By Margaret Philp, Social Policy Reporter
The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada
Saturday, April 19, 2003 - Page F6

The baby's bedroom was fixed just so: a brand-new bed adorned with a pink and white coverlet, walls painted pale rose, tiny dresses displayed on miniature hangers and T-shirts crisply folded in drawers -- everything in place for the little girl who was about to trade a drafty, dour orphanage in Eastern Europe for the trappings of life in a charming middle-class Toronto neighbourhood.

Bren Hoadley had waited long enough to become a mother. Childless in her late 40s, with a career as a public-school teacher surrounded by other people's children, she had a 13-year-old failed marriage and three years of gut-wrenching infertility treatments behind her. Neither produced the child she craved.

So she had turned to an adoption agency that matches childless prospective parents with abandoned infants and toddlers in Russia and Ukraine, her heart set on adopting a baby girl stranded in an orphanage. The entire bill, once the agency and social workers and airline were paid, was a stiff $26,000.

But she eagerly headed for Kiev, her head spinning with the promise she remembers getting from the agency director that the orphanages would be stocked with plenty of healthy children.

Her happy transition to parenthood was not to be. After less than three weeks, Ms. Hoadley returned to Toronto empty-handed but for a suitcase stuffed with children's clothes and toys. With her leave booked and a replacement teacher already hired, she launched into the heartbreak of a three-month maternity leave without a baby.

Now Ms. Hoadley wants her money back. She wants to sue, not only to recover the fees squandered on a fruitless adoption but to stop adoption agencies from peddling the promise of a cherubic child they can't always deliver.

"I've never been in court in my life, but I don't think this should happen to anybody else," she says. "It's like having a miscarriage. You have all these dreams and set up all these plans, and when it doesn't go through, it's like losing a child. No one should have to go through what I did."

This is a story of the messy pitfalls of international adoption, a thriving traffic of parents and abandoned kids that has imported more than 20,000 foreign children to Canada in the past decade and has easily exported $100-million -- and probably far more -- to overseas adoption brokers and orphanages in hard-scrabble countries around the world.

It is a cautionary tale that raises unsettling questions about an industry that trades on money and emotion: If would-be parents hand over tens of thousands of dollars to an adoption agency, are they entitled to a baby?

Should they be allowed to choose the gender or physical features of their child?

Do agencies collecting lofty fees feed a false sense of entitlement among hopeful parents, blurring the line between purchasing adoption services and buying a baby -- and turning children into commodities like merchandise in a store?

The international adoption boom started a little more than a decade ago, when images of listless, malnourished children languishing in orphanages in post-Communist Romania flashed across television screens around the world.

Years later, Romania has closed its doors to foreigners seeking babies, and Canadian adoptive parents are now flocking to dozens of other destinations, notably China, Russia and Haiti, to bring children home.

People like Ms. Hoadley, who still chase the dream of a baby while their own child-bearing years wear thin, write cheques to adopt abroad with the stout expectation that a picture-perfect infant awaits at the end of a transatlantic flight.

In many provinces, more children are adopted internationally than through the child-welfare system and private domestic adoption agencies combined. In Quebec, three of every four adopted children is from another country. In Ontario, for the 12-month period that ended in March, 2002, 516 young adoptees were from children's-aid societies and 128 were from private agencies, while 703 came from abroad.

While public adoption in Canada costs little, it often takes years to get a baby under a year of age, if it happens at all, and parents are compelled to sit through weeks of training classes. Private adoption costs several thousand dollars more, but parents are at the mercy of birth mothers who often want to select their babies' new families themselves.

By turning to the more expensive international agencies, hopeful parents can bypass the older children and frustrating delays.

Most parents sign a contract warning that there is no money-back guarantee of a child. Ms. Hoadley signed an eight-page agreement that included a provision stating that the agency "does not guarantee the successful completed adoption of any child," nor could it vouch for their health.

But prospective parents rarely return from overseas empty-handed, and agencies almost never mention their failures. In a multimillion-dollar industry where money almost always begets parenthood, few people worry about the fine print, and no one is prepared for an adoption to fizzle.

"This is one of the big problems with money and adoption -- it breeds a sense of entitlement," says Adam Pertman, executive director with the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York, a research and policy organization that promotes ethical adoption practice in a U.S. market that abounds with adoption agencies.

"The money pollutes our thinking. The money makes us feel entitled to a child. But that's not a good way to think about kids."

Still, the director of the agency Ms. Hoadley used vows that in her eight years placing Russian and Ukrainian children with Canadian families, she has never had an adoption fail like this. Irina Zaretsky says she didn't, and wouldn't, promise that Ukraine was bountiful with healthy abandoned children. And even if it were, prospective parents are never guaranteed they will return home with a child, even if tens of thousands of dollars have been handed over for the privilege.

"This has never happened to me before," says Ms. Zaretsky, who has placed 328 children since opening her international adoption agency here after emigrating with her family from Russia. "And I hope it never happens again."

Ms. Hoadley turned to Ms. Zaretsky's agency, Adoption Horizons, after hearing about it through a friend who had adopted a Russian baby. She considered adopting from Russia, but struggled with that country's system of having parents choose a potential son or daughter from a video clip. So she switched to Ukraine, where the government bureaucracy requires those seeking to adopt to travel to the country before being matched with a child. She headed overseas in late October of 2001.

Not once during her months of contact with the agency does she recall Ms. Zaretsky mentioning the possibility of her returning home childless.

A day after arriving, Ms. Hoadley was whisked to the Ukrainian Adoption Centre, the government authority that matches foreign families with the children in the country's 168 orphanages, where she was told about a healthy 13-month-old boy who had been picked out for her.

She was taken aback. Her social worker had recommended in her home study that she adopt a girl, and she had talked about little else since. While few biological parents can select the sex of their child, her agency and the Ontario government that licenses it allows adoptive parents to request their child's gender.

In a move she now regrets, Ms. Hoadley turned down the boy for the prospect of a girl. "I thought a little girl would appear the next day," she says wistfully, "and she never appeared.

"Being a single mom, I thought I'd have more to offer to a little girl. In an emotional way, I thought that would be best."

Over the next few weeks, Ms. Hoadley would pore over 27 binders full of photographs of thousands of children -- mostly boys -- in orphanages. By her reckoning, they were all visibly disabled or diagnosed with medical conditions that would have run afoul of Canadian immigration authorities.

The Ukrainian adoption broker hired by the Canadian agency produced two more photographs of available children, including a girl. But she appeared to be mentally handicapped, and when Ms. Hoadley visited the orphanage of the sweet-faced boy, the staff informed her that he had suffered brain damage since his picture was snapped. Meanwhile, the first boy she's seen had been snagged by another adoptive family.

"If I had to do it over again," she says, "I would have picked up that healthy boy. Now I look at young boys, and when I see one, I think, 'That could be my son.' "

It is here where the versions of the story diverge.

In Ms. Zaretsky's account -- staunchly denied by Ms. Hoadley -- it was a preoccupation with looks and gender more than a genuine concern about health that foiled the adoption. She insists Ms. Hoadley rejected at least one of the girls shown to her because of hair colour. The child's hair was brown, and Ms. Hoadley had a dream that her daughter would be blond. And when she turned down the boy, Ms. Zaretsky says, she protested to the Ukrainian authorities that she had only girls' clothes in her suitcase.

"I don't believe she looked at 28 files and there were no healthy children," says Ms. Zaretsky, sitting in her spacious home office in North Toronto. "I don't know what she means that there were no healthy children. I know for sure that the three children presented to her [by the broker] were healthy.

"If she wanted to come back with a child, she would have come back with a child."

Sonia Kondrat, director of the Ukrainian Cradle Adoption Agency in Toronto, says people looking to adopt cannot expect guarantees.

"Parents should not feel like they're going shopping for a child," she says. "We can give them assurance that we're going to work very hard on their behalf to assist in their pursuit of a child. But [it's] just like an obstetrician when you're pregnant. Can he guarantee that the baby will grow to term and the parents will have a perfectly healthy baby? No."

Ontario started licensing agencies only four years ago, passing new international-adoption legislation after Canada ratified the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. With business booming, agencies proliferating and corruption flourishing in the lawless international adoption environment of the 1990s, the convention was drafted to establish ground rules designed to prevent the trafficking of children between the world's richest and poorest nations.

In Canada, where about 30 agencies are licensed in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, and British Columbia, international adoption is still an immature industry operating under fledgling legislation and dealing with distant countries whose policies and laws are ever shifting.

Ukraine, one of the many countries exporting children that has not signed the international adoption treaty, can be difficult to deal with because of its requirement that would-be parents travel to the country, pick their child from a photograph and then head to an orphanage filled with abandoned kids to inspect their choice.

Only children who have been in an orphanage for at least a year or diagnosed with a medical condition can be adopted by foreigners, although Ukrainian doctors are known to label perfectly normal children with a minor diagnosis to allow their adoption. And girls are rarely relinquished by Ukrainian parents, so the orphanages are filled with boys.

"I was never told that," Ms. Hoadley laments.

(A few months after Ms. Hoadley's experience, Ms. Zaretsky stopped working with Ukraine out of frustration with its bureaucracy.)

Whatever the destination, parents usually return from an overseas odyssey with a child in their arms. But not always.

"We've all had a case like this," says Gordon Lewis, director of the Mission of TEARS adoption agency in Toronto. "If agencies are being transparent with you, they'll tell you they've had a case."

All told, Ms. Hoadley says she exhausted $46,000 on her ill-fated adoption attempt, including a $4,500 fee charged by the agency, a payment of close to $12,000 for the adoption broker in Kiev, $1,000 for her return flight, $925 for fees to the Ontario government, more than $1,000 for the social worker who prepared her home study, and $20,000 in lost income from the maternity leave.

After a lawyer friend fired off a few menacing letters to the agency, she recovered about $1,300. But she is still chipping away at a $20,000 adoption loan from the bank.

"Before somebody else goes through all the time and energy and plunks down $26,000, they should really pay close attention to that line that says there are no guarantees," Ms. Hoadley says. "The agency doesn't have to give you anything.

"I hope my story stops people from signing on that dotted line, and [has them] asking agencies, 'What exactly are your services?' "