1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: Oh, baby: of corruption and scandal (12/31/95)

1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Oh, baby: of corruption and scandal

During 1995, the furor in Ukraine revolved around the scandal of a baby-selling operation first uncovered in Lviv at the end of 1994. The news hit the media in 1995.

Three doctors were arrested in this tale of crime and corruption (Liudmyla Ornst, Bohdan Fedak and Volodymyr Doroshenko), and, as the year drew to a close, they remained in jail, detained until February 1996, when the Lviv prosecutor plans to bring the threesome to trial.

Originally charged with "exceeding their authority" and "forging official documents," these doctors are allegedly only a small part of a ring that includes petty bureaucrats, adoption "facilitators" and small-time crooks, and which extends from Ukraine, to Russia, to the United States, Canada and Italy, and includes costs of anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000 per child.

Initially, Lviv Oblast Council Chairman Mykola Horyn claimed that the scandal had been politically motivated, but by year's end he, too, realized its criminal content and gave two Lviv assistant prosecutors the green light (and the necessary funding) to go to the United States to find evidence against these doctors and their cohorts.

In the Lviv region, some mothers were told that their babies had died at birth, or were born with severe handi-caps, while others were pressured into giving up their newborns, as adoption facilitators convinced them that, with the economic hardships plaguing Ukraine, they did not need the burden of an additional mouth to feed.

More than 100 children from the Lviv region alone have wound up in America and Canada, and now the adoptive parents - who, it seems, were under the impression that they were doing everything according to Ukrainian law - are worried that the natural mothers may want their babies back.

However, in a new twist in this scandal, one Massachusetts couple has returned a Ukrainian child adopted in early 1993, a child who is severely handicapped and whose medical bills cost the family $7,000 a month. Although it has not yet been confirmed, Lviv authorities think that baby Alexander, as he is known, was one of the babies sold to the West.

But no matter what Lviv authorities find in the United States, Ukraine urgently needs legislation to monitor such situations. Mykola Zhulynsky, then the vice-premier of humanitarian affairs, in May 1993 had placed a moratorium on adoptions by foreigners. In July 1994, Parliament strengthened that government decree by passing a moratorium on all foreign adoptions.

In early 1995, the first reading of a bill that includes provisions on foreign adoptions was presented. However, as the year drew to a close, the law on adoption had not been brought up for a second reading.

The new legislation, which may still be amended, does include a basic strategy and plan concerning adoption by foreigners. The new law envisions the creation in Kyiv of a body called the National Center for Adoptions (NCA), which must approve all applications by foreigners to adopt any child in Ukraine.

Indeed, a cornerstone of the new legislation is the principle that foreigners may adopt a child only if there is no Ukrainian citizen willing to adopt that particular child. If a child has not been adopted by a Ukrainian citizen after one year of registration with the NCA, only then does the child become eligible for adoption by foreigners.

In the case of the 54 Ternopil orphans - who arrived in the United States in 1992 for four months of rest and relaxation in the Chicago area and subsequently were adopted by American citizens - the news was cheerier for the adoptive parents. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry closed that case, issuing a diplomatic note to the Ukrainian Consulate General in Chicago.

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