By Linda Taaffe

A giant brown teddy bear oversees a group of stuffed animals tidily arranged on a blue and pink blanket in an empty crib in the Ficks’ Los Altos home. Abbie and her husband, Stephen, were just days away from getting the adoption paperwork needed to bring a baby girl home from China this month, after an almost two-year wait, when they received news that the Chinese government had halted overseas adoptions to prevent the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Since March, the contagious illness has killed 682 people worldwide, mostly in China where it was first detected, according to the World Health Organization’s update May 22.

The adoption would have required the Ficks to travel to the American Embassy in Guangzhou, the location of the first case of SARS.

The couple, who have lived in Los Altos since 1994, say they don’t know how long the nursery will remain empty.

“I’ve heard the words ’soon,’ ‘indefinitely’ and ‘maybe a year.’ I’m not good at waiting. I need to know what’s happening,” Abbie said. “This is really a form of torture for me. I understand that the government is doing the right thing for the right reason, but it breaks my heart.”

The state-operated China Center of Adoption Affairs is still processing adoption applications but has stopped sending out the documents authorizing new parents to come to China to pick up their children, officials announced May 15.

“In view of the epidemic situation … the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) would like to … avoid cross infection that might be caused by a flow of people, and to guarantee the health and safety of life for the parties of adoptive relations and the other related parties,” according to a press release from the adoption center.

Two weeks before the announcement, the Ficks had received a phone call from the China-adoption facilitator at the Mountain View-based Bay Area Adoption Services confirming that the couple had been matched with a baby girl.

Within a few days the Chinese adoption center would send a referral letter with the name, age and photo of their daughter and the paperwork needed to enter the country.

The center in Beijing shut down the following day for a weeklong national holiday.

In the meantime, the Ficks waited for the letter carrying the first glimpse of their baby. The paperwork never arrived, Abbie said.

When the center reopened May 6, no one there had information on the status of the paperwork, the facilitator said.

“I don’t know if a match was ever made,” the facilitator said. “They were in the process when the (center) shut down.”

The delay cost the Ficks the opportunity to finish their nearly 21-month journey to adopt a baby.

If the holiday had not postponed the mailing of the paperwork, the recent ban would not have impacted the adoption and the Ficks would have been in China next month picking up their daughter. Abbie said she had already looked into flight arrangements.

She said she had agonized over whether the United States’ war with Iraq or other international politics would impede the adoption process, not the threat of disease.

Even after the Ficks learned of the SARS outbreak in China, they didn’t realize how bad the situation was, and they certainly never imagined that it would impact them personally, Abbie said.

“This (disease) is so much bigger than any one person. People are dying, I remind myself every day,” she said.

The Ficks aren’t the only ones who have had to put their plans on hold.

“(SARS) certainly has impacted our families,” said Andrea Stawitcke, executive director of the Bay Area Adoption Services, which has placed about 450 Chinese children with local families during the past 12 years. “It won’t impact those beginning the process … It’s impacting those at the end and waiting for assignments. They’re the ones caught in this.”

The last group of seven families able to complete the adoption process through the agency, including one from Los Altos, returned home from China last week, Stawitcke said. The next group, which the Ficks would have been a part of, was scheduled to go out in June. For these families, the waiting game continues.

The adoption process typically takes 19 to 20 months and can cost as much as $23,000 for agencies in both countries to perform background checks, medical evaluations, home visits and a series of interviews.

Stephen said the agency probably knows more about his wife and two sons than he does. Agency workers ask about everything from the adoptive parents’ favorite sports in elementary school to their favorite foods.

In China, the government must advertise abandoned children in the newspaper for three months in an effort to locate

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their families, before the adoption process may begin. Chinese law prohibits families from having more than one child each. As a result, most of the children available for international adoption have been abandoned.

The Ficks’ story began just after the terrorist attacks in New York City Sept. 11, 2001. Abbie, a probation officer with Santa Clara County, and Stephen, senior vice president at Borel Private Bank & Trust in Palo Alto, wanted a third child. They already had two boys — Bo, 3, and Oscar, 6. The events of September 2001 influenced them to consider adoption.

“After the attack, everyone seemed so scared of other cultures. We thought, ‘We need to teach our children diversity, how to get along with others,’” said Abbie, who had studied female infanticide during her graduate studies. “We thought if it worked out, it would be good for her and good for us. That’s how we came to our decision.”

Neither Stawitcke nor the agency’s facilitator could predict how long the government hold would remain in place.

“They are doing this to be on the safe side. How long they will do this, I don’t know,” Stawitcke said. “China is very predictable (with its adoption process). They have made it clear that this is just temporary.”

The facilitator said she did not believe that the waiting families would have to redo any of the paperwork.

“I didn’t know how strongly I would feel about her until she was taken away,” Abbie said. “I know I would go get her as quickly as I would go get one of my sons, and I’ve never even seen her. There’s an incredible bond. I know this will have a happy ending … I just don’t know when.”