Meghan Wall's marathon effort to start a family has come down to a sprint at the finish line.
Like thousands of US couples, Wall and her husband are racing to complete an adoption from Guatemala by year's end, when reforms are expected to slow or stop the exodus of that country's orphans.
"I don't want to get near that date," she said. "It's kind of like Y2K. No one really knows what's going to happen."
The 37-year-old Wall and her husband, Michael, 30, fell in love with the baby they met on a visit to Guatemala earlier this year. His birth mother named him Eddy, which they took as a sign she wanted him raised in the United States.
In August, with the adoption humming along, Guatemala clamped down on the outflow of children amid cries it has become a baby mill for wealthy Americans and that women were giving up their babies out of duress or for money.
The reforms come as Guatemala, like the United States, moves toward a 2008 deadline for complying with an international adoption treaty.
Guatemalan adoptions, long handled by notaries who sometimes keep half of the $25,000 to $30,000 fee, will be processed by family courts. But those courts are far from ready to handle the approximately 5,000 foreign adoptions that take place each year.
On Tuesday, Guatemalan legislators approved a new law to comply with the Hague treaty that tightens adoptions, while allowing pending cases to go through without meeting stricter requirements. President Oscar Berger is expected to sign the law.
The Central American country, with more than 4,700 adoptions to the US this year, had become the second largest source country for Americans, between top-ranked China (5,453) and Russia (2,310). That number is expected to drop sharply next year, leaving prospective parents to look to Ethiopia, Vietnam, Ukraine and elsewhere.
"It's a roller coaster," said Ann Roth of Chicago.
She and her husband, David, both 38, mortgaged their house to finance the adoption of two Guatemalan infants after enduring two miscarriages and various tests and treatments over seven years.
The babies, a boy and girl born days apart in November 2006, are among 46 babies seized after Guatemalan authorities conducted a night raid of a private adoption agency called Casa Quivera in August. Officials have spent the months since verifying the birth mothers' consent, the children's DNA and related paperwork in each case.
Jay Richey, a 43-year-old single father from Atlanta, is among the few Casa Quivera parents who have since brought a child home. He went to Guatemala City and waited out the election season before a local mayor agreed to release a new birth certificate.
"It was a big political issue (adoption reform), so the guy refused to issue it until after the election," Richey said. "It was always, "Manana'."
But his case had been approved before the raid, a crucial hurdle that Roth has been waiting for since March. Even though the two birth mothers in her case have renewed their consent in recent months, the adoptions appear stalled, she said recently, before the new law was approved.
The State Department pressured Guatemala to make an exception for pending adoptions in the law.
It has advised Americans not to initiate applications in Guatemala while the overhaul is under way.
Adoption advocates say neither impoverished birth mothers nor the Guatemalan government have the means to care for the nearly 5,000 children in foster care and thousands more on the street or in orphanages.
"There is a nationalistic reaction to international adoption in most countries of origin," said Thomas Atwood, president of the National Council for Adoption in Alexandria, Virginia.
"In one sense, you can identify with that, that a country would like to be able to take care of its children.
"However, in most sending countries, there is such a large orphan population that we believe the children's interests override national pride," he said.
The Walls have been trying to start a family since soon after they married in 2003.
They, too, endured costly infertility treatments before turning to adoption.
Last month, they received word that Guatemalan authorities had signed off on their case. Now they just need the US embassy to issue a visa.
Source: China Daily/Agencies
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