U.S. To allow resumption of Vietnamese adoptions

American parents will soon be able to follow celebrity couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in adopting Vietnamese children after alleged baby-selling led the U.S. to halt adoptions for six years.

Vietnam's Ministry of Justice will make an announcement about overseas adoptions on Sept. 16 in Hanoi, U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Lisa Wishman said. Adoptions will be limited to children five years and older, those with disabilities and others with siblings.

The resumption comes as the two countries, once enemies, engage in a rapprochement with increasing high-level government visits, military cooperation and trade. U.S. adoptions from overseas have fallen 69 percent since the 2004 peak because of government restrictions.

"This creates a better overall environment for new strategic agreements," Alexander Vuving, a security analyst at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii, said in a phone interview. "The U.S. initiated the suspension of the process. It added to the distrust between the two countries. Now the trust has resumed over the years."

Vietnam has put in place a new legal framework under the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, said Tad Kincaid, founder of Ho Chi Minh City-based Orphan Impact. Among the Hague stipulations is that governments have a single authority regulating the adoptions, he said.

"Both countries know that adoption is good for these kids," Kincaid, whose nonprofit has partnerships with Intel Corp. and VMware Inc. to provide technology training to orphans, said in a phone interview. "Vietnam doesn't have a foster care system and there are not a lot of domestic adoptions."

Vietnam reported there were 236,224 orphans in the country in 2013, according to the labor and social affairs ministry.

In 1987, the U.S. Congress passed the Homecoming Act, which gave children fathered by U.S. servicemen who were born between 1962 and 1975, and their families, the opportunity to resettle in the U.S. As of November 1992, about 66,000 of them had resettled in the U.S., according to a U.S. General Accounting Office report.

The U.S. State Department said in 2008 that investigations into Vietnam's adoption system uncovered abuses, including forged documents, mothers who were paid, coerced or tricked into giving up their children, and children offered for adoption without the knowledge or consent of their birth parents.

Jolie and Pitt, who adopted their son Pax in 2007, created a publicity stir in the Southeast Asian country in 2011 when they returned with their boy to his homeland while the U.S. adoption ban was in place.

The couple's overseas adoptions highlighted the existence of orphanages in developing countries to many Americans who might not have known they existed, said Becky Weichhand, interim executive director with the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute in Washington D.C.

"It elevated the world's awareness about children living in orphanages," she said in a phone interview. "The American people in general have very positive views toward adoptions, not only at home but overseas and of special needs children."

The process to adopt overseas children, always lengthy and costly, has become even more difficult for American families as agreements between the U.S. and other countries have been curtailed, Weichhand said. The U.S. has barred adoptions in Cambodia since 2001 and Romania, Guatemala and Russia have restricted or prohibited them, she said.

Adoptions by Americans of overseas children peaked at 22,991 in the 2004 fiscal year, and reached only 7,092 in the 2013 fiscal year, according to State Department data.

About a half-dozen State Department delegations have visited Vietnam to evaluate the country's ability to manage overseas adoptions, Kincaid said. Under the agreement, only two U.S. adoption agencies will be licensed in Vietnam, he said. Previously, there were about 40 American adoption agencies in the country.

Vietnam's Central Adoption Authority will authorize Dillon International Inc. and Holt International Children's Services Inc. to operate in the country as adoption services, according to a State Department statement issued Sept. 12.

"The upcoming announcement serves as an example of yet another success in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Vietnam in light of the 20th anniversary of the normalization of relations between the two countries," Wishman, the Embassy spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The chosen agencies were required to have operations in five U.S. states, which is unusual, Kincaid said. Most adoption services are licensed for just one state, he said. The Vietnam government also said the agencies must have a history of working in the country and promote humanitarian programs to help children, Kincaid said.

"I would hope they would be willing to expand it to other agencies once the system is proven," Weichhand said. "There is a lot of interest from the U.S."

Limiting adoption services to two providers is a form of "tit for tat" by the Vietnamese bureaucracy, which was embarrassed by the allegations of corruption and the lack of trust displayed by the U.S. in the slow pace of restarting adoptions, Vuving said.

"They point the finger back at the U.S., 'You also have your errors in your system. You give me a little and I give you a little,'" he said.

The adoptions will first focus on children who have the greatest needs, Kincaid said.

"They are starting with the hardest kids to place," he said. "Most people who sign up for adoptions request infants and one child."

Some impoverished parents believe orphanages can provide for their children better than they can, while some single mothers abandon newborns in hospitals, Kincaid said. "There is still the underlying issue of poverty," he said.

The average monthly wage in Vietnam was $194 during the fourth quarter of 2013, according to government statistics. Vietnam may fail to reach its 2014 gross domestic product growth target of 5.8 percent, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said during an Aug. 7 investment conference. Vietnam's Central Bank devalued the dong on June 18 for the first time in a year by weakening its reference rate by 1 percent to 21,246 per dollar to spur exports.

"Many of the orphanages are filling up," said Kincaid, who has three sisters who were adopted from Vietnam. "We see the little kids in the nurseries. There are a lot of kids there. Inter-country adoption is not a perfect solution. But it is an option for some kids."