As word spread last week that a house of the Russian parliament had voted to prohibit adoptions of Russian children by American parents, Russian adoptees in the U.S. made appeals to President Vladimir Putin, asking Russia not to hold needy children hostage to international politics.
With the proposed ban apparently rolling through Russia’s legislature, a loose network of hundreds of adoptees and their American parents started writing letters to the Russian leader, and they are planning a joint appeal to the country’s ambassador in Washington after Christmas.
One leader of the effort is Tatyana McFadden, who was adopted at age 6 with spina bifida, paralyzed from the waist down, by Deborah McFadden of Clarksville, Md.
“I probably wouldn’t have survived in that orphanage,” said McFadden, who is now 23 and a multiple medal winner at the London Paralympics, among other top racing honors. “Closing down adoptions would ruin thousands of lives.”
The bill to end U.S. adoptions has passed one house of the parliament and could pass the other this week. Putin has refused to say whether he will sign or seek to alter it. It arose in response to a new U.S. law imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of violating human rights, a law Putin has called an arrogant insult.
As the adoptees, many of them young adults or teenagers now, make their own appeals to Russia, several U.S. groups involved with adoptions and child welfare have asked their members to write legislators and President Barack Obama to call for strong diplomatic measures.
“Right now, the main thing is to ask Mr. Putin not to sign it,” said Randi Thompson, the executive director of Kidsave, a child-advocacy group based in Los Angeles and one of the organizations urging clients to contact Washington. While her group works in Russia to promote domestic adoptions, Thompson said, international adoptions remain the only alternative for thousands of children, many of them older or with disabilities that make them hard to place.
In Moscow on Friday, in the strongest public statement on the issue yet from the U.S., Ambassador Michael A. McFaul sharply criticized the bill, saying in a statement and in Twitter messages, “The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to other issues in our bilateral relationship.”
It is not clear whether the ban, if signed into law, would affect adoptions already in progress, but the threat has put adoption agencies and hopeful parents on edge, leading many to look to other countries. Even without the proposed ban, sending children to the U.S. had become more contentious within Russia in recent years, and some regions have slowed or virtually halted suchadoptions.
About 45,000 Russian children have been adopted by Americans since 1999, according to State Department records, but after reaching a peak of 5,862 in 2004, the numbers have declined steeply, to 962 in 2011. Experts say the decline has resulted in part from a welcome push for domestic adoptions and foster care in Russia. But it also reflects increasingly stringent screening, paperwork and expenses for prospective foreign parents and a nationalistic reaction that has led some local officials to hamper U.S.
adoptions.
That reaction and increased screening that some adoptive parents call unnecessarily repetitive and costly were stoked by wide news coverage in Russia of episodes in which adopted Russian children in the U.S. were abused and died - tragedies, all agree, but rare events that led to criminal punishments.
While adoption agencies applaud Russia’s efforts to nurture domestic adoption, which is not a strong tradition, they note that tens of thousands of children still languish in orphanages and that parents from other countries are unlikely to meet the need.
“If the ban is adopted, some number of children will end up living in orphanages untilthey are old enough to hit the streets,” said Adam Pertman, the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research group in New York.
Erin and Keith Thompson of Huntsville, Texas, have visited Russian orphanages annually as part of a Christian mission. After having a son, they adopted Sasha, now 14,at age 12, and Losha, now 17, when he was 16.
“We have seen the hopelessness in those orphanages,” Thompson said. When they met Sasha, she recalled, an orphanage official told them that every year at Christmas, the boy would ask Santa Claus for a family.
“There are so many children just waiting,” she said.
Front Section, Pages 14 on 12/23/2012