The Hague Meetings I
“If not us, who? If not now, when?”
–Ronald Reagan
Back in October, while we had been busy picking up Anguel, the U.S. Congress had passed the Intercountry Adoption Act.
This didn’t get a lot of attention in the media at the time, but to those of us in the greater international adoption community it was the most significant legal development since ... well, it was the most significant legal development ever.
Why? Well, by passing it, the Senate had thus ratified the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which U.S. representatives had helped negotiate and draft in the early 1990s.
The Convention was the best hope for adoptive parents like ourselves who had suffered at the hands of unscrupulous adoption providers. It intended no less than to establish a transnational legal framework for this procedure.
But, as long as the US, the world’s largest “receiving” country (final destination of more than 80 percent of those adopted from countries of origin different from their parents) had not signed, few other countries felt the need to. Bulgaria had started its ratification by then, but not Russia or China.
And in the absence of any such framework, there was no legal recourse, no safeguards, for people such as ourselves, the Corrigans, all the other frustrated BBAS clients and many other clients of other agencies who had reached out to us since we had gone public, save going public themselves.
(Well, we still hadn’t ruled out legal action yet. More on that next chapter).
The treaty contained broad provisions, with little specifics, aimed primarily at protecting the rights of the children involved. Congress went into a few more specifics in the law.
One of them was to develop regulations. Here, at long last, was our opportunity to make sure nothing like BBAS could ever be allowed to happen again.
These regulations had worldwide importance. With so many of those international adoptions coming to America, the U.S. standards would be the de facto world standards (a large part of the reason Russia and China hadn’t signed on yet).
The State Department awarded the bid for drafting these regulations to a private consulting firm called Acton Burnell, based in the Virginia suburbs.
Mary Mooney informed us, through her mailing list, that Acton Burnell would be holding an open meeting, sort of what’s called here in New York a “scoping meeting,” where anyone can comment about issues that regulation (or any public action) should address, before the regulations themselves get drafted.
It was set for April 2, at the Holiday Inn in Arlington, Va., near National Airport. They even had (and still have) a site dedicated to the effort.
Mary was planning to attend herself, as were a few other people who, either individually or on behalf of organizations they had founded or co-founded, had been trying to increase official awareness of the widespread fraud and malfeasance in the international adoption field.
Without hesitation, we made plans to go. Not only was there the meeting and the chance to speak our piece as well as meet some of these people in the flesh for once, it was an excellent chance to visit Daniel’s father and stepmother, who live in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. They had only had one or two chances to see Anguel since he came home.
There also was one other thing, which we’d set for the day after the conference.
We had at long last assembled the money, and our records (with special emphasis on the financial aspect) for a visit to Leslie Scherr. What we would he make of BBAS? Could we sue them?
First there was the conference itself. We barely made the deadline for writing something up to present, but we did it with an hour to spare (not that it would have stopped us, just that having a written document gave us something for Acton Burnell to print up and distribute to attendees in case they were unable to hear what we had to say).
After driving down to Washington the afternoon before, we got up bright and early to go from Bethesda to the hotel.
In Washington’s morning rush-hour traffic, driving was perhaps not the smartest means of getting there. But we took a circuitous route via Chain Bridge and the George Washington Parkway and managed to park in the hotel’s busy garage and get to the registration desk in a reasonable amount of time.
The conference, as is often the case with most such events, did not start on time. So we had the chance to look through the written material to be presented by other participants and, most importantly, greet a few people we had only known through email.
Daniel did most of this, as I attended to Anguel, who was understandably uninterested in the conference. Indeed, it was an event more up Dan’s alley than mine, similar to many things he’d attended in his capacity as a journalist, and he would speak and listen for all of us.
Many of the people there were lobbyists of sorts, representing groups like the National Council for Adoption, the American Adoption Congress, the Child Welfare League, the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute ... you name it.
Most importantly for us was the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, a group composed mostly but not exclusively of agencies (many of them the large players) that specialized in international adoptions.
BBAS was not a member of any of these organizations, and if their representatives here took seriously even one-tenth of what we had to say, they never would be.
Before everyone sat down, Daniel found Thais Tepper, outspoken cofounder of the Parent Network for the Post-Institutionalized Child, for years the only organization raising the issues we had learned about all too much the hard way.
He and she had had an interesting and productive email exchange after a defense of critical news coverage of international adoption he had posted to the EEAC PEP mailing list (for parents with adopted children already home, often with needs) was forwarded to her.
She had been aware for many years of some of the truly appalling (and simultaneously lucrative) shenanigans of some agencies, and filled us in on a few (she herself had adopted a child from Romania who had some serious special needs, and her agency had denied it utterly, which led her to the Internet where she hooked up with PNPIC’s two other cofounders).
She would be doing a short presentation along with one of her fellow special-needs adoptive parents from Pittsburgh, who was planning to talk about training that all PAPs should go through (which she had cofounded an organization to provide).
There were others there whom we had wanted to meet: Mary Mooney of course, Dr. Jerri Jenista and another woman from the online adoption world named Barbara McCartney, an attorney from the Buffalo area with some experiences in Ukrainian adoption and a lot to say.
But that would have to wait as everyone was called to sit down.
I mostly hung out with Anguel in the hotel lobby. Daniel had chosen to speak in the afternoon, after lunch, so he was mostly an observer and listener during the morning session.
Not that it wasn’t interesting. There was a vivid discussion at one point between Dr. Jenista, Laura Ceceres (founder of the China Seas adoption agency) and someone from the National Association of Social Workers over whether or not to require that licensed social workers be the ones to do homestudies.
Ms. Ceceres, an attorney and L.S.W. herself, said she frequently had had to call social workers “on the carpet” about homestudies they’d written for questionable clients.
They would often tell her flat out that if they did write a negative homestudy, they wouldn’t get any other business (this goes a long way to explain, by the way, why far fewer negative homestudies are written for international adoption by Americans than domestic ones).
Jenista brought up another problem ... homestudies written by non-social workers, people like clergy (apparently permitted in several states). Someone pointed out that in some areas of the country, the nearest social worker may be over a hundred miles away and it was unfair to make PAPs from those areas incur additional costs in time and money.
It doubtless was, but the woman from the AASW said that the lack of capacity should not be remedied by loosening standards. She had an obvious professional interest, but also a point, so the discussion went no further.
Everyone also was in agreement that agencies that also did homestudies should be barred from working on the adoption as well — the potential conflict of interest was just too great (Although it didn’t fall under that, one had to wonder about Denise’s coziness with Carol Wilson and Adoption Specialists, as reported to us by Mary Hutchison).
Another presenter, attorney Leslie Margolies of the International Adoption Center in the Philadelphia area, described several nightmarish scenarios that she said had occurred to clients and noted a general problem that agencies (like BBAS) try to hide behind vague language in their contracts: they really have, in some cases, no control whatsoever over the activities of their foreign agents.
At lunch, Daniel eschewed the hotel’s pricey dining room and the K Street types who ate there with each other for burgers and fries at the neighboring McDonald’s with Mary Mooney.
For my part, I finally decided that Anguel couldn’t stand this anymore, and after letting some people like Thais and Mary get to meet him, he and I hopped the Metro home, which he liked far more than the conference.
Daniel and Mary had some interesting discussions over lunch, finally learning the story of her attempted adoptions — and subsequent litigation — with an agency she can’t identify publicly as the result of the settlement. They traded observations on what they had heard and which agencies were the most corrupt and venal and some breaking stories we had all heard about.
Afterwards, he had the chance to kill some time and talk to Dr. Jenista as well. She would speak before him in the first afternoon session.
She truly lives up to her billing as a Midwestern mom who works in a pediatric ER and has adopted five children from India. She came in a denim jumper and red Keds, standing out amidst the usual demure colors and conservative fabrics that prevail inside the Beltway.
When she went up to speak, she addressed the subject of misleading and inaccurate medicals and/or agency attempts to play down alarming ones, the latter being a subject we had familiarity with.
She related her anecdotes with the dry wit she’s famous for. Here, medicals with comments that turned out to have been recycled from ones she herself made several years earlier. There, a covert phone call to a Siberian orphanage revealing that the facilitator had fudged key vital statistics to make a child more attractive to a pontential parent.
And finally, the “porcupines in the urine” story: A Russian translator, seeing the word igly (“quills”) used to describe some crystals floating in a urine sample, had had to rely on an inadequate English dictionary and had to make do with “porcupines” as a translation.
The crowd laughed, but as we knew and they would learn in a few minutes, the underlying issues were no joke but a matter of life and death.
It was good, however, that Dr. Jenista had noted the amusing side of this.
As Dan paced around the side of the room, nervously sipping water, it was what he needed to relax him just enough. He was more nervous about giving a speech, about telling Cyril’s story, than he had ever been before or since.
Finally it was time.
The assembled notables in the international adoption field (including Bill Pierce, notorious former head of the NCfA), heard for the first time the names of Building Blocks Adoption Services of Medina, Ohio, and its director Denise L. Hubbard. They would never forget the context.
The room grew quiet, and the Acton Burnell representatives let Daniel exceed the time limit, as he flatly recalled being in a hotel room with his wife thousands of miles from home, watching the life seep out of the boy they had come to accept as their son. A few mouths gaped at the undeniable horror of the situation.
His narrative had more impact because it was not, as were so many others, a general discussion of abstract issues or stories like this heard secondhand, unverifiable. No ... here was someone telling them what this was really about, taking them into the dark heart of what international adoption was becoming. What these regulations had to address.
As he returned to his seat, a few people went up to offer their condolences and shake his hand. He felt bad for the next speaker, Susan Cox of Holt International Adoptions. Would anyone really listen as raptly to what she was saying after his talk?
She finished, which then gave everyone time for a break. More people went up to Daniel privately.
Two of them had interesting things to say.
The first was the aforementioned lawyer Leslie Margolies, who told him that a story she told of an “unconscionable” contract a client had wrestled with under threat of losing a referral had been that offered by none other than ... Building Blocks!
She had tried to get Rick Marco to loosen up on some of the terms; he wouldn’t budge. And all the time Denise was leaning on the PAP to take the child or she was going to lose her.
(The story later offered some tantalizing details that made us wonder if it had been one of the disruptions we had learned of earlier, but when we contacted Ms. Margolies she explained that the whole story was a composite of many clients’ experiences through many different agencies).
A tall, dark-haired woman also sidled up to Daniel.
“I’d be interested in hearing about your Burgas experience,” she said.
She introduced herself as Jill Cole, then director of international programs for Spence Chapin. She wanted to know who BBAS’s facilitator in Bulgaria was. But she didn’t recognize Valeri’s name.
She did, however, say that Spence had pulled all its clients’ children in Burgas out of the orphanage and into foster care.
We didn’t even know that had been possible. “Why?” Daniel asked.
“We had concerns,” was all she would say.
Later we would learn the whole truth of the matter from Joe Wynman, when he told us the story now on his website. And he has quite a few things to say about Mrs. Cole, too! Not many of them good.
A woman named Maureen Hogan, executive director of the National Adoption Foundation, practically jumped over chairs and tables to get to Dan. She asked if we had considered legal action.
In fact, he told her, I was taking the case we had to Leslie Scherr the very next day.
Good, she said. He was the best possible lawyer for a case like this, if one could be brought.
“Tell him to bring the case under RICO,” she counseled, referring to the somewhat controversial federal Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which allows plaintiffs to seize a third of the defendants’ assets pending trial and provides for treble damages, among other things.
“We were able to shut down a crooked agency in Texas that way. These people have to learn.”
Like Thais Tepper, Ms. Hogan was a very outspoken woman whose organization had helped many parents left high and dry by the very agencies and/or facilitators they had signed contracts (and, often enough, large checks) to. She was another veritable storehouse of stories and information about the seedier side of the business, and we thank her very much for her reassurance if nothing else.
Near the end of the conference, insurance coverage (which may be the Achilles’ heel of adoption agencies’ current lack of accountability) was discussed.
It says as much as anything else about the state of international adoption that no one could offer a reasonable figure for how much coverage should be mandated per occurrence ... because so few verdicts have been returned against any adoption agencies, since most lawsuits have been dismissed; and those that haven’t have usually resulted in settlements where the parties are not free to discuss the amount, much less the issues.
(Acton Burnell summarizes that day’s proceedings here)
Daniel also had an interesting chat with Lynette Thompson, administrator of the Precious in His Sight photolisting, afterwards.
He had, as part of our presentation, spoken out strongly against photolistings, calling for them to be tightly regulated, barred from public access if not banned entirely.
At the end, as they were packing up, Lynette, a fair-haired bespectacled young woman from La Crosse, Wisc., who looked to have stepped out of a church promotional brochure in her yellow dress, approached him as he was getting one last can of soda from the well-worked-over coolers at the back of the room.
“I’m sorry you don’t like photolistings,” she said.
He replied that he had given his reasons, and it certainly wasn’t personal, but that he felt the practice created more problems than it could possibly solve.
He mentioned the sort of thing we’d heard about more than once — people finding the same child offered by more than one agency, sometimes at the same time, and proceeding only to accidentally bump into someone else believing the child whose Internet photo they had taken to heart was theirs, and theirs alone.
Lynette said she did get complaints about that. Part of the problem was that she didn’t personally vet what was placed on her site ... agencies that registered got a login and password and could then just upload photos and have pages generated automatically.
Often these photos have numeric codes attached, and Dan pointed out to her that some of them under Building Blocks begin with a “B,” which, when taken with other information, clearly indicated the children were from Bulgaria, in clear violation of that country’s recent edict prohibiting the display of its orphans on publicly accessible Internet sites (the accompanying text, in keeping with Denise’s practices, fudged the issue by merely saying the children lived “in an orphanage in Eastern Europe.”).
“Oh, is that what those mean?” she replied.
The agencies worked on an honor system, though she did receive complaints from some viewers about redundant listings and did try to respond to those situations, she claimed.
This was all very interesting. No wonder Denise listed so many children there! (She no longer does, as far as we can tell).
Lynette was mainly focused at that time on starting her own agency to place children from Haiti. But later on a fellow vigilant adoptive parent forwarded on to us an exchange he had with the administrator of another photolisting site in which that person complained that Precious “will take anyone, no questions asked.”
It didn’t surprise us, then, to learn much later that there were lots of legal problems and complaints about her agency, too. She even used some of the same lines as Denise in deflecting criticism!