Hands Off Our Babies, a Georgian Tells America

In a girlish lilac-colored diary stamped ''Secrets,'' Isabel Brodersen, 40, writes daily entries to Leah, the 10-month-old Georgian orphan she came here to adopt.

''I studied your physique. I had an awful feeling of alarm,'' she wrote on May 27, the first time she saw the baby, who, among other things, suffers from brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen at birth. ''Oh, my darling Leah,'' she added. ''You are such a mess.''

Ms. Brodersen, a neonatal and pediatric physician's assistant, has been waiting in Tbilisi for more than a month, trying to persuade the Georgian authorities to release Leah and let her take the baby home to Berlin, Conn.

But Ms. Brodersen and her husband, Nicholas Chirico, 49, along with 14 other American couples, have found their adoption papers stuck in a deeply politicized bureaucratic struggle that pits them against Nanuli Shevardnadze, whose husband, Eduard, is President of Georgia.

Though the numbers are small, the impasse the couples face reveals a great deal about the way people in lands once controlled by the Soviet Union increasingly react to the idea of Americans' saving their children by making them Americans.

Mrs. Shevardnadze is leading a crusade to end foreign adoptions altogether. ''I am categorically against foreign adoption,'' she said in an interview. ''Our nation's gene pool is being depleted. No more children should leave Georgia.''

Mrs. Shevardnadze also expressed deep mistrust of the dozen foreign adoption agencies registered in Georgia, accusing them of using bribery and deceit -- including exaggerated diagnoses of medical needs -- to whisk out healthy babies whom Georgians would be happy to adopt. Having pushed for a moratorium on foreign adoption -- in almost all cases this means American adoption -- Mrs. Shevardnadze has pledged to find homes in Georgia for the children who have already been assigned to parents overseas. She casts the issue as one of national identity.

''All the Georgian people are suffering hardships,'' she said. ''Let our children suffer, too.''

The painful controversy over foreign adoption has been echoed throughout the former Soviet Union, where foreign adoptions soared soon after Communism collapsed.

In 1991, Americans adopted 2,552 children from Romania -- population 23 million -- an exodus so controversial that it led the Government to rewrite the rules. Last year, 555 Romanian children were adopted by Americans. When Russia imposed a temporary moratorium in 1995, many agencies shifted to Georgia.

In this desperately poor country of 5 million, 77 children were adopted by Americans last year. But however small the number, it was much larger than the 17 adopted two years ago.

The Corrupted Image Of Western Agents

Unlike Russia and Romania, which introduced legislation to curb and control foreign adoption, Georgia has left the process uncharted and poorly regulated. Foreign adoptions here are increasingly cast as a murky business perpetrated by rich foreigners and corrupt bureaucrats.

And while there is little doubt that incidents of corruption abound, there is also no question that some sick children are suffering -- even dying -- under the moratorium.

The orphanage known as the Infant's Home in Tbilisi is home to 77 infants and toddlers. Many are not really orphans but have been left there by parents who cannot afford to rear them. In most cases, only sick children are legally available for adoption from orphanages, because healthy ones are quietly adopted right out of the maternity ward, usually by Georgians.

It is a bleak building, with peeling linoleum, blistered walls and scuffed metal cribs. There are few toys. Mounds of laundry are washed by hand in tubs. Caretakers are briskly tender with crying babies, but they are outnumbered, and many children lie for hours without being held, particularly the ones with Down syndrome or severe brain damage.

The orphanage director, Avtandil Bubuteishvili, said he had all the food and medication he needed. ''We give better medical care than a lot of Georgian families can,'' he said. ''But children die. Children die in all countries, including the United States and Japan.''

His records, submitted to the Ministry of Health on Dec. 6, show that 25 children died in 1996 out of 140 admitted, a death rate of 18 percent. A spokesman for the ministry said that 14 more children from the Infant's Home had died since December.

After independence in 1991, Georgia endured civil war. Poverty and disease are still rampant. But other deprived Georgian institutions do not share the Infant's Home's record. At the pediatric emergency ward of the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Tbilisi, for example, only 8 percent of patients died last year.

Mr. Bubuteishvili insists that the moratorium has not cost any lives. ''I am almost certain no child who was being prepared for foreign adoption has died,'' he said.

Actually, several did, including Nana Makatsarya, who was born on Oct. 11 of last year with damage to her central nervous system. An American couple formally applied to adopt her on Nov. 27 through their adoption agency, Hawaii International Child Placement. In February, during a flu outbreak that took the lives of at least five other children, she died of pneumonia.

A Suspension Decree Only Fuels Hostility

Such sad facts are not generally known or widely believed in Tbilisi. Beneath good intentions on all sides, there is a powerful undercurrent of suspicion and rumor. There have been charges of criminal neglect of children in orphanages, as well as tabloid newspaper reports that baby merchants are buying children for hundreds of thousands of dollars to sell their organs for transplants.

With scant evidence on either side, the issue is governed by passions.

Last December, President Shev ardnadze issued a decree suspending foreign adoptions until Parliament approved a new adoption law, but that effort has only further confused and embittered the situation.

$(Parliament adjourned for the summer on June 27 without action, leaving the moratorium in effect.$)

Adoption agencies and many bureaucrats and legislators say the moratorium is not even legal.

The issue of foreign adoptions has driven a deep wedge throughout Georgian society, pitting adoption agency against agency, ministry against ministry, and Parliament members against one another.

It has also strained relations between Georgia and the United States, which gave the country $20 million in foreign aid last year.

Prominent American officials like Senator Edward M. Kennedy have written to Mr. Shevardnadze pleading for an exception on behalf of constituents caught in the freeze. The United States Embassy in Tbilisi is pressing the Georgian Government to let the remaining children go before the Georgian President and his wife arrive in Washington in August for a working visit.

The only law on adoption in Georgia is an old Soviet-era family code, and it does not stipulate that only sick children can be adopted by foreigners. Still, agencies like Cradle of Hope, the Maryland-based organization that is handling Ms. Brodersen's adoption and eight others in Georgia, have programs to place handicapped children with American families. Many agencies and Georgian bureaucrats try to paint children as too sick to be easily adopted by locals, as a way to make them available to Western couples.

The issue came to Mrs. Shevardnadze's attention last summer, after a battle between rival adoption agencies spilled into the open. New Partners, an agency based in Washington, hired Keti Nemsadze, chief pediatrician of Georgia, as its representative. Other agencies and Education Ministry officials complained that her dual role represented a conflict of interest. She complained of corrupt practices in their midst.

''Health is not a criterion for adoption, but they acted like it was,'' Mrs. Nemsadze said in an interview. ''Nobody was supervising the diagnoses -- what does the Ministry of Education know about pediatrics?''

A Georgian Who Scorns 'Foreign Millionaires'

Mrs. Shevardnadze asked that a special Government panel re-examine the diagnoses of 19 orphans from the Children's Republican Hospital who had been approved for foreign adoption by the Ministry of Education. Mrs. Nemsadze was on the commission and concluded that only three of the children were seriously ill. Those three were granted adoption papers.

Mrs. Shevardnadze said she had gone on vacation in August believing that none of the other children would be allowed to leave. ''We thought we had saved them,'' she told a local paper at the time. ''But as soon as we took a leave, they were adopted.''

She remains convinced that all agencies exaggerate symptoms. ''They tell us all the adopting families are millionaires, that our children will grow up happy and rich,'' she said scornfully. ''Maybe our entire population should be adopted by foreign millionaires.''

Sixteen children whose foreign adoption papers had been in the pipeline before the December moratorium were offered to Georgian Government agencies for local adoption this month. Several of the healthier ones, whose adoptive parents in the United States had been paying for their food, medicine and private nurses for months, have since been placed in Georgian families.

There was one notable exception to the moratorium. In April, the Speaker of Parliament, Zurab Zhvania, was asked by Representative Benjamin Gilman, Republican of New York, for his help on behalf of constituents who had been waiting to adopt since December. The Speaker pulled strings, and the baby was taken to the United States in May.

The resulting controversy was so explosive that Georgia is unwilling to make any more exceptions.

'' 'Eye disease, hydrocephalia, brain damage' -- I feel embarrassed even offering these children to Georgian families,'' Mzia Samsonadze said as she read a list of symptoms of half a dozen children once approved for foreign adoption and who have since been remanded to her for placement in Georgian homes.

Mrs. Samsonadze, an inspector for the municipal agency that oversees local adoptions, said she despaired of finding Georgians able to take on such daunting medical problems. Leah's name was also on the list.

''These children could die over the summer,'' she said. ''They are really sick -- when you consider the conditions of our orphanages, one nurse looking after 10 kids, well, there is nothing shining in their future.''