Disabled Children Confined and Abused in Romania

Human Rights Report Prompts Reaction

"Their terror that they live with is that they'll be in one of those adult facilities for the rest of their life," Rosenthal said.

According to UNICEF estimates, 68,805 disabled children are registered in Romania, but that figure does not include psychiatric patients. Moreover, many babies never receive birth certificates, so they are not counted.

Quiet Crisis

Despite a tough new law mandating that all abandoned infants immediately be transferred into foster homes, Nanette Gonzalez, founder and CEO of Romania Outreach to Christ's Kids (ROCK), said the government quietly warehouses children at hospitals across the country.

"They don't call it institutionalization, because they think it's a hospital, not an orphanage," said Gonzalez, who has worked in Romania for 12 years. "This is where they get around that whole law. Sure, these kids are in a hospital, they're being treated, but it's still an institution."

There were 18 children in her ward and she said the number of abandoned kids continues to drop every year. But the problem is still an epidemic -- these children are considered severely disabled even though one child was simply a hemophiliac and another was blind.

"They say there are about 53,000 abandoned children in Romania," Gonzalez said. "Nine-thousand children a year are being abandoned."

The Romanian government said the number is half as much.

Gonzalez brought ABC News to see children who were scattered over three separate areas in a hospital complex in Bucharest. We met a 4-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who weighed about 12 pounds.

"The doctor told us that he thinks she's going to die soon because she's very thin. You can see her bones," McGowan said.

"They feed them mush," Gonzalez said. "Like they'll puree carrots or potatoes."

Blank Check Won't Help

Even after being shown some of the horrible images uncovered by ABC News, Ioana Nedelcu, subsecretary of the National Authority for the Protection of Children's Rights, said, "Those children were protected within a medical service system. … Even though most of them were abandoned by their parents."

For the legions of other children lost in the system, the only hope of escape lies in a foster care system that is slowly groaning its way toward transformation. Romania continues to spend more than 70 percent of the money for child protection on infrastructure, 18 percent on foster care and 1 percent on training staff.

Neurosurgeon Sebastian Koga is helping to conduct a study on the effects of institutionalization on children called the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (www.idc.ro). He and his colleagues followed some institutionalized children for five years. The study shows that young children lose one month of growth for every three months they live in an institution, which is why most of the Braila children between the ages of 9 to 12 look more like 3- to 5-year-olds. Their intellectual development is seriously impeded as well -- many of them end up with IQ levels close to mental retardation.

"The Bucharest Early Intervention Project has over time collected a huge amount of data that speaks unequivocally in favor of family care," Koga said. "Our study shows that it isn't just behavioral things that can be later modified in life, but that these early experiences change the structure of the brain in a way that can become irreversible with the passage of time."

Rosenthal said that sympathetic Westerners who want to help the situation shouldn't "write a blank check."

"The European Union has a generous amount of money to provide technical assistance," he said. "Don't give them a blank check. Insist that that funding is linked to helping those kids. And not just nice, new, clean facilities, that won't do -- families."

The Romanian Government disputed some of MDRI's findings but said it's creating a special committee to investigate the institutions that shelter children with disabilities. There will be more on this story tonight on "Nightline."

For the full report on Braila, visit the Web site of Mental Disability Rights International, which made this report possible.

This story was originally reported by Diane Sawyer.