We are thankful for the Commission and its leaders, who, despite your overwhelming responsibilities to domestic and international issues, show concern for the rights and welfare of abandoned children in Romania. Thank you for hosting this hearing.

I was requested by the Commission to provide testimony today in this hearing to bring you a perspective from my personal experiences on the ground in Romania, as an adoptive parent of a Romanian child, and as 1 of over 200 American families with a current pending adoption case from Romania, whose final approval has been delayed for years due to Romania's moratorium and subsequent legislation essentially banning intercountry adoption.

I'm greatly honored to testify today, though I fear it is not without a risk, a risk that exposing my name and speaking out publicly for the Romanian children could somehow jeopardize our own pending adoption case, as has happened to some families we know.

However, we are committed to being a voice for abandoned children in Romania and pray that their rights to a permanent, loving family will be honored as a result of this hearing.

For 2 weeks each summer for the past 11 years Whitney and I have taken time away from our jobs as a university professor and an engineer to serve as volunteers for a private Romanian nonprofit. Our first trip to Romania was in June 1994, and it was only 4 years after the revolution in Romania. The experience deeply impacted our lives. We fell in love with Romania's beautiful landscape and its warm and loving people.

But we also saw the brutal effects of the former communist government, people stripped of all they had, and tens of thousands of children left abandoned. We worked in one state-run institution housing over 300 children in cramped, horrible conditions, and where the environment had developed into a survival of the fittest. We saw a disproportionate number of abandoned children of Roma descent and witnessed unfair discrimination of these children.

In sharp contrast, we also work for the Private Children's Home, whose ministry focused on rehabilitating abandoned children and placing them in permanent families, both domestically and internationally. We saw the life and hope of abandoned children, including the Roma, restored through basic physical needs and emotional and spiritual needs as well.

Since that first trip, our work in Romania has focused on ministering to a variety of needs, but especially those of abandoned children, both in state-run institutions as well as private orphanages and foster care homes.

Over the years, we've seen some improvements, but in our experience, the needs of abandoned children are as great now as they were when we first went to Romania in 1994.

I've compiled a slide show of recent images from Romania, that I showed before the hearing and will show again afterwards, documenting the reality some abandoned children in Romania still face. Note too that many photos show American volunteers working alongside Romanians to help with these children.

The slide show also includes just a small sample of the thousands of miraculous stories of intercountry adoption from Romania, sent to me by families all across the United States, where children

are being united with loving families. The contrasts speak for themselves.

Whitney and I again returned to Romania last month and worked with 20 children under the age of 4 in the previously mentioned Private Children's Home. The same children are still there that were there during our last visit, only now a year older. Some children have been fortunate enough to be placed in foster care, but most face a difficult future without a family.

Unless the pending cases are processed and the current law is changed, the nonprofit organization that we work with anticipates raising these children until they are out of high school, as very few, if any, Romanian nationals are inquiring to adopt these children. If the pending intercountry adoption cases were processed today, seven of these children from this organization would have permanent, loving homes.

While in Romania last month, I also accompanied a social worker for a day and learned that the new law has created a paperwork nightmare. Since it requires new signatures from parents who had already terminated their rights, social workers now spend most of their time locating parents or relatives for signatures instead of working to find children permanent homes.

My understanding is that social workers are also obligated to explain to the parents or extended family that the government will pay them to care for the child if they take them back, even if the conditions are unfit to raise a child.

On that particular day, we searched for the parents of two girls from the Children's Home and finally found them living in a city garbage dump. Another child's grandmother, who lived in similar conditions, wanted to reclaim the child so she could receive money from the government, despite the fact that she had never seen the child and the child had been living with a wonderful foster care family for over 3 years, who wanted to adopt him.

But I was not granted access to a state hospital. I was told that because the new law prohibits adoption of children under 2 years of age, there are once again entire floors filled with abandoned babies, reminiscent of the Ceausescu era.

I also understand that in an effort to meet E.U. admittance criteria, requiring closure of large government institutions, many foster care parents are required to accept more children than they can support. According to the social worker I was with, some foster parents have up to 16 children.

These are some of the experiences I had just 1 month ago, but the organization said that these are common experiences that social workers in Romania clearly face. Clearly these are not in the best interests of the children.

Whitney and I first considered adopting a Romanian child after our summer trip in 2000. Our motives for wanting to adopt a child were very simple: to provide a home to a child who needs a loving family. Our experiences have confirmed to us that, though Romania has made some progress over the years in providing for abandoned children, as Ambassador Ducaru noted, the need is too great for Romania to meet by itself.

Statistics tell us there are over 80,000 children in state care and another 9,000 babies abandoned annually. However, less than

1,500 children are domestically adopted each year. Further, there is a disproportionate number of Roma children, older children, and children with medical problems that statistics show will never be adopted domestically. In fact, according to the UNICEF report in 2005, approximately 66 percent of the abandoned children are Roma.

Our daughter, Simona, is of Roma descent, and her story is a testimony to the miracle that intercountry adoption can provide to a child who needs a loving family. She was abandoned at 3 months of age at a state hospital in Romania, and she spent the next 2 years of her life in state institutions, where she was largely neglected.

Fortunately, she was then placed in a loving foster care family for 9 months, which in many ways saved her life. But had intercountry adoption not been an option for Simona, she likely would have never been adopted domestically due to her age and Roma heritage.

We celebrate the day we brought her home-June 20, 2001, which was a week before the moratorium on intercountry adoption was first imposed by the Romanian Government. At that time Simona was about 3 years old, she'd just learned to walk, and was speaking less than 10 words in her native language.

Four years later, Simona is now a beautiful, healthy, and thriving 7-year-old girl, who loves to run, jump, play, and laugh. Simona has added immeasurable joy to our family, and we thank God for her.

We celebrate her Romanian heritage, though there are days when we look at her and wonder what would have become of this beautiful girl had intercountry adoption not been an option for her.

But our story is not unique. There are literally thousands of miraculous intercountry adoption stories of Romanian children from all over the world. We have even documented many of these stories in a book, that will serve as an appendix to this hearing.

From our perspective, it is outrageous and offensive to hear that certain influential members of the European Parliament have repeatedly threatened Romania with denial into the E.U. if they allow international adoption, calling it nothing more than the selling of babies.

After returning again from volunteer work in Romania during the summer of 2003, we filed papers to adopt another abandoned child who we'd spent considerable time with at the Private Children's Home.

Despite the moratorium, we received a confirmation of a case number and assignment of our child from the Romanian Government in September 2003, hoping to get approval under the Emergency Ordinance.

Ambassador Ducaru claimed that the cases assigned during the moratorium were "a mere administrative act." However, I know many children were still adopted during the moratorium. So I don't quite understand why this can be called "a mere administrative act."

In February 2004, we joined efforts with hundreds of families with pending cases and Romanian adopted children to form an organization called For the Children-SOS, to actively seek resolution

for the pipeline cases and promote fair and transparent legislation for abandoned children in Romania.

The extensive efforts of For the Children-SOS are documented in an appendix to this hearing. Collectively, our organization has spent thousands of hours not only working with our local, state, and national governments and with the past and current Romanian leaders but also working on the ground in Romania, helping abandoned children.

On July 17, 2004, we met with then Prime Minister Nastase to discuss the moratorium on the proposed new law. In that meeting, he promised to process select cases with serious medical issues. To my knowledge, that was never done.

In October 2004, French Prime Minister John Pierre Raffarin was to lead an international committee under the direction of the Romanian Government to review and process the pending cases. This also was never done.

In March 2005, we met with President Basescu here in Washington. He expressed sympathy for the abandoned children and for those of us with pending cases, but still we've seen no action.

In June 2005, the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute sponsored a letter to President Basescu, urging him to process pending cases and consider revising the adoption law. Over 40 U.S. Congressmen signed the letter. Still, to this day, no response has been received.

We understand that there are political ramifications involved with these pending cases, but truly it is unthinkable that abandoned children would have to wait to join loving families already assigned to them, while their government plots and ploys strategy for accession into the E.U.

We consider ourselves fortunate compared to some American families with pending cases. We have traveled to Romania to see our assigned child on two occasions and received periodic updates and photos. However, many have waited much longer than we have some up to 5 years. Some continue to pay monthly for private care in children's homes or foster care to ensure proper care for their child.

Still others have lost all contact with their assigned children or learned that they were singled out for domestic adoption. Time is passing. These children are growing up without families-families that have already been assigned to them by the Romanian Govern

ment.

We urge the Romanian Government to approve all pending cases immediately. In the words of one pending family: "These children do not have shelf lives, and if they did, they would have expired long ago."

Our daughter, Simona, has been praying daily for our assigned child for 2 years. She often asks us when the Government of Romania will say "yes" and let her little sister come home. Simona knows, somehow, the urgency of this adoption and what it is like to be without a mom and a dad. She also knows the joy of belonging to a family.

She is a small voice for the many children from her own country that need permanent, loving families, and right now a voice is what the abandoned children of Romania desperately need.

Thank you.

Mr. SMITH. Mr. Forsyth, thank you very much for your statement.

In your statement you talked about "Simona loves to run, jump, laugh," then you added "and be silly." There's nothing silly about the wisdom and the truth that is being uttered from a child's mouth.

And I hope, Mr. Ambassador, you will take that back. I mean, it's not just the parents, it's the siblings who desperately want to build these families and will provide a great atmosphere in which these kids can grow and thrive.

So thank you, and I do hope there will be no prejudice and I hope the Ambassador will take note of that as well, for your willingness to come forward with a pending case by the Government of Romania, and we will follow that closely as well.

Ms. Murphy-Scheumann.

STATEMENT OF DEBRA MURPHY-SCHEUMANN, PRESIDENT, BOARD OF DIRECTORS, JOINT COUNCIL ON

INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S SERVICES

Ms. MURPHY-SCHEUMANN. Yes. I'm Debra Murphy-Scheumann, and I'm president of Joint Council of International Children's Services. We're one of the world's largest and oldest organizations, representing about 75 percent of all of the children who are placed internationally in the United States.

I would like to thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to come and speak today and be the voice of the Romanian children. In order to save some time, I am going to basically summarize some of the information that we have in our testimony, because some of the statistics have already been stated and there's no point of being redundant.

But I would like to submit our testimony, with all the attachments, for the record.

Mr. SMITH. Without objection, it will be made a part of the record, and all of the full statements and attachments by our wit

nesses.

Ms. MURPHY-SCHEUMANN. Thank you.

The Joint Council shares the commitment of the Romanian Government, and we've been very pleased to see the strides that they have made in child welfare since 1989, and they have indeed made some strides.

But we also recognize the intense political pressure that Romania's getting with their desire for entering into the European Union, which seems to have taken precedent over what is called "the best interest of the child," as we're all aware of this "wonderful" law January 1, 2005, that basically eliminates international adoption with the exception of second degree or the grandparents. We also heard earlier the testimony about the number of children who are in foster care and institutions and the amount of abandonment, done by the UNICEF study, that continues to show that the abandonment is about the same as it was 10, 20, and 30 years ago.