Adopting a hard line on parents

COUPLES hoping to bring a child to Australia are tested to the end of their patience.

BY law, there is nothing to stop an Australian couple from adopting a child from overseas. There are no fewer than eight state and territory departments set up precisely to help Australian couples form families this way.

In practice, adopting a child from overseas is pretty near impossible. The most recent figures on overseas adoption, released last Friday, show that just 269 children were adopted into Australia last year, from a pool of destitute and needy children thought to number in the millions worldwide.

Moreover, the numbers aren't rising, but dropping: this year's figures are down from last year's, which were down from 420 overseas adoptions in 2006. Never mind that Australians have the largest homes, the highest rate of employment, and one of the best standards of living in the world, there seems to be no room for adopted children here.

The question, of course, is why?

Tony Dunne, president of International Adoptive Families of Queensland, sighs and says he's been grappling with that question for more than 10 years.

He has four children, two of whom were born in The Philippines and adopted into Australia, over a period of eight long years. He also has links to a Cambodian orphanage, which helps reunite orphans with family members.

"My feeling, basically, is that the Australian government, at all levels, is anti-adoption," he says. "They make it as hard as possible, and that can only be because they don't want Australians to do it."

When Dunne first heard that an earthquake had hit Haiti, killing thousand and leaving many children orphaned, his heart sank.

"I knew we would get calls from people, ready and eager to help, by adopting children," he said. "But there's just no way it will happen."

Australian couples can adopt only from the 14 countries with which the federal government has an "agreement", and Haiti isn't one of them. Advocates for overseas adoption were shattered once again to hear that a busload of Haitian children had been stopped at the border of the earthquake-ravaged nation, apparently on their way to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, despite some of them not being orphans at all. Their US escorts - white, Christian church workers from Idaho - have since been charged with child abduction.

"That kind of story, it really doesn't help," Dunne says. "It makes people think: well, maybe there is something wrong with overseas adoption, maybe it's child trafficking, when in fact, here in Australia it's all done under the Hague convention, and there are so many checks and balances - it's so rigorous - you wouldn't believe it."

It isn't yet entirely clear what happened in Haiti that led to that busload of 33 children being stopped at the border, but already some parents have come forward and said that yes, they did give their children to the church workers in the hope of giving them a better life. Even before the earthquake, there were 380,000 children in Haitian orphanages, including 60 mostly rundown facilities in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Many have parents who simply cannot take care of them.

Even before the earthquake, Haiti allowed many of them to be adopted. Since the earthquake, Haiti has fast-tracked the adoption of many more, including 58 children who were flown to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just three days after the quake; 53 who went to Paris, where adoptive parents were already waiting; and 32 to The Netherlands. Not all are orphans. As Abi Boni, of Kentucky Adoption Services, explained to local media last week, about 75 per cent of the children adopted through her service are given up, voluntarily, by their parents.

"Rather than watch your child starve to death, if you love your child the way a Haitian parent does, you are willing to give that child to a stranger so that the child might live," she said.

Florence Antoine, whose son Carl and daughter Jenisa were on the bus that was stopped at the Haitian border told media that the church workers had promised her child a better life, with a swimming pool, and a private education.

"If someone offers to take my children to a paradise, am I supposed to say no?" she said.

The children from the bus were taken to Haiti's SOS Children's Village. An SOS village - there are hundreds of them across the world - is generally a cluster of small homes, in which children live with "house mothers".

The Haiti SOS wasn't damaged in the earthquake. It had 140 children before, and has since taken another 250. The organisation, which is funded by donations, is anti-adoption, too. In the main, it believes that children should be raised in their own culture, and not shipped abroad.

SOS director Kathie Neal told reporters in Haiti that "we don't have a right to take these children out of Haiti". But she agrees that that may be what the parents want.

"In desperate situations, families want to make sure that their children are well looked after and are, in some senses, quite happy to hand over children," Ms Neal said.

"This is not a new situation just because of the earthquake. Many of these people were in poverty

beforehand and they see this as an opportunity, actually. They'll bring children to our village and say `please look after these children', and sometimes we don't know which children are truly orphaned and which are ones that the family wants us to look after."

There seems little doubt that the case of the Haitian children on the bus will make it harder still for Australians to adopt, by providing ammunition for bureaucrats in the various state and territory departments who believe that overseas adoption amounts to little more than exploitation of the poor.

Already, it takes three years, minimum, plus about $30,000, much of it payable upfront, just to get approved to adopt a child. Even then it's touch and go, with programs starting and stopping at any time, without notice. The Ethiopian program, for example, was closed for no clear reason in December. It may open again, but meanwhile, even those children who had been told a home in Australia had been found for them are stuck in a heartbreaking limbo.

The process of adopting a second child should be simpler but it isn't. It's just as arduous and expensive as the first go-round, and there are ever more rules, about how old the first child must be before the second can arrive, and which one must be older, and by how much, and so forth.

An investigation overseen by Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop in 2006 found that these costs and delays were not the result of incompetence, as much as of the "anti-adoption" ethos that reigned in all departments. In other words, the program is being sabotaged from within.

In the years since, the Rudd government has been elected and it did what it does: it established a committee to advise the government on overseas adoption. The National Inter-country Advisory Group met twice in 2008, and a couple of times last year, and then the funding got cut, and the members were told they'd have to get used to having fewer meetings, or perhaps catch up on the telephone. The members expressed frustration, but it came to nothing: there hasn't been a meeting since last year, and there won't be one until March, and it's not clear that anything is achieved, in any case.

Those couples who want to adopt from overseas, and are within their legal and human rights to do so, are fighting back. The public face of their campaign is actress Deborra-lee Furness, who has two adopted children with her husband, actor Hugh Jackman.

Furness took up the cudgels in support of Australian couples during National Adoption Week in November. Like many Australians, she once went to a meeting in NSW, to find out what it took to adopt a child, and went away appalled by the way she was treated, by bureaucrats who were visibly keen to get prospective parents off the program, rather than on.

"Australia has the lowest adoption rate in the developed world, it's embarrassing, when we have such resources and richness and wealth," Furness says. "So many people come to me and say `I want to adopt' and they can't . . . Someone said to me they had been waiting 16 years.

"They [Australian authorities] don't want you to do it, [it's an] anti-adoption culture."

Told that it would take years, and much scrutiny, she opted to adopt in the US, instead. And many other Australians are following suit: a quirk in the law means that couples who live abroad for a year or more may be able to adopt in their country of residence, and then apply for a visa for their baby, upon their return. Last year, 112 children were adopted by Australians through overseas agencies.

Asked about the government's attitude to overseas adoption, the Attorney-General's office says it supports the practice but "insists that it occurs in the best interests of children and protects them from the risk of abduction, sale or trafficking". To this end, it "regularly reviews inter-country adoption arrangements to ensure that there is adequate infrastructure and sufficient safeguards in place to protect the best interests of children". The government, the statement says, is working to improve the process " through an assessment of alternative models of service delivery".

Paul Harapin, chairman of the national Adoption Awareness Week committee, says the anti-adoption stance in Australia is historical. "If you think about the Stolen Generations, and the Forgotten Australians [an estimated 400,000 Australians raised in orphanages and foster homes, until 1970] and you can start to see how this anti-adoption feeling takes hold.

"But the fact is, if you look at the US, and at France, and throughout Scandinavia, overseas adoptions happen more often than they do here, and we really do believe that the checks that have to be done - the police checks, the FBI, Interpol, whatever you need to do - don't have to take three or four years. Either people are good people, or they are not, and we don't believe it takes four years to find out." Harapin says the situation in Haiti is "really unfortunate, because whatever has happened there, it will stick in people's heads that overseas adoption is bad, when it fact, there is no evidence in Australia that it's ever been anything other than wonderful for anybody who takes part".