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International Adoptions
A Healthy Leap of Faith By Kelly Burgess
This was the experience of Rob Sederholm and his wife, Susan Susang, of Export, Penn. When they first saw their prospective son, Andrew, on an eight-minute videotape sent from Russia in 1998, it was a little unsettling. Although the 16-month-old was walking well and seemed to have good motor skills, he never smiled. Their pediatrician, Dr. Sarah Springer, an expert in the field of international adoptions, urged them to get another tape. The second one was a little better, but Andrew still didn't speak or smile. They also had a confusing, two-page, single-spaced medical report. Still, Sederholm says they felt a powerful connection to Andrew and went ahead with the adoption. Within just a few months of arriving at their home, he was a normal, happy 2-year-old chatterbox.
Andrew's case is an excellent example of what Dr. Jerri Jenista, a pediatric infectious disease expert from Ann Arbor, Mich., calls the uninterpretable Russian medical system. "Videotapes are important, even with supposedly healthy or normal children, simply because the Russian system has no relation to ours at all," says Dr. Jenista. "If we get a medical report from Ethiopia that says a child is spastic, that means the child is paralyzed and stiff. If we get the same term from Russia, it may mean the same thing."
However, depending on the country the child is coming from, there are specific problems that adoption agencies and health professionals look for. In Eastern European countries, such as Russia, the Ukraine and Romania, where there is a high incidence of alcoholism, doctors look closely at videos and medical information for clues to fetal alcohol syndrome and other alcohol-related birth defects. Alcohol use is also on the rise in Korea. There is a great deal of attention paid to children from countries where children awaiting adoptions are raised in orphanages rather than foster care. There are well-documented problems associated with institutionalized children, such as attachment disorders, speech delays and sensory integration issues.