More News from MOJ

The Bulgarian MOJ recently remodeled its website and added some further new information regarding international adoptions.  The Ministry has now released a list of confirmed adopters through December 31, 2011, showing 767 active, registered dossiers still waiting for referrals.  This number is completely in line with previous estimates I have given on this blog and through private emails.

Eighty-seven of these active dossiers specifically request the referral of a girl or a girl as part of a sibling group.  Eleven dossiers request a boy or a boy as a part of a sibling group.  Fifty-eight dossiers are asking for a child up to only 24 months of age.  There are eight dossiers which request children with a maximum age parameter of less than 24 months.  Those dossiers are from Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Meanwhile, we know from the list of 395 children adopted from Bulgaria in 2012 that only two of them were born in 2011 and only 39 in 2010 which shows that the frequency of children coming home at under 36 months of age is just over 10%.  In addition, the list highlights that most of these very young referrals have special needs.  One of the children born in 2011 was known to have a birth mother with syphilis and was referred to a family who registered in 2008.  The other has a heart defect and two close biological relatives diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was referred to a family registered in 2011.  Of the children born in 2010, only six were considered healthy by MOJ and three were registered waiting children.  The remaining 30 kids had at least one, often multiple health conditions including vision problems, syphilis, reflux, heart defects, anemia, limb differences, prematurity, microcephaly, epilepsy, asthma, cleft lip/palate, Down Syndrome, hypotrophy, Kippel-Feil Syndrome, urinary conditions, motor disorders, facial malformations, borderline intelligence as well as family histories of mental retardation, personality disorders, and birth mothers known to have used alcohol and/or drugs during pregnancy.

Based, on MOJ registration numbers, I venture to guess that there were approximately 1000 additional dossiers registered between January and December 2012, a certain percentage of which will already have received referrals.  Nonetheless, if you are about to submit a dossier to MOJ, you can expect to have around 1500 dossiers ahead of you in terms of their chronological registration dates.

Again, I hope this information is helpful for families preparing or updating home studies/dossiers and setting age, gender and health parameters for the child(ren) they wish to adopt.  I think it's safe to say that the wait for healthy Bulgarian toddlers is now at least three years from dossier registration.