Jeff spent 10 years as the Executive Director of Adoption Rhode Island, an agency that recruits families to adopt children from Rhode Island's child welfare system.
Satwinder Sandhu, director of adoption and fostering at the Pact agency, said some social workers wrongly thought the agencies were making money out of adoption, which was holding back adoptions.
"You can never properly sterilize a chain-link fence," said Kiska Icard, director of adoptions at the agency's $7 million Maddie's Pet Adoption Center, which opened in 1998.
Epidemiologists believe the disease began in Guangdong Province in China, where Americans adopting Chinese children must go to obtain their child's exit visa from the United States consulate, said Amy Zajac, director of adoptions for Catholic Charities in Fairfield County.
I have worked with many pregnant teenagers and young adult women in my 25 years as a director of an adoption agency, and adoption is only a small part of the solution.
"People are concerned; they're scared," said Penny Rearick, director of the Adoption Resource Center of Connecticut of Glastonbury, which provides services to adoptive parents.
Kjersti Olson, the director of international adoption for Children's Home Society & Family Services, the Casserlys' agency, said unethical cases should be investigated.
Sarah Mraz, director of international adoption programs at Wide Horizons for Children, said the Massachusetts-based child-welfare organization spent the day counseling families.
Since her return, the woman said, the director of her adoption agency assured her that he had "complete faith" in the Chinese program and government.
Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city.
This reasoning makes sense to Ronny Diamond, director of post-adoption at Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children, an adoption agency in Manhattan.
