New Chinese Law Loosens Rules for Domestic Adoption

SHANGHAI —  China, the land that has become the United States’ biggest source of adopted babies, has changed its law to encourage more of its own people to adopt orphaned and abandoned children.

The new law, passed Wednesday by China’s National People’s Congress, lowers the minimum age of Chinese adoptive parents from 35 to 30, drops a requirement that they be childless and allows them to adopt more than one orphan.

Requirements for foreign adoptive parents were clarified slightly but not necessarily made stricter. The new law will take effect April 1 and should not affect pending adoptions, an NPC spokesman said.

As under the earlier law, foreigners who want to adopt Chinese children must provide notarized background information including age, marital status, occupation, property, health and police records. The new law adds that they also have to sign an agreement with individuals or institutions that put the children up for adoption and register at provincial civil affairs departments.

In China, where most families are still permitted to have only one child, and boys are preferred, nearly all of the babies in the orphanages are girls.

In September, a draft law making adoption easier for both foreigners and Chinese was proposed to the Congress but failed to pass.

The new law is the culmination of a long tug-of-war between governmental departments that wanted to relax requirements to provide more homes for orphaned or abandoned children and officials who feared that loopholes would be exploited to get around China’s one-child policy.

Other officials consider it embarrassing to have foreigners embrace the country’s discarded children. The adoptive parents often “donate” thousands of dollars for the privilege to the country’s overcrowded and underfunded welfare institutions.

Parents from outside China adopted more than 4,000 Chinese babies last year, and 96% of the new parents were Americans. The Civil Affairs Ministry said it did not keep statistics on domestic adoptions, but it noted that more Chinese families now had the means and the desire to adopt.

Saying that “excessive restrictions” were keeping qualified families from taking in abandoned or orphaned children, Civil Affairs Minister Doje Cering urged in September that adoption regulations be eased.

“Welfare institutions are less than ideal places to promote the healthy growth of unfortunate children because of poor living conditions and the lack of family warmth,” the minister told the National People’s Congress as the first revisions were being considered. “Changes will all be for the good of the children.”