Reece Roberts came out the door to greet me as I approached his family’s town house. Clad in a blue-and-green football jersey, he cautiously extended one little hand in greeting.
The Gaithersburg 7-year-old will never know he’s become a symbol against the worldwide abandonment of Down syndrome babies.
On April 26, 2002, his mother, Andrea Roberts, had no idea that her newborn son would have that extra 21st chromosome.
“It was definitely a shock,” she remembers. “It was a God thing, but we were not feeling that way. Our lives were being turned upside down.”
Because someone had to provide full-time care for her little boy, her career in sales management was over. As the weeks lengthened into months, she fell in love with the happy and content child. As she researched the syndrome on the Internet, she ran across one chilling fact: Had Reece been born overseas, he’d likely be dead.
Millions of children with handicaps ranging from fetal alcohol syndrome, dwarfism, cerebral palsy, spina bifida and Down syndrome are warehoused in orphanages where 80 percent, she learned, die from lack of decent food, medicine and human love.
I adopted a little girl two years ago from such an orphanage in Kazakhstan. Every so often, I got a glimpse into the room where mentally handicapped children lay in their cribs most of the day. What haunted me was a cheery, intelligent little girl with spina bifida named Yulia who was forced to live in that ward.
“They’re 60 years behind,” Andrea told me. “Those kids are living like they were in Nazi concentration camps.”
An aid group put her in contact with orphanages in Ukraine. Searches on various list servers, blogs and forums gave her names of people desiring to adopt special-needs orphans. In 2006, she formed Reece’s Rainbow, a nonprofit group connecting these children with potential adoptive families.
Three years later, 200 children in orphanages in 26 countries have been adopted. Her Web site (ReecesRainbow.org) has gotten 300,000 hits.
It’s not easy finding families for little people whom no one wants. Canada restricts families to adopting only one such child; Britain “basically denies it,” she told me, because of socialist health care policies that discourage families from taking on such children. She fears the health care reforms being pushed by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats will eventually do the same.
Reece’s Rainbow scrapes by on $30,000 a year while she tries to raise at least three times that toward helping adoptive parents pay overseas fees and travel expenses.
Many are evangelical Protestants who have a Christian calling to help the less fortunate. Their willingness to take on this difficult task brings Andrea, a Methodist, to tears. Were it not for Reece, “I don’t know if I’d be one of those people,” she says.
She’s formed a “prayer warrior” component for intercessors who will “pray a child home.” Others can click on her site’s “sponsorship” tab to contribute funds toward a specific child.
She and her husband, Rich, were previously lukewarm about their Christian faith, “but Reece brought us back,” she said. “You have to have a living faith to fall back on. And now there are 200 kids who are glad Reece was born.”
• Julia Duin’s Stairway to Heaven column runs Thursdays and Sundays. Contact her at jduin@washingtontimes.com.
• Julia Duin can be reached at jduin@washingtontimes.com.
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