Laura and Paul Zagnoni were warned they might be too old. They were told they had been married too short a time. They were deterred, too, by the prospect of waiting an undetermined amount of time and coming up empty-handed.
So the Phoenix couple bypassed the idea of adopting a baby domestically and signed on to adopt from China. Age wouldn't be a factor there -- the Chinese favor older parents -- and the Chinese process, though lengthy, is well defined and usually goes flawlessly for about 5,000 American families a year.
Except, as the SARS outbreak proved, even the world's most stable inter-country adoption process can be disrupted by unpredictable circumstances.
When the Chinese indefinitely halted all adoption-related travel on May 15 until SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, is contained, it served as a reminder that foreign adoptions can be fraught with unexpected complications.
''These parents must be prepared for anything,'' says Antonia Edwardson of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, an association of foreign adoption agencies. ''We're talking global issues here. You could have a war, a health crisis, a natural disaster, all sorts of things.''
The Zagnonis expected to be in China this week taking custody of a daughter they'll call Liliana Shu Zagnoni. Instead, Laura Zagnoni, 41, heard rumors on Mother's Day that China might freeze the process. China confirmed the rumors a few days later, leaving the couple indefinitely separated from the little girl whose perky brown eyes and tuft of fuzzy black hair they have come to adore through photographs.
Liliana will celebrate her first birthday on June 19 in her orphanage crib.
''We decided to go with China because we figured that at the end of the waiting time, you get a baby,'' says Laura Zagnoni, a pharmacist for Bristol-Myers Squibb. ''We thought it was a sure thing.''
A record number of prospective parents have flocked to foreign adoptions in recent years as the number of healthy infants put up for adoption in the USA has fallen, along with the stigma surrounding unwed motherhood.
Last year, 20,099 children were adopted from abroad, triple the number a decade ago and roughly equal to the current number of domestic infant adoptions, says Tom Atwood, president of the National Council on Adoptions, a non-profit advocacy agency.
Yet as foreign adoptions become more common, some controversies have surfaced to create agony. For the first time, the United States declared a ban on adoptions from a specific country, Cambodia, in December 2001 after suspicions surfaced that babies were being stolen from or sold by their families.
Hundreds of American families already matched with Cambodian babies were left in a lurch. Several parents stayed in Cambodia for months with their children because the U.S. government wouldn't issue immigrant visas to them.
The U.S. government eventually allowed almost all those pending adoptions to be completed. Three adoptions in which evidence of fraud was overwhelming were halted.
Vietnam, Argentina and Guatemala also have had waves of adoption strife, with Vietnam closing its process to American parents in April.
Perhaps the most traumatic case of late is that of a San Jose, Calif., couple still trying to adopt a handicapped daughter in India with whom they were matched in November 2000. Their adoption and about 70 others to parents from several Western nations have been stalled by extensive legal challenges set forth by anti-Western Indian activists who oppose having Indian children taken out of the country.
John Clements says his wife, Sharon, has been living in India for 15 months visiting Haseena, now almost 4, in her Catholic-run orphanage three hours a day. The latest court ruling toward the end of May seemed to signal the ultimate failure of their long-running and costly battle, with the judge siding with the activists that every effort must be made to find Indian families. The children, including Haseena, were then seized from the Catholic orphanage and placed in a state-run facility. The ruling came out of the state of Andhra Pradesh, in the southern part of India.
John Clements, 37, an accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, keeps holding out hope, although he says he is tormented every time he walks by the room in his house that has been decorated for Haseena for two years.
''Foreign adoption is a much more complex issue than I knew when we went into it,'' he says. ''Most families and social workers start off thinking about it in very simple terms: There's a child who needs a home out there and parents who have homes. Then you see there are financial considerations, religious considerations, political considerations. And you have these children trapped in the middle.''
The U.S. government is working to improve the foreign adoption process, most notably by announcing a pilot program to begin this month in which the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration would ensure that children who are offered to American parents for adoption really are orphans before the parents travel overseas to take custody. The program will start with Haiti, Sierra Leone, the Philippines, Poland and Honduras.
In addition, 66 countries signed the Hague Convention on International Adoptions, a 1997 treaty that sets forth standards for inter-country adoption and requires nations to ascertain that the process is free of corruption. Vietnam, Cambodia and Argentina are not signatories.
Despite the negative publicity surrounding foreign adoptions of late, interest remains strong. Even as news of SARS surfaced, Monique Zhao of the Gift of Love adoption agency in Des Moines says she has received a record number of applications so far this year from parents interested in adopting from China.
''This is just a bump in the road right now, and the families know that,''
Zhao says. ''Some families come to us after they've registered
with a domestic agency and waited or were matched with a birth
mother who then decided not to give her child up. They want
more stability and predictability in the process.''
