Adoptions in U.S. feed Guatemalan ‘baby farm’

GUATEMALA CITY

Every 100th baby born in Guatemala is adopted in the United States, making the Central American country the No. 1 source of such children in the West- ern Hemisphere, but U.S. ratification of an international adoption treaty is likely to choke off the supply next summer.

Critics say Guatemala has become a “baby farm” where adoptions are too easy and prone to corruption. Defenders say it offers the children a better future, and that legal corners are cut only to spare Guatemalan women the stigma of unwed motherhood or relieve them of another mouth to feed.

For now, willing parents can get Guatemalan babies by paying thousands of dollars to notaries who act as baby brokers, recruiting birth mothers, handling all the paperwork and completing the job in less than half the time it takes elsewhere.

All this likely will end once the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions takes effect in the United States. The United States then will require all foreign adoptions to meet tougher international standards, which Guatemala ratified in 2003 but has yet to implement.

“We don’t want adoptions to stop, but we believe the current system does not provide enough protection to the child’s needs,” said John Lowell, the U.S. consul in Guatemala.

The treaty, also ratified by China, Russia and at least 39 other countries, aims to protect children, birth parents and adoptive parents from abuse, in part by requiring a government agency to regulate adoptions.

Guatemala still allows adoptions to be managed privately, without judicial approval. In many other countries, adoptions take more than a year. Guatemala can deliver children in as little as five months.

Mothers and money

Berta Morales, 35, has given the last five of her 10 children to Americans.

“It would have been more of a sin to abort them,” said Miss Morales, who lives in Coatepeque, west of Guatemala City. “I’m poor … but maybe one of them will become a professional.”

Miss Morales said she was paid only bus fare to the capital, Guatemala City, to sign the papers. But Josefina Arellano, who heads the government office that approves adoptions, said women who give up children one after another are probably getting paid.

“When you look at the time between pregnancies and how many children they have given up, you have to conclude they are doing it for money,” said Mrs. Arellano. “What we’re witnessing is a baby factory or farm, dealing with children that should not have been born or put up for adoption.”

Susana Luarca, a lawyer for an association of notaries, also denied that mothers are giving up their babies for money: “What more help could they get,” she asked, “than relieving them of the problem of their child’s situation?”

Every profession has unscrupulous people, “but that does not mean everything is rotten,” said Miss Luarca, who currently is handling 40 adoptions. “Some people have tried to make the case that, just because a business is lucrative, it’s bad.”

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