Media

Letter to Financial Times (published 13 June 2006)

Romania banned international adoptions as an ‘evil trade in children’

From Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne MEP.

Sir,
I would like to set the record straight as regards a full-page advertisement that appeared in the Financial Times entitled “Romania’s concealed childcare crisis” (June 12).
This advertisement argues for the re-introduction of international adoptions in Romania and was paid for by a group of 33 non-governmental organisations, some of which have a strong financial interest in the resumption of the highly profitable international adoptions business.
Romania banned international adoptions in 2001 because it was an evil trade in children; adoptive parents were taken for a ride by unscrupulous adoption agencies; children were illegally selected based on photo and video presentations and the social services were bypassed.
Banning it was a brave decision and has been upheld by successive Romanian governments that have done well at reforming their child welfare system and stopping children being institutionalised. It would be madness to re-introduce international adoptions now.
The pro-adoption lobby is continually peddling false information about the number of children abandoned in Romania. According to the advertisement in the FT, these babies are “crammed into hospitals . . . not included in government statistics . . . confined to steel cribs 23+ hours a day for months or years”.
All this sounds very dramatic and terrible - but it is simply not true. Unless these abandoned children are hidden away in some secret location (perhaps the “secret CIA prisons”), the pro-adoption lobby should inform us where these tens of thousands of abandoned children are kept. To find out the truth of the situation, one just has to make a random visit to any child hospital in Romania.
My name is often used by the pro-adoption lobby as the bête noire who has a peculiar obsession with international adoptions - as it makes for good lobby practice to blame all these ills on one person. The lobby consistently fails to mention the fact that my views are in line with the child rights experts who have consulted extensively in Romania on behalf of the European Union, the United Nations agencies and USAID.
The FT was actually one of the first European newspapers to reveal the corruption behind the international adoptions business in Romania, and it is in that spirit of investigative and balanced journalism that I now appeal.
Emma Nicholson,
Chairman,
Foreign Affairs Committee,
European Parliament

Published in FT: June 13 2006 03:00
www.ft.com