U.S. families puzzled by tighter China adoptions

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York lawyer Meg Tolan is the mother of three adopted daughters, all of them from China, but if she wanted to adopt another, she couldn't. Beijing no longer considers her a suitable parent.

Tolan is a single mother and that is one of several new criteria that will rule out parents who want to adopt children from China, along with being overweight, depressed, married less than two years, divorced and remarried less than five years, or over 50.

The restrictions, to be implemented later this year, have led U.S. parents of Chinese children to question whether it is a bid by China, which has experienced rapid economic growth in recent years, to shrug off a perception that it is a poor country that cannot look after its own children.

"If I wanted to have another kid or if I decided that I couldn't I would like that to be my decision and not theirs," said Tolan, who lives in the Bronx borough of New York City and is mother to Hannah, 12, Julia, 9, and Celia, 4.

The girls are among 55,446 Chinese children adopted by U.S. parents in the past 21 years. About one-fifth of them live in the U.S. states of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, according to Families with Children from China, a support group.

China has been the No. 1 choice for U.S. foreign adoptions for the past six years, according to the State Department. The Chinese government says four-fifths of its foreign adoptions in the past decade went to U.S. families.

When it announced the new rules in December, the Chinese government said it was a bid to shorten the wait -- now up to 16 months -- for prospective parents.

Gongzhan Wu, China program manager at the Gladney Center for Adoption in New York, said the waiting period had lengthened because less Chinese children were being put up for foreign adoption. He said around 600 to 800 children a month were currently available, down from around 1,000 a month 18 months ago.

He said China received around 2,000 applications a month, about 1,200 of which were from the United States.

"CHINA WANTS TO IMPROVE IMAGE"

David Youtz, president of Families with Children from China of Greater New York, said there was a sense among some American parents of Chinese kids that Beijing wanted to cut the number of international adoptions.

"It's become so popular that we sense they are a little uncomfortable with having numbers in six, seven, eight thousand per year to the United States," said Youtz, who, with his wife Mary Child, has four Chinese daughters, an 11-year-old and two-year-old triplets.