TWO ADOPTIONS END IN RETURN TO SENDER

TWO ADOPTIONS END IN RETURN TO SENDER
Unwanted Children / From Hungary to America, and Back by Peter S. Green, International Herald Tribune (8-11-98) http://www.iht.com
When they left the state children's home here in 1996, 7-year-old Gabor and 8-year-old Karoly were looking forward to a bright future as the newly adopted sons of two American couples in the wealthy suburbs of Connecticut.

In March, the boys, their names now officially Gabriel Petrosino and Jeremy Harper and their language now English, found themselves back in Hungary, delivered with little ado to the doorstep of Budapest' s main orphanage, each with two bags of clothing and toys, and a lifetime of emotional scars.

Their adoptive parents had simply had enough. They said the boys were children from hell, violent and emotionally disturbed. Unwilling and unable to fit in, they were destroying the lives of their adoptive families.

http://www.amfor.net/Adopters.html

Adoptions are not meant to be dissolved like mistaken marriages, and under a United Nations treaty protecting children, they cannot be. But legal loopholes in both Hungary and the United States, neither of which has signed the treaty, means that canceling the two boys' adoptions was no more difficult than an average divorce.

The two boys are now back in foster care, but Hungarian officials say the case has revealed the dark side of Hungary's adoption system, which does not properly prepare or screen prospective parents and which they suspect is riddled with bribery, corruption and even baby- selling schemes.

Two lawyers for the parents said that the parents spirited the boys back to Hungary and asked that their adoptions be annulled days before child welfare authorities in Connecticut were to remove one boy from his family. The lawyers said Gabor falsely accused his parents of abuse because he wanted to be sent back to Hungary.

But Hungarian officials said that returning the two, like a pair of faulty video games, was a cruel shock, and that new homes should have been found for them in America.

All that the parents said when they left the boys at the entrance to the Budapest children's home was ''bye,'' reported the parents' Hungarian lawyer, Istvan Fekete....

''Now, adoption seems to be a commercial transaction,'' said Maria Herczog, director of Hungary's National Institute of Family and Children. ''Parents can choose children and bring them home, and if they don' t like them they can bring them back.'' And that, Mrs. Herczog said, is devastating for the children. ''They have to learn for the second or third time that they are not wanted, '' she said. ''They learn they are not good enough for anyone, to be loved. And when they grow up, can you see what good fathers they will be?'' Hungarian authorities are waging a court battle against annulling Gabor and Karoly's adoptions, fearing a tide of unhappy foreign parents will simply return their problematic adoptive children. The parents' American lawyer, Sheri Paige, said the boys were so emotionally damaged before they reached Connecticut that their adoptive parents had to send them back or risk destroying their own families. Mrs. Paige said both boys suffer from ''attachment disorder,'' the effect of spending infancy without the emotional attachment to a mother.