to ge tthe jist of it and what i want feelings on, just read the quote, the aarticle is put ther for personal interest.
New Chinese adoption rules leave some families wondering, others scrambling
By KHURRAM SAEED
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: January 7, 2007)Adoption guidelines
The China Center of Adoption Affairs, the agency that oversees all international adoptions, last month announced a number of new guidelines that will affect who may be able to adopt, effective May 1. Here are some of the changes. How these guidelines will be interpreted is unclear.
- Single parents will no longer be accepted.
- One parent cannot be older than age 50 (a parent can be up to 55 years old if he or she is adopting a special-needs child).
- People who have remarried must be married for more than five years in order to adopt.
- Parents with a body mass index (BMI) over 40, which is medically considered morbidly obese, will not be accepted.
- Parents must have a household income of $80,000 or more.
- Parents must be off of medication for depression or anxiety for at least two years.
- Parents who have a "severe" facial deformity, numbness, incompleteness or missing limbs or hearing loss will not be accepted.
- Parents can never have come under "any criminal sanction."
Resources for families
- China Support and Adoption Information Group: Call Barbara Salvesen at 845-623-5277.
- Homeland Adoption Services: Call Pamela Thomas at 845-268-6194.
Julie Ann Gallagher has a picture of the 2-year-old Chinese boy she hopes one day will be her son.
She knows his name.
She knows what needs to be done to correct his congenital cataracts, which affect his vision.
What she doesn't know is if she'll get the chance to adopt him.
Single people like Gallagher are among those who will find it far more difficult, if not impossible, to adopt a child from China after May 1 when new strict Chinese government restrictions take effect. People over the age of 50, people taking antidepressants and obese people will also be affected.
"The anxiety level is definitely higher," said Gallagher, 31, who lives in Nanuet.
Three weeks before the new guidelines became public, Gallagher was matched with the boy.
Now, she's racing to complete the necessary paperwork and submit her application dossier by April 30. She's about halfway through, and much of what remains to be done - home visits, securing federal and state clearances - are out of her control.
She is trying to stay positive.
"This could be a godsend that he could be home quicker," said Gallagher, who co-owns a Nyack hair salon and has two biological children from a past marriage.
In the past decade, about 40,000 Chinese children have been adopted by American families.
Adoptive families in the Lower Hudson Valley interviewed for this story said they had extremely positive experiences with China, noting its children were healthy and well cared for in orphanages and its system largely corruption-free.
But Pamela Thomas, executive director of Homeland Adoption Services, which provides adoption support services for the families of China adoptees, said the rule changes have been received with a tremendous amount of sadness.
"There are families that may have been planning to adopt from China and now won't qualify, or families who have already adopted from China but planned to build their family in China and can't qualify to adopt another child," said Thomas, a Congers resident who adopted her daughter, Lianna, now 12, from China.
Joanne and Peter Spellane find themselves working under a deadline to adopt their second child from China. The Irvington couple adopted 4-year-old Catherine when she was just 17 months old.
Peter Spellane is 55 years old, which could disqualify him under the new rules. The couple remains hopeful - they are 80 percent through the application process.
"Had we not we been this far in the process, we would never have made the April deadline," said Joanne Spellane, 48, a lawyer.
She recalled that when she and her husband were preparing to bring Catherine home, there was a deadly SARS epidemic in China.
"There's always some curveball," Joanne Spellane said.
For his part, Peter Spellane understood why the Chinese wanted to match children with younger parents: Kids take a lot of energy.
"Age is not to be denied," the college chemistry professor said. "But I think a person my age has an understanding of himself, an awareness of life and some financial security that he didn't have earlier. And that's to the good."
Adoption agencies fear people might steer away from China, convinced they won't qualify. They are also concerned about investing their clients' time, money and emotions into a process in which they might be rejected. It takes about three to four months to complete the adoption application, while the waiting time for the child can last up to 16 months.
Thomas, who has worked in China for 12 years, said nearly a third of Chinese adoptions are from single parents, in her agency and others in the United States.
Some other changes sent to Thomas in a letter from the China Center of Adoption Affairs, the Chinese central authority that oversees all international adoptions, include requiring people who have remarried to wait five years before they can apply for adoption. Those with hearing loss, facial deformities and families earning less than $80,000 a year would not be eligible to adopt.
Thomas said 40 percent of her current clients would likely not qualify under the new guidelines primarily because of an age issue or the length of their marriage.
"As we know, parents are not perfect and still can be perfectly wonderful parents," Thomas said.
Lu Ying, director of the China Center for Adoption Affairs, has said guidelines might be modified over time.
"The new rules will help shorten waiting time for qualified foreigners and speed up the process for children, especially the disabled, so that they can go to their new families, where they can get better education and medical treatment more quickly," the Xinhua News Agency, the official Chinese news service, quoted her as saying last month.
Another China Center official said the rules were meant to protect the children "and not to show prejudice against less qualified applicants, who can still apply," the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Barbara Salvesen, founder of the China Support and Adoption Information Group, which meets monthly at St. Anthony's Church in Nanuet, said the changes contained "a lot of common sense."
"My take is there is nothing terrible here," said Salvesen, who, with her husband, Edward, adopted daughter Sabrina in 1994 and another daughter, Katari, in 1998.
"These are guidelines; they are not laws. This is temporary. We don't know how long they are going to last. Guidelines have a lot of flexibility," Salvesen said. "They want stable marriages. They want sound mental and physical health. And they want sound finances."
The support group has 300 families from the tri-state area.
Salvesen, who lives in Bardonia, noted other countries also placed stringent restrictions on adoptive parents, including the United States. As for China, she believed single parents would still be accepted but it might take longer for them to adopt. She acknowledged that changes might deter some families from looking to China and adopt elsewhere.
"Maybe that's where their child is meant to come from," she said.
Irene Meehan knows that her second child, like her first, is meant to come from China.
Even though Meehan is a single parent, the Wesley Hills woman said she would choose no other country from which to adopt. Her paperwork has been in China since June, and now she is left to wait. She waited more than a year before she was able to bring home her daughter, Christine.
These days, she happily passes the time playing with Christine, 3.
"I honestly feel there's a longer waiting period now, but you also get the child God wants you to have," she said. "Of course, I'm anxious about it, but whatever happens is the way it's supposed to be."
As for Gallagher, who's rushing to qualify in time, she compares the process to a pregnancy. She's done what she can - including contacting Sen. Hillary Clinton and Rep. Eliot Engel's offices - but said a higher hand is guiding hers.
"It is a labor," Gallagher said. "It's just as hard and just as scary."
There is no anger in her heart, she said. She was never insulted China didn't want single parents.
Gallagher tries not think about what will happen if all of this doesn't work out. And in those moments, she thinks not of herself, but of a little boy in a far-away orphanage. "My focus," she said, "is getting this child the care and love that he needs."
