Prospective Parents Flock to Russia to Adopt, but Some Balk at Westerners ‘Buying’ Children

MOSCOW – It’s been just more than a year since Peter and Cynthia Coughlin of Long Island joined the thousands of Americans who adopt Russian orphans every year. In October 2003 – less than a year after first applying to adopt a Russian child – they flew back to New York with a 6-month-old baby girl they named Kaylee.“We’re ecstatic,” Mr. Coughlin said. “She’s fabulous, she’s healthy. Everybody that we meet says she’s the most beautiful girl.”With hundreds of thousands of abandoned children filling orphanages and adoptions taking a fraction of the time here that they do in America, childless couples like the Coughlins are increasingly looking to Russia for adoptions.“There are so many families out there who want to adopt and so many children who need our help,” Mr. Coughlin said.But as foreign adoptions surge to record levels, there’s a growing backlash against Westerners adopting Russian children. Nationalist politicians allege that the foreign adoption system is riddled with corruption, and that Western families are bribing officials to “buy” Russian children. Rumors circulate of Western families abusing Russian children and even of orphans being sold to the West so their organs can be harvested. The recent high-profile adoption of a 3-year old Russian orphan by the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder – – and Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie’s rumored adoption of a child this fall – have also brought the issue to the fore.Lawmakers are now urging the government to take steps and are set to approve a bill tightening controls on foreign adoptions by the end of this year.“It’s a dirty country that sells its children,” a Communist Party deputy, Nikolai Kondratenko, said in a recent debate on the new legislation.The rampant poverty that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union has sent the number of Russian children in state care soaring to levels not seen since the end of World War II.According to official figures, more than 700,000 Russian children are wards of the state, many of them crammed into poorly funded and understaffed institutions.In 1998, Human Rights Watch visited nearly 20 Russian orphanages and reported that children “are exposed to shocking levels of cruelty and neglect.” The report alleged that thousands of children are misdiagnosed as “mentally deficient” every year and sent to boarding institutions where “they receive little to no education…may be restrained in cloth sacks, tethered by a limb to furniture, denied stimulation, and sometimes left to lie half-naked in their own filth.”The Ministry of Education, which cares for orphans in Russia, denies that maltreatment is widespread and a number of experts here, including doctors and adoption agents who regularly visit orphanages, said the HRW report exaggerated conditions. They said that while it is true that institutions are frequently lacking in basic needs, abuse is rare, and orphanages try to care for the children as best they can.With most Russians struggling to survive financially and a strong social stigma still attached to adoption, few Russian families are willing to adopt. That has left a massive pool of potential adoptees waiting for parents, and foreign families have rushed in to fill the gap.Foreigners adopted more than 7,000 Russian children in 2003 and the number is growing every year. For the first time last year, the number of foreign adoptions exceeded the number of local ones. The bulk of the children are going to America. American families have adopted 5,849 Russian orphans so far this year, 640 more than last year, according to the American embassy in Moscow. Overall, Americans are adopting more than 20,000 children from other countries every year, according to the State Department. Most come from China, followed by Russia, Guatemala, Korea, and Ukraine.Experts say that with agency fees, processing charges, and travel expenses, the average American family spends about $20,000 adopting a Russian child.Russia has taken repeated steps to tighten controls on foreign adoptions. In the mid-1990s,it decreed that foreign families can only adopt children who have been up for adoption for at least three months and have not been selected by a Russian family. If a Russian family expresses interest in a child at any point before the adoption is finalized, it will be given preference.In 2000, in the wake of scandals over criminal baby-trading rings in provincial cities – including the arrest of a woman in Volgograd who allegedly bribed officials and forged documents to facilitate the adoptions of about 600 children by Italian families – President Putin signed a decree requiring adoption agencies to be registered with the government and introducing harsh penalties for illegal middlemen.Russian lawmakers are now worrying about what happens to adopted children once they’ve gone abroad.The parliamentarian overseeing the legislative changes, Irina Kuznetsova, said the problem is that Russian authorities “have no way of keeping a close watch on or to control the fate of Russian children abroad.”“There have been grave violations of the rights of Russian children abroad,” she says. “In the past several years six Russian children have died in foreign families, four of them in the last year. We need to have more control abroad.”The bill proposes that international treaties be negotiated giving Russia some jurisdiction over children adopted by foreign families – allowing the Russian government to monitor a child’s development and intervene in cases of abuse.Many of those involved in foreign adoptions fear the proposal is a smokescreen. The Russian representative of Christian World Adoption, Maria Gnevasheva, said that while the proposal may sound reasonable, it would effectively ban foreign adoptions because Western countries would never give Russia jurisdiction over adopted children.“If they manage to push this law through Parliament, it will mean an end to foreign adoptions,” said Ms. Gnevasheva, whose agency handles about 100 American adoptions a year.Ms. Gnevasheva said the backlash against foreign adoptions is founded in the deep embarrassment many Russians feel that the country is exporting its children.“It’s insulting for the Russian people to think that they can’t take care of their own children,” she said.Critics argue that lawmakers are targeting foreign adoptions because they aren’t willing to deal with more fundamental problems.“This new legislation is a distraction from the scandal they have in this country of not taking care of their own kids,” said a Canadian doctor who has spent the last five years examining orphans up for foreign adoption, Eric Downing. “The real problems are that they are not funding orphanages properly, single mothers have no support, there’s no proper fostering system in place. …It’s so much easier to say ‘look at the foreigners buying our children’ than to address the real issues.”

Prospective Parents Flock to Russia to Adopt, but Some Balk at Westerners ‘Buying’ Children

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