Sharon Van Epps remembers the day she first held Haseena, with her rich black hair and dark eyes. The baby, just beginning to walk, did not make a sound, just held on to her tightly.
"I felt like something I'd been missing my whole life that I didn't even know I'd been missing had been found," she recalled.
Van Epps, an American freelance writer, saw Haseena nearly every day afterward, bonding with the girl she hoped to adopt with her husband, John Clements, a partner in a major accounting firm. The couple had received nearly all the necessary approvals from agencies in the US and India, and Van Epps expected to leave here with Haseena within two months.
But that was 15 months ago, and since then she has been locked in battle with a small but determined group of activists.
Led by Gita Ramaswamy, a longtime union organizer-turned-book publisher, the group argues that the foreign adoption system in India is riddled with corruption and encourages trafficking in baby girls, who are often seen as a burden by poor families. In some cases, the police say, babies have been sold by their parents for as little as US$20.
Van Epps, 37, and Ramaswamy, 50, are fighting it out in the state of Andhra Pradesh, but Ramaswamy wants a nationwide moratorium on foreign adoptions for several years.
Last year, according to the Indian government, American and European families adopted nearly 800 children from India, compared with 1,200 in-country adoptions. The numbers may not seem large for a country of a billion people, but Indian law allows only Hindus and Buddhists to adopt; Christians, Muslims and Jews in India may only become guardians.
For Van Epps and other Americans and Europeans seeking to adopt here, the only number that counts is one -- the child they are seeking.
Van Epps' experience has left her pained and angry. "I am a test case for them," she said.
Ramaswamy insists that the dispute is not personal.
"We're not working on Haseena not going abroad," said Ramaswamy, whose five sisters live in the US.
"We're working for changes in the system," Ramaswamy said.
Ramaswamy argues that poverty and the degradation of women in Indian society are the reasons that so many poor women sell their baby daughters. Rather than address these problems, the Indian government allows foreigners to adopt babies as a partial solution, she said.
What really drives baby trafficking, she says, is demand from rich couples from the US and Europe. Poor women do not go around offering their babies, she said, but are persuaded to sell by offers of what to them are irresistible amounts of money.
Ramaswamy and her colleagues have sought to portray Van Epps as a rich American who is throwing her weight around. Indeed, two US senators have written letters on her behalf, and the US Embassy has made inquiries about the case, though it has remained neutral.
"Her faith in the power of the color of her skin, and the superpower status of her country, is so strong" that she is convinced "she must win," Ramaswamy wrote in April in a commentary against foreign adoptions in the Deccan Chronicle, the state's leading English-language daily.
Ramaswamy and her group have publicly asserted that Haseena was trafficked, though Ramaswamy conceded in an interview that there was no hard evidence that Haseena had been bought by the orphanage.
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