Would-Be Parents Fret Over Looming Changes

Instead of waiting for mothers to abandon children, Guatemalan lawyers tend to identify babies available for adoption soon after or even before they are born, reducing the age at which they are handed over to their new parents. Rather than warehousing infants in large orphanages, where the children might receive less attention and are prone to developing mental disorders that prevent them from bonding with their parents, Guatemala's private lawyers often pay foster mothers to care for the babies during the many months it takes for adoption paperwork to be approved by the Guatemalan and U.S. governments.

During this period, adoptive parents can travel to Guatemala and spend time with their prospective child. Indeed, parents fly in so frequently that several major hotels provide toy-filled playrooms for guests and sell infant necessities such as diapers and talcum powder in the gift shop.

Some lawyers even help adoptive parents move to Guatemala and be the foster parent to the child with whom they have been matched. That option was a huge draw for Erin Stoy of Memphis, who worried that a child from the other nations she considered -- Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Ethiopia -- would suffer "stranger anxiety" by the time he or she finally met her.

Since March, Stoy has taken an extended leave from her job in the shipping business to care for Azucena, the baby girl she and her husband are in the process of adopting.

"We've seen her taking her first steps, crawling, being able to understand a few words, asking, 'Where's Daddy?' " Stoy said.

Such benefits, however, usually come at a hefty price: On top of the roughly $6,000 that adoptive parents pay U.S. agencies, many pay Guatemalan lawyers $20,000 to $30,000. Critics suggest that such sums are a huge markup over the actual cost of finding, caring for and processing the paperwork.

The potential for windfall profits, combined with the lack of robust government oversight and the vast pool of impoverished women, has created massive opportunities for abuse, critics charge.

For instance, many lawyers contract with jaladores, Spanish for tuggers or touts, who fan across the countryside seeking women willing to relinquish their children. There is widespread suspicion that jaladores may be paying, pressuring or bamboozling women who would not otherwise choose to put up a child for adoption.

Payment is considered a particularly likely, and insidious, practice because if a woman gives in to temptation but then changes her mind before the adoption is complete, she or her relatives might hesitate to reclaim the child because they cannot pay back the jalador.

Manuel Manrique, UNICEF's representative in Guatemala, speculates that a substantial number of women are conceiving children for sale because the government and nonprofit charities that care for abandoned children receive only a few hundred a year, not the thousands that would indicate an epidemic of women who feel they cannot care for their children. He also notes that it is common for the same woman to give up multiple infants for adoption.

"Why else would a woman have three successive children and put them all up for adoption?" he asked. "It's as though with the first adoption, women are getting drawn into an adoption circuit."

Faced with growing outrage over the issue among the Guatemalan public, the Guatemalan government has slowly but steadily moved to increase its supervision of international adoptions. In August, authorities launched a rare investigation of an agency, raiding a foster home for multiple babies in Antigua run by a company called Casa Quivira and detaining several lawyers on suspicion of illegal practices.