GUATEMALA CITY — Jeff and Diana Kerr fell in love with the Guatemalan baby girl the moment they saw her photograph. The Minnesota couple decorated her pink-and-white nursery with pictures of flowers and butterflies, but now they don’t know if the 8-month-old will ever become their daughter.
The Kerrs are among thousands of Americans trying to adopt 3,700 babies caught in limbo as Guatemala’s lawmakers debate new rules that could all but shut down a largely unregulated system that had become the speediest place in the world to finalize an adoption.
As early as this week, the legislature is expected to debate new rules to eliminate potential fraud in Guatemala’s adoption process, which until now has been run from beginning to end by notaries who work with birth mothers, determine whether babies were surrendered willingly, hire foster mothers and handle all paperwork.
These notaries charge an average of $30,000 for children delivered to adoptive families in about nine months — record time for international adoptions.
The small Central American country sent 4,135 children to the U.S. last year, making it the top source of babies for U.S. families after much-bigger China. Americans adopted 6,493 children from China in 2006.
The Guatemala adoptions are a $100 million a year industry, but the system violates the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions, which Guatemala and the U.S. have agreed to observe starting next year. Among other things, it stipulates that a government agency must oversee the process and determine if the child was legally surrendered.
What this means for the Kerrs and other would-be parents remains unclear.
The U.S. is pushing for a transition period so that the 3,700 adoptions underway can be concluded.
But scrutiny has turned up problems in about 1,000 cases, said Victor Mejicanos, a federal official.
“We have everything from altered birth certificates to birth mothers who change their minds and want their babies back,” Mejicanos said.
