Adoption Flap Not Expected to Last Long

by Alexander Bratersky

Source: The Moscow Times

April 14, 2010

A U.S. government delegation will arrive in Moscow next week to discuss rules for American parents who want to adopt Russian children, setting the stage for a resolution of a years-long irritant in U.S.-Russian relations.

Adoptions, a hot-button issue after several Russian children died at the hands of their U.S. parents in recent years, jumped to the forefront last Thursday when a single Tennessee mother sent her 7-year-old Russian son to Moscow with a note saying she no longer wanted him.

President Dmitry Medvedev denounced the action as a “monstrous deed” by a “bad family.” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was “the last straw” in a series of bad adoptions and threatened to suspend all adoptions to American families.

But shock and sympathy has also poured in from U.S. government officials, the U.S. parents of adopted Russian children and other Americans.

Although the mother’s actions were dismaying, the incident will not escalate into an international scandal and, to the contrary, promises to ultimately improve relations by convincing the U.S. government to finally discuss a long-running Russian demand for an international agreement on adoptions, analysts said.

“I don’t see any [Kremlin] desire to turn this into a political issue,” said Fyodor Lyukanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

Final arrangements are now being worked out for a visit next week by a State Department team led by Michael Kirby, a deputy assistant secretary who handles adoption issues, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Monday.

“In fact, this trip was being put together even before last week’s incident,” Crowley told reporters in Washington, according to an e-mailed transcript. “But clearly, this latest situation will be among those things discussed.”

He did not give precise dates for the visit.

U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle said the team would discuss “an agreement on bilateral understanding” to ensure the welfare of adopted Russian children.

“Many thousands of Russian children have been adopted by American families, and we hope that children here who are unable to find a family in Russia to adopt them can continue to have this chance,” Beyrle said in a statement.

U.S. families adopted about 1,600 Russian children last year, according to the National Council For Adoption, a U.S. nongovernmental organization.

Another senior U.S. official, Melanne Verveer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, will visit Moscow, St. Petersburg and Barnaul soon, and she might also discuss adoptions, the State Department said.

Lavrov said Friday that an accord to ensure the well-being of adopted children must be reached before further adoptions are approved, and he noted that Washington had balked at signing such an agreement in the past.

Medvedev has appeared to support a halt in adoptions, telling U.S. television network ABC News on Friday: “We should understand what happens to our children, or we will have to cease the practice of adoption of our children by American parents.”

At least 15 Russian children have been killed by their U.S. parents since the mid-1990s, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office. More than 60,000 Russian children were adopted by Americans over the same period, according to the National Council For Adoption. Among the more prominent parents is former U.S. astronaut Thomas Stafford, who adopted two Russian teenage boys in 2004.

But children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said up to 15 children adopted by Russian parents die every year. “If we compare the statistics for dead children in Russia with America, it is not in our favor,” he told reporters Monday.

About 1,220 children adopted by Russian parents died between 1993 and 2008, according to data compiled by the children ombudsmen’s office.

Astakhov recommended on Tuesday that the Justice Ministry take over adoption issues from the Education and Science Ministry and said Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko supported the idea.

Despite the tough Russian talk about suspending adoptions, no concrete actions have been taken — a sign, analysts said, that Russia will let the incident blow over if the United States agrees to the adoption agreement.

But Elisabeth Bartholet, a professor of law at Harvard University and an expert on international adoptions, cautioned that better enforcement of existing adoption procedures would be better than negotiating the agreement.

“Adding new restrictive requirements to the adoption process typically simply means that children will be kept in institutions for longer,” she told The Moscow Times. “This makes them much harder to parent and will increase the chances that the adoption will not work out.”

Artyom Savelyev’s adopted grandmother took the boy to Washington last week and sent him unaccompanied on a United Airlines flight to Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, wh ere a tour guide hired for $200 by the grandmother picked him up and deposited him at the Education and Science Ministry. The boy was carrying a note from his mother, Torry Hansen, that accused Russian orphanage workers of lying about the boy during the adoption process.

“He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues. … After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child,” the letter said.

The deputy director of the orphanage in the Primorye region town of Partizansk denied misleading Hansen and expressed surprise that the adoption had not worked out. Nadezhda Guseva said Hansen had visited the boy three times before the adoption was finalized last September and had “made a positive impression” with the staff. “She behaved like a woman who expects to take a child,” she said.

The orphanage is home to 82 children, and six of its former wards now live in the United States.

Guseva said the orphanage has kept in touch with the U.S. parents of most of the children. “We have a very friendly relationship with them,” she said.

Education and Science Ministry officials, meanwhile, are trying to establish contact with Hansen, who they say remains the legal parent of the boy because she has not renounced her rights in court. A ministry spokesman said the note from Hansen carried by the boy was not a legal document.

U.S. authorities are also trying to speak with the mother.

The boy is currently undergoing checks at a Moscow hospital. What will happen to him next is unclear.

The family of a Russian diplomat has expressed interest in adopting the boy, said Astakhov, who met with the boy on Friday in a meeting featured prominently on state television.

Guseva said his old orphanage was also ready to take him back. “He has many friends here, and many still remember him,” she said.

The boy will celebrate his 8th birthday on Friday.

Pray for Russia’s Orphans

by Russell D. Moore

Source: Moore to the Point, the blog of Russell D. Moore*

April 12, 2010

I nervously switched off the television early Sunday morning as I heard my children bounding toward the door. I didn’t want them to hear the news. I didn’t want to hear it myself. Every time I see what is going on in Russia, with the government calling for an immediate halt on American adoptions, I think about the orphanage where I first met my two oldest sons.

And I want to cry.

The news reports are appalling, to be sure. A grandmother in Tennessee reportedly placed a child adopted from a Russian orphanage on a plane bound for the former Soviet Union, sending him back because the family allegedly said they couldn’t deal with his disturbed emotional state and alleged potential for violence. The Russian government and the Russian people are outraged, and want to see to it this will never happen again.

There are several things Christians ought to keep in mind and, more importantly, in prayer here.

First of all, we should pray for this child, and for his family. We, of course, don’t know much about this situation beyond what we see in the news, but that’s enough to know this is a catastrophe. It is horrific any time a child is orphaned. It is even more horrific when a child is twice-orphaned.

There is no defense, and no excuse, for the actions this family took. If there were emotional or behavioral problems, there are legitimate mechanisms in place to work through those things with the assistance of counselors or social workers, even through the agency by which the family was formed in the first place.

We should also pray, and pray fervently, that God would change the hearts of the Russian government officials, that they would not allow this tragedy to further harm the already endangered orphans of Russia.

Sadly, this American family’s actions may well have catastrophic implications. This case, along with one or two others, has given impetus to a nativist Russian nationalism already uncomfortable with international adoption.

At one level, I can understand this. Imagine if the United States collapsed into a hodgepodge of independent and impoverished states and American children were being adopted by citizens of a Cold War triumphant USSR. Add to that, a high profile case of this kind of neglect, and this impulse can be whipped into a frenzy.

The stakes are high. Families who were poised to be formed through adoption are now suddenly on hold, in a “diplomatic limbo” of waiting. “An estimated 3,500 Russian children are in some stage of the adoption process with 3,000 American families,” reports the New York Times, citing the Joint Council on International Children’s Services.

The very fact that this horrible situation is getting such coverage all over the world right now is precisely because it is such an anomaly. There have been more than 50,000 U.S. adoptions from Russia since 1991, with adopting parents carefully screened and the Russian government receiving reports back from the post-adoption home studies. The stories of abuse are rare, much rarer than domestic abuse rates in virtually any country.

It would be quite different if there were a vibrant adoption culture in the former USSR. This is not the case. Adoption is extremely rare in Russian culture. The very few families who adopt, and children who are adopted, are often stigmatized.

The leftover effects of Communist materialism matched with the instability of the new economy have resulted in a skyrocketing abortion rate along with orphanages filled with abandoned infants and
children. The children who are not adopted languish in these orphanages until they are old enough to be thrown out, defenseless, into society, where they often find few options beyond the Russian military, prostitution, or suicide.

The Russian orphanage where my wife and I found our sons, then Maxim and Sergei, was the most heartbreaking place I have ever been. Its sights and smells and sounds come back to me every day.

But, even more so, before my mind’s eye every day are the faces of the children we couldn’t adopt. The little girl who peered around the door frame every day as we visited our then-future sons in their room. What happened to her? What will happen to those like her, and like my sons, who are waiting now for homes and families, someone to love them and feed them and hug them?

Until now, my hope has been that Christians from America, Canada, Germany, France, or somewhere may have adopted them, to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. If the anti-adoption Russians get their way, I fear that these children will be sentenced to institutions, never to find families.

There are other Maxims and Sergeis, sitting day and night in cribs somewhere in Russia. Let’s pray that the Russian people make the right decisions for them. And let’s pray for the providence of the One who promises to be a Father to the fatherless. This situation isn’t just a human interest tragedy. And it’s not just a foreign policy issue.

Russia’s orphans aren’t foreigners to those of us who’ve been adopted into the family of Christ. They’re Jesus’ little brothers and sisters (Matt 25:40). He won’t forget them.

And neither can we.

My television’s going to stay off for awhile. I don’t want my boys to overhear this horrible scenario and wonder if, God forbid, they might ever be put back on a plane to Russia. I don’t want them to know, yet, that they live in a world so dark that such things can happen. Maybe you could turn your television off too, just for a little while, and pray for the orphans of Russia.

*Dr. Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as a preaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church, where he ministers weekly at the congregation’s Fegenbush location. Moore is the author of The Kingdom of Christ and Adopted for Life.

Adoption fearmongers take over:

As the mom of an international adoptee, I’m saddened by the Russian adoption story — and outraged by the coverage

by Martha Nichols

Source: Salon

April 12, 2010

When I first saw the pictures of 7-year-old Artyom Savelyev — who is close to my son’s age — in Moscow, after his adoptive grandmother put him on a flight from Washington, D.C., by himself, I wondered what the hell is wrong with us.

Who is “us”? That’s the question. American adoptive parents? Not most of us, by any stretch. The American adoption agency involved, which has now had its license suspended by the Russian education ministry? Again, that’s painting with a broad brush. The Russian orphanage in which by some reports the boy was mistreated? Who knows?

I wanted to blame somebody, though, as did the many commenters on news stories and blogs about Artyom’s fate this past weekend. Adoptive mother Torry Hansen and grandmother Nancy were right at hand, courtesy of the AP. Here are a few comments about the story from Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog:

“This is totally unconscionable and irresponsible.”

“This woman’s (I cannot say ‘mother’s,’ for she doesn’t deserve such a title) behaviour is despicable.”

“This article made me cry. It takes the patience and endurance of Mother Theresa to deal with special needs children. Where did this woman not understand the commitment to a young, troubled child that she adopted into her family?”

If you haven’t heard the story yet, last week, Nancy Hansen decided to fly Artyom (called Justin by his adoptive family) back to Russia because his violent behavior had become too much for them. According to one of the AP stories, his grandmother “chronicled a list of problems: hitting, screaming and spitting at his mother and threatening to kill family members.”

Back in Russia, he was accompanied by a note from adoptive mother Torry Hansen, who is a registered nurse: “This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues … I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues … After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”

As of Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was threatening to suspend all U.S. adoptions, calling this “the last straw.”

Grandmother Nancy says she had no idea she was setting off an international incident. She did tell an AP reporter, “The intent of my daughter was to have a family and the intent of my whole family was to love that child.”

I hate stories like this, in which a child becomes abandoned over and over again, unwanted by anyone. I hate what this does to me as an adoptive parent of a son born in Vietnam, of the doubts I start to feel about whether I had any right to everything that my family means.

I’m also waiting for more facts. The problem, as usual, is that a media storm has managed to make the situation even murkier, spreading an array of misinformation about international adoption, attachment disorders, and what constitutes “normal.”

Shocking headlines like “Boy from Russia said ‘he’d torch our home‘” and “Grandmother: Boy terrified adoptive kin” keep the focus on extreme behavior. Here’s the blurb that introduces the AP report in the Seattle Times: “Torry Hansen was so eager to become a mother that she adopted an older child from a foreign country, two factors that scare off many prospective parents. Her fear came later.”

A distorted look at “the inside story of adoptions that go horribly wrong” aired on ABC’s “Nightline” Friday, including videos taken by parents of children having “meltdowns.” (Click here for the accompanying article.)

This prompted developmental psychologist Jean Mercer to debunk some myths in a Psychology Today blog. She rightly castigates “Nightline” for running home videos without questioning the parents’ interpretations. In one case, shortly after a pair of Russian sisters had been adopted, the older sister wanders around her American home in tears, clutching a blanket, and crawling under furniture. As Mercer notes,

“[T]he parents seem to have regarded it as such bizarre and unacceptable behavior that it needed to be recorded because no outsider would believe it.

“But what do we actually see in this video of a child who has been in the adoptive home for about a week? Let me just inquire how similar it might be to your own behavior, if you had been taken by very large people who spoke a different language, put on an airplane with little comprehensible explanation, and taken far away to a new house, new food, new ways of doing things? Would you be grateful?”

Meanwhile, it’s important to keep the numbers in perspective. According to the U.S. State Department, there have been about 15,000 U.S.-Russia adoptions in the past five years. I’ve heard that in the last 15 years, it’s about 50,000. As many adoption experts have noted, most of these don’t go “horribly wrong.”

Whether Artyom is really psychopathic and violent is unclear. Even if it were true, shoving him onto an airplane is at the very least an act of ignorant desperation. Giving him an American name when he was already 6 years old indicates a lack of awareness and empathy. The Hansens — not to mention those parents supplying videos of their children for “Nightline” — appear to have little understanding of what it means to suddenly land in another culture.

Yet something much larger is at play than the actions of two unfit adoptive family members. Based on the official outrage of Russia — following the travesty of American missionaries trying to hustle Haitian “orphans” out of that country after the recent earthquake — the practice of international adoption is once again under fire.

There are lots of ethical reasons why it should be. In Haiti, a number of the children involved still had biological parents. In many other developing countries, from Vietnam to Ethiopia, there’s always been the risk of money paid for babies to finance a less than savory adoption industry.

Yet there’s the flip side, too, and you see it in Russia and Haiti: social welfare systems that simply are ill-equipped and far too under-funded to support the rolls of abandoned children. What you see is poverty and its brutal impact on society’s most vulnerable — children who receive little or no adult care.

Let me say it again: You see poverty, on a global scale, ramped up by the churn of developing economies. The Harvard University Project on Global Working Families, research that surveyed 55,000 people in a variety of countries and is detailed in Jody Heymann’s book “Forgotten Families,” makes clear that many children have no one to take care of them. Here’s a quote from my own 2007 review of Heymann’s book in “Women’s Review of Books“:

“Of the working parents interviewed, nineteen percent in Vietnam left their children alone or in the care of an unpaid child; 27 percent did so in Mexico; and a whopping 48 percent did in Botswana, which has almost no publicly funded child care.”

Even the reference in a USA Today story about Artyom — “United Airlines allows unaccompanied children as young as five years old on direct flights. Children age eight and above can catch connecting flights, as well” — chills me.

So maybe we should blame global capitalism and every one of us (that “us”) who participates. Maybe it’s not just the Hansens of Shelbyville, Tenn. Maybe we should blame general ignorance about international adoption — for example, the various media commentators ranting about the numbers on the rise when in fact they’ve been in steep decline since 2004.

Our son was a baby when we adopted him from Vietnam, from an orphanage in which he seemed very well-treated by affectionate staff. He is now a happy and healthy little boy. I say this not to vaunt my own skills as a parent but to add that even my son, who remembers nothing of the orphanage — an orphanage that was far from a horror show — has occasional meltdowns. When he was just a little younger than Artyom, he would cry uncontrollably when I left him at school. My son still sucks his thumb, though he’s working on it.

Loss experienced by young children can be profound and impossible to process rationally. The fact that my mother was hospitalized when I was 6 still sits in my soul. Sometimes I believe my own loss has helped me to understand my son’s; other times, I think that all humans walk alone.

In my adoptive family, some days we walk in the light. We are together, we are whole. But have we really become a world in which so many children have no safe homes?

Apparently so. At this moment, all I can do is hug my boy close.