The more challenging issues have to do with the way the State Department of Adoption (SDA), Ukraine’s official adoption ministry, will be accepting dossiers in the coming year. A dossier is the bundle of documents from adoptive parents asking to adopt a child, and demonstrating their readiness to adopt. Ukraine currently accepts about 1,500 dossiers each year from all over the world. These dossiers are submitted to the SDA by local adoption facilitators. The facilitators receive the dossiers from families and adoption agencies, and try to submit them to the SDA. Unfortunately each year there are more families who want to adopt than the SDA is willing/able to process. 

For the past two years, the SDA has tried to control the number of dossiers they would accept by controlling the facilitators waiting in line outside the SDA wanting to bring in dossiers. These efforts have had mixed results.

In 2007 the SDA only accepted a few dossiers each day. This led to fights among facilitators trying to push to the front of the line, and eventually the formation of an informal list system where the facilitators worked together to have a definitive “place” in line, and communal resistance to line jumpers.

 In 2008 the SDA set up a pre-registration system where a facilitator would bring a dossier, it would be given a registration number. Later in the year the registration number would be “called," and the facilitator would bring in the dossier for actual submission. Very early in the year it looked on the surface as if all 1,500 registration numbers had been given out. This proved to be deceptive. Very quickly it became obvious that some facilitators did not have dossiers actually ready to submit. They had simply taken a registration number hoping that they could get a family to give them a dossier in time. At the end of the year, several hundred additional dossiers were accepted. But the dossier submission procedure at the end of the year seemed to be different from what we saw earlier in the year. Our facilitators did not submit several dossiers that were ready to go as a result of these developing changes. 

The SDA was recently given the authority to reject dossiers based on the profile of child requested by the adoptive family, and the children actually available to the SDA at time of dossier submission.

Here is an example. Let’s say a family is requesting a 3-year-old girl with minor special needs. At the time the dossier is brought to the SDA there are very few girls in the list of available children, and all of them are either over 5, part of a sibling group or have significant special needs. The SDA can reject the dossier. In the past they had to accept all dossiers, and handled the processing on a first come, first served basis.

So in the past they managed the lines. Now they are managing the dossiers. They only accept the dossiers that they want to accept, and can just hand back dossiers they don’t want to process if they perceive that they don’t have the children available that the families want.

 Already the maneuvering has begun. Families are putting wider and wider profiles of children they would consider adopting. In a tactical move families will have to at least say that they are willing to adopt a child who is of any gender, might have serious handicaps and is older.

But the children who are available to be adopted when the family’s dossier is submitted will be different from the children who are available when the family actually travels to the Ukraine. Each week new children become available to be adopted. Each week children who are already in the system are adopted. 

This new authority to reject technically qualified dossiers on the basis of the family’s child request gives the SDA some advantages in the process. They no longer have to worry about how many people submit dossiers.  They just reject any they don't want to process. It makes the appointments at the SDA easier for them to manage as well. If a family gets to the Ukraine and wants a healthy girl under 3, they might get one. But if there are only boys with special needs over 5 available on the family's appointment day, then the family doesn't have good grounds for rejecting all of the boys. The psychologist can always point at the request letter and assert that the family is being too picky.

 It has been the experience of our agency that when a family is presented with children at the SDA they will be able to find a child they are comfortable adopting. But here is the tricky bit. If the family is only presented with older children with serious special needs, and they don’t want to adopt a child with that profile, then they may not be able to complete an adoption.

At this time the SDA is publicly saying that they only have older children with significant medical conditions available. We have specific information about two families who have been through the SDA in the last three months. One was offered an essentially healthy 4-year-old boy, and the other was placed with a sibling group of three children: a healthy 18-month-old girl, and healthy 4- and 5-year-old boys.

It is difficult to say to what extent the types and numbers of children in available to international adoption from the Ukraine has changed in the past year. The public statements from the SDA have changed, and are emphasizing that younger children with fewer special needs are likely to be placed in foster care within the Ukraine. 

Looking at all of this from the outside, we do think that Ukraine is frustrated with the large numbers of applications they have been receiving, and are trying another method to reduce the flow of eager, pre-adoptive parents. A method that gives the SDA staff more control over the adoption process, and the number and type of dossiers they accept in 2009.

Our facilitation teams have been helping families for a long time. We don’t think that our families will receive worse treatment than any other families, but we cannot predict with any surety how any families will be treated in 2009. We continue to have a great deal of confidence in our Ukraine program, but the beginning of 2009 could be a bit of a roller coaster.

The Ukraine has been trying to emphasize more domestic foster care and domestic adoption. It is possible that there are actually fewer kids available to be adopted who are under 5 and only have minor special needs. But in our experience domestic adoption programs in developing countries are rarely as successful as publicly claimed. 

Our specific advice to families is to widen the profiles of the children you are willing to consider; even if you are uncomfortable with some of the children you may be presented. It is a risk, because you may well only be presented with children you refuse to adopt. Be seriously willing to accept sibling groups. We are finding younger, healthier kids seem to come in bunches.

We believe that the Ukraine will start accepting dossiers again some time after the Orthodox Christmas, which is in mid Jan. So late January or February will see new submission of dossiers that are ready to go in 2009. There hasn’t been an announcement yet about how they will physically accept the dossiers. They will probably just open the doors each day for a different country (Monday  the United States, Tuesday Spain, etc.), and then reject dossiers that don’t have a sufficiently wide child request profile. 

Each day orphanages submit information about available children. Each day adoptive families come to the SDA and pick out kids. That the SDA is rejecting dossiers based on child availability, when the family won’t come to Ukraine for a couple of months, is a bit of a shadow dance. The kids who are available on the day the dossier is submitted will be different from the kids who are available when the family is actually in Ukraine a couple of months later. But this is how they are trying to manage the system.

For families who have not submitted dossiers, be aware that the Ukraine process has different risks than it did last year. There is probably a greater chance that your dossier will be rejected, that you will come home without a child, or that you will be working with a process that has more potential for corruption.  We think that families faced with these choices will be a relatively small percentage, maybe 10 - 15 percent.  But the possibility does exist.  At this time we are still hearing from the people in the Ukraine that there are still generally healthy children under 5 who are available to be adopted. In short, we still encourage families to adopt from the Ukraine, but to do so with an understanding of the challenges involved.