Foreigners Vie to Adopt Black U.S. Babies

OTTAWA, March 5, 2005 — -- When Allison Darke goes out in public with her adoptive son, Ethan, people notice certain things.

"They notice he's a baby and cute," she said. "They think my husband is black."

Ethan was born to black parents in Chicago, but will spend most of his life growing up with Darke and her second husband, Earl Stroud, a white couple living in the Canadian capital.

The State Department says the number of Americans adopting babies from overseas has more than doubled in the last 10 years, with couples often citing a dearth of American babies.

But there are plenty of American babies who need homes -- African-American babies. And more and more of those children are finding homes abroad, especially in Canada, according to people who work in the U.S. adoption field.

"I just don't understand why American couples go to China and Romania and places like that," Stroud said, "when they have kids in their own back yards."

For Stroud and Darke, Ethan is the shining light at the end of a long tunnel of hope. Darke had two children from her first marriage, but she and Stroud wanted to have a child together. They had tried to conceive and then to adopt a child, at first without success.

Then came Ethan. Darke has been with him since the day he was born. She was with his biological mother when she gave birth.

"It's incredible," she said. "It's no different than if it was your own. It's all the same joy, all the same love, all the same desires and dreams and wishes right from the beginning. It's just instant -- the bond is just instant. And then there's the bond that you have with the woman as she goes through a very painful experience, a very joyous but also a very sad moment for her, because now it's the beginning of an end."

Margaret Fleming, who runs Adoption Link, a service in Chicago specializing in placing African-American babies, said the group in recent years has placed Ethan and more than 700 children -- many of them with overseas families in Germany, Switzerland, England and Canada.

For every Caucasian child in the United States, there are at least 200 families in line, waiting two to three times as long as they would if they adopted a black baby, according to Adoption Link.

"At the very top of the adoption hierarchy are white, blue-eyed, blond-haired girls," Fleming said. "And unfortunately, at the very bottom of the hierarchy are African-American boys."

Fleming not only places black children, she has adopted five herself. But there are stigmas involved.