When You Wish Upon A Star: An Adoption Story

Copyright 2001, 2002, by David N. Kruchkow

Chapter One:

The Kruchkows Choose Adoption Choice

Sara and I were married in September of 1992. At the time, Sara was 41 years old and I was 39 years old. Over the next year when the discussions turned to growing a family, we agreed to rule out trying to have biological children for several reasons. We both had full time jobs and careers that would make it difficult to take the time off necessary to attend to the needs of a newborn. Sara's age would automatically make any pregnancy a high risk one, which we preferred to avoid. Our ages made us both feel that the youngest child we could parent the way we would like would be a toddler, in fairness to both the child and ourselves. Fertility was never an issue, as neither of us had any burning desire to promulgate our genetic lineage. Two of Sara's brother's four children were by adoption, which gave her a favorable view of adoption. I certainly felt that there were enough children in the world needing a home and family that it wasn't necessary to make our own biological child. We both felt that we were neither emotionally nor financially equipped to handle the adoption of a special needs child. We also felt that the foster care system in the US was so bad that it more often than not left the older children available for adoption with more psychological problems than we were ready to handle. We were both scared by the stories in the media about domestic adoptions where, years later, a biological parent would appear and want the adopted child back. The media made it appear that the courts favored the rights of the biological parents over the adoptive parents, regardless of what benefited the child and drove us to look at international adoption instead of domestic adoption. I've come to view the media as a double-edged sword. I'm a big supporter of a free press yet the sensationalist, distorted reporting of a ratings driven mass media drove our choice as to how and where to adopt and drove my decision to detail our story in my own words rather than through a reporter. I have learned that domestic adoptions do work and that the sensationalist stories that the media has emphasized so much are rare exceptions.

We began to seriously research international adoption sometime in early 1994. Over the following year and a half, we went to an orientation meeting held by a well-known and respected New York City agency. We scheduled and paid for an initial consultation and were very put-off by their attitude and questions. Sara was bristling when we were asked if we knew how it felt to be adopted. She felt the question was ridiculous, as only an adopted person would be capable of answering that affirmatively. We agreed that we weren't cut out to handle the attitude coming from the representatives of this particular agency.

We also began to discuss where we would adopt. It had to be a country that did not require a lengthy stay there for both of us as the jeopardy to our jobs and the financial strain of loss of income would quickly end our adoption plans. We are of middle class New York Jewish heritage. David's family is Eastern European (Ashkenazic) on both sides and Sara's is Eastern European (Ashkenazic) on her dad's side and Mediterranean (Sephardic) on her mom's. Sara would not have felt comfortable parenting an Asian child and neither of us wanted to deal with the social issues of being white parents of an adopted black child, so we looked in the direction of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Ultimately, we ruled out Eastern Europe because of the prevalence of medical problems as well as the psychological problems many of the children coming out of long periods of institutionalization experienced. Additionally, the costs and travel times as well as the waiting time for Eastern European adoptions to be completed seemed high. Sara felt she would be comfortable parenting a Latin American child as she has a dark enough complexion to pass as Hispanic. My degree in Anthropology focused on the peoples, cultures and prehistory of the Western Hemisphere, so I had no objections and felt that I could help our child stay connected with its culture and heritage. We both were admirers of Native American cultures, history and art, especially that of the American Southwest.

After that first agency meeting, we went to an orientation meeting of the Northern New Jersey Chapter of the Latin American Parents Association (LAPA). Although a bit far from home, we went to them because the local New York City chapter of LAPA was barely active at the time. There we got to meet adoptive families, see photos, learn about the international adoption process and see the benefits and activities a support group like this can provide. While not an agency, LAPA can point you to a reputable one or steer you away from a disreputable one based on the experiences of its members. Its members could also help guide you through an independent adoption if you wanted to avoid the additional expense and paperwork of an agency adoption. They could put you in touch with attorneys and facilitators with whom they had contact in foreign countries, and let you know where and when these sources had children available for adoption. In fact, just a few days after this initial meeting, we received a call from the woman who ran this meeting asking us if we were "paper ready,'" meaning we had met all the INS pre-adoption requirements, as they knew of a child in Guatemala available immediately. We said we hadn't begun the necessary paperwork yet as we were still trying to decide whether or not to actually commit to adopting. We thanked this woman for considering us and said we'd let her know if we decided to adopt using LAPA's sources. Where the New York City agency seemed to want to tell us that we didn't fit their mold for adoptive parents, the LAPA group seemed overzealous and overanxious to us. It was too much, too soon and seemed too good to be true. We decided that this might not be the best route for us either. As it turned out, not staying with LAPA may have been one of our biggest mistakes. Years later, I learned that this particular woman who ran this meeting and made the phone call to us did not last long in her position with LAPA because she began to blur the lines between acting as a support group and acting as an adoption agency.

We began to expand our research into international adoption. I had recently added a modem to my PC at home and began to haphazardly explore the vast unorganized wasteland known as the Internet. At the time, there was very limited availability of information on adoption on the net and my skills at web surfing were akin to a kid riding a bike with training wheels. We began to send away for information to any adoption agency with a Latin American program within 400 miles of home. We also began to share our plans and experiences with friends, relatives and co-workers, thinking some old-fashioned networking may point to the right road to travel for our adoption.

This is where things began to get confusing. From the friends, relatives and co-workers, we must have heard every possible negative and positive remark imaginable. Some of the things we heard included:

"Why don't you just make your own kid?'"

"Why would you want a child whose own mother didn't want to keep it?"

"It's too bad you can't have children on your own."

"How much does it cost to get a child?'

"What kind of child are you going to pick out?"

"Why would you want someone else's problem?"

"What if there's something wrong with the baby?"

"Why don't you adopt a white baby?"

"Why would someone give up her own baby?"

"God will bless you for doing this!"

"What a lucky child!"

"What are you going to change the name to?"

I know the adoptive and prospective adoptive parents reading this are smiling and wincing knowingly at these questions and comments. Whether well meaning, curious, ignorant or malicious, these remarks try our patience. The personally intrusive questions really don't deserve answers other than sarcastic and flippant ones. The ignorant ones need to be addressed educationally and patiently. The malicious ones need a dose of their own medicine and then some education. The comments that the child will be lucky and that God will reward us for our selfless humanitarianism are off the mark. Every adoptive parent knows they are blessed with the gift of a child, not the other way around. The adoptive family is the lucky one. I think if we were the selfless humanitarians some people make us out to be, we'd have a house full of foster kids or special needs kids or the like. Adoptive parents are not saints. When you have a biological child, you more or less have to take whatever the genetic roll of the dice gives you, although new genetic technologies may eventually change that. In an adoption, depending on the agency and program, you can pick and choose your child up to a point, especially with the adoption of an older child. I feel that there is a selfish element to all adoptions in that the adoptive family has a want and need for a child and goes out to get a child to fill that desire. I do not wish to explore the semantic and ethical debates that weave through adoption groups about "shopping" for a child or about whether prospective adoptive parents should be allowed to express preferences or exercise varying degrees of choice. I think most people who pay substantial professional fees for a service want and deserve some input as to what results the service will deliver.

My boss introduced me to a couple who had just completed an adoption and who was a member of the Adoptive Parents Committee (APC). In late 1994, we went to one of their meetings at the Fashion Institute in New York City. They seemed to be a melting pot for all kinds of support, workshops and information about all types of adoptions. We attended a workshop, were impressed with the resources APC had, signed up and paid the miniscule dues. After that initial session, we were supposed to be scheduled for a workshop in the home of an adoptive parent. Months passed and this was never scheduled. We brought it up and received an apology and were told we would be scheduled for the next workshop. Again this never materialized. While APC had a wealth of information and resources, they sorely lacked organizational and follow up skills. During the next six months, we attended approximately 4 out of six of their monthly meetings and workshops, although we were never contacted to attend that important one in the home of an adoptive family. At the meetings and workshops, politics, both internal along with pro-adoption state and national abounded. Adoption attorneys handed out business cards. Speakers and social workers contradicted each other. Children were held up as if they were prizes won in bureaucratic battles. Confusion also reigned. We were able to ask the same questions repeatedly and never get agreement or the same answers twice. Clearly adoption was a volatile field. International adoptions were even more confusing. It was bad enough that each state and each adoption agency had its own set of rules and requirements. It was bad enough that the federal authorities had to check you out as much as they'd check out anyone given top secret security clearance even though any street junkie could have a baby and leave it in a dumpster. The kicker was that you also had to satisfy the requirements of the government in the country where you were adopting. This is where the information got most confusing, as foreign governments were prone to change their rules in mid-game. Someone who successfully adopted from country X four months ago could describe a different process than someone who completed his or her adoption two weeks ago from the same country. Both would be correct in their times, but to us it was just mass confusion. We came away from APC more attuned to the politics of adoption with a general sense of the required bureaucratic processes and totally confused about specific details of these processes. We gave up on them after they failed to schedule us for that in-home workshop a second time. Sometimes it's good to be invisible and fall through the cracks, but this time it wasn't.

One thing that became apparent to me is that the ranks of prospective adoptive parents were filled with those whose fertility problems drove them to be desperate for a child. Since fertility was not an issue with us, we often felt out of place in the adoption community. It was like we were people without cancer who wanted to make use of the resources of a Laetrile clinic. It was an issue we brought up with agency and support group people more than once. I think it was around this time that I saw that adoption could be viewed as an industry that had the potential of feeding on and profiting from the desperation of people to have children. Promise desperate people that you have the means to end their desperation and these people will do whatever you want and pay as much as they can to grab that carrot that promises to end their suffering. Interestingly enough, five years later, the judge in our case, Judge Mishler, likened the way the operation of Reyes and the Arlenes victimized vulnerable infertile couples desperate for adoption to the "lonely hearts'" fraud schemes that targets elderly women. At this point my attitude about adopting a child was that I could basically take it or leave it. I felt the bureaucratic hassle may not be worth it but Sara's desire to parent was enough to drive us both to continue.

In our years together, Sara and I have developed our roles as most couples do. Some things she handles, some fall on my shoulders and some are shared more or less equally. Unbeknownst to me, Sara had re-established contact with a childhood girlfriend who just so happened to have adopted a child in Guatemala recently. Somewhere in late spring of 1995, Sara asked me if she should call the people her friend used for her adoption from Guatemala. I believe I said, "Why not," as Sara convinced me we had nothing to lose. Sara made the phone calls. It seems her friend had used an outfit named Stork Adoptions, who later became Adoption Choice and eventually were renamed again as International Adoption Consultants, although this seems to have occurred sooner than Agent Pace's Affidavit indicates. They were presented as the local contacts and consultants for Adoption Choice, Inc. of Milwaukee, WI.

Two years of research, the New York agency meeting, the experience with LAPA, the APC meetings and now this were the signposts that pointed to the Arlenes, Adoption Choice and Mario Reyes. We thought we had done enough homework, but that proved to be our biggest mistake.

In June 1995, we were invited to attend a meeting at a community recreation center in Medford, Long Island. Present at this meeting was Melinda Randa of Adoption Choice, Arlene Lieberman, Arlene Reingold and Judy Noonan from International Adoption Consultants, two social workers, an adoptive mother with her child (one of the parents in Agent Pace's deposition, who just so happened to be Sharon Clarke with her daughter from Guatemala, Nicole), a prospective adoptive mother with her mother and ourselves. This was the first and last time we saw Judy Noonan, who may have actually been representing Stork. The purpose of this meeting was for us to learn about Adoption Choice's international adoption programs and for Adoption Choice to select a social worker to conduct homestudies in this area. At this meeting we expressed our preference for working with an agency licensed in New York State and were assured by Ms. Randa that her agency was in the process of obtaining that license. More than two years later, it was apparent that Adoption Choice was not going to be licensed in New York and that this was the first in an endless string of lies and deceptions that we continued to learn more about with each passing day. At a later date, Adoption Choice told another victim in this case, Elyse Ritter, that they were licensed in New York.

We were made to feel comfortable at this meeting. Refreshments were served. Information sheets were handed out. The costs and procedures for adoption programs from different counties were discussed and outlined on these sheets. Checklists of necessary documents were provided. Melinda Randa struck us as an established professional who knew her business and had the gentle mannerisms of a local librarian. The Arlenes struck us as friendly, helpful neighbors who you wouldn't hesitate to ask to watch your kids for an afternoon or take in your mail and feed your cat while you went on vacation. Our questions were answered and our concerns were addressed. We were treated as equals with respect and dignity. Ms. Randa and the Arlenes certainly didn't seem like the kind of people who would lie, commit fraud, broker babies, smuggle children and wreak financial and emotional havoc on dozens of families. As we were leaving this meeting, Arlene Lieberman took the opportunity to address our obvious concerns by telling us that one of the reasons she was doing this was that she had been burned in the past and wanted to help others to avoid that fate. As it turned out, Arlene Lieberman, like most good con artists, was a master of ironic statements.

After several weeks of consideration, we felt comfortable enough with Adoption Choice to select them as the agency we would use for adopting a toddler using their program in Mexico. We chose Mexico because it was close, costs were reasonable, and we were told that we could complete everything and spend as little as one day in Mexico. In September, we sent our application to Milwaukee along with the agency fee of $4,500, in full, as this allowed the agency to waive certain other fees. We proceeded to have our homestudy done, fulfill all the New York State, INS, agency, medical and all other requirements made by the various bureaucracies involved. We were not "paper ready" in time to take advantage of an offered referral after Thanksgiving that the Arlenes told us the lawyer in Mexico, Mario Reyes, wanted to place as a Christmas present to the child and adoptive family. This child was a boy and we had expressed a preference for a girl. At some later date, we asked about this boy and the Arlenes did show us pictures of him with his adoptive family. Two federal government shutdowns caused long delays in the processing of our fingerprints by the FBI, but by April 1996, all our paperwork was complete and we waited for a referral. Mario Reyes' fee was set at $16,000, half upon acceptance of a referral and half upon completion of the adoption. The Arlenes told us that his fee had escalated over the years as he had become greedy, but his heart was in it for the children. This was the beginning of what turned into years of waiting, and an ongoing legal nightmare that continues with an end so far off, it's difficult to picture.

Next, click here for Chapter Two.