Great article and photo essay in the New Republic about American families who adopted Russian orphans. Many of those kids have FAS. Too bad that Putin is an asshole, and those kids can’t find good homes in the US any more.
Russian Orphans in the US
17 thoughts on “Russian Orphans in the US”
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Apt. 11d 
My sister adopted a Russian baby, and it has been a very successful experience. A lot more successful than American foreign policy over the past five years, which seems to have alienated pretty much every other country in the world.
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It’s also too bad that the US adoption process had been letting yahoos adopt Russian orphans.
“Jessica Beagley, the woman dubbed the “hot sauce mom” after she poured hot sauce into the mouth of her adopted Russian son for lying about getting in trouble in school, has been convicted of misdemeanor child abuse in what prosecutors said was a ploy to get on the “Dr. Phil” TV show.
“The 36-year-old mother made a videotape of how she punished the boy and submitted it to the show. The tape shows Beagley yelling at the crying boy. She then tipped his chin up and poured hot sauce in his mouth.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20096514-504083.html
“In 2010, Torry Ann Hansen put Artyom Saveliev, the seven year-old boy she adopted from Russia, on an 11-hour flight and shipped him back to his homeland. “I no longer wish to parent this child,” read the note Hansen had tucked into the boy’s backpack along with cookies and some crayons when she put him on a plane bound for Moscow.”
“When Hansen returned the boy like he was a handbag she no longer wanted, he was brought to the Russian Education and Science Ministry by a man reportedly paid $200 (and who she found on the Internet) to meet his flight.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dianeclehane/2012/05/31/u-s-mother-who-returned-her-adopted-son-to-russia-ordered-to-pay-child-support/
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45,000 Russian kids have been adopted by American families in the past 15 years. There are a handful of cases of adopted parents mistreating their kids (and a few cases where the kids died), but is that rate worse than parents overall?
The problem is that the Russian media hypes every negative case about Americans who adopt Russian kids and those stories, (Trust me, I spent a year in Kazakhstan, where the Russian media dominates) if they are sensational enough, tend to get picked up by the international press. It creates the impression that parents who adopt Russian kids are a bunch of “yahoos” when actually the vast majority have nothing to do with the cases you mention.
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I’m pretty sure those two cases are why Americans can’t adopt Russian babies anymore, not foreign policy. I agree banning adoptions is pretty extreme, but clearly we don’t have a good screening process and there was very reasonable concern about Russian children being abused in the US. More so than with domestic adoption, it seems like some parents see foreign adoption as more like acquiring a pet, and then get tired of the child when it turns out to have psychological issues or severe culture shock.
I watched an interesting documentary on adoption from China. Despite what people think, there is also not a surplus of children here, and contrary to propaganda girls are not abandoned in droves. A lot of the babies adopted from China are coerced or even straight up kidnapped from their parents.
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Actually, the American adoption ban was retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, which prohibited certain individuals in the Russian government who had been tied to the murder of journalists and other human rights violations from owning property in the U.S. or having accounts with U.S. banks.
” it seems like some parents see foreign adoption as more like acquiring a pet, and then get tired of the child when it turns out to have psychological issues or severe culture shock. ”
That’s a pretty offensive statement to make. I wonder how much experience you have had with actual adoptive parents, as opposed to the caricatures generated by sensationalist media storms.
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Actually, I know a lot of adoptive parents of internationally adopted children. The vast majority are great parents, a small percentage are horrible assholes who never should have been allowed to adopt, and a few are in between. Real life examples of terrible parenting that wouldn’t make the evening news include: 1) claiming you adopted a Chinese child because you assume they’ll be smart, hard working, and good at school, and 2) telling your Chinese daughter to stop complaining or you’ll send her back to the rice paddy. If you want more examples of people assuming adoptive children are accessories, simply search ‘adoption’ in Salon’s lifestyle section, which is filled with navel gazing of the rich and narcissistic.
That said, even among very well meaning parents are parents who cause a lot of unintentional harm. Adopting a child of a different cultural, ethnic, or racial background brings a lot of very difficult issues that even very loving and attentive parents don’t necessarily know how to deal with. I have tons of very religious relatives who adopt internationally, and while on the one hand I think that is very admirable, on the other, most of what they tell their kids about their backgrounds is quite problematic.
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Some friends of ours are an older Caucasian couple with two adopted tween Chinese daughters. I thought it was funny and rather sweet to hear the story of how one of the girls plans to marry a Chinese man, as she wants to have kids who look like her.
Sorry, that was a bit of a non sequitur, but I think it’s a cute story. I liked the fact that she had so much self-confidence and so much sturdy ethnic pride, despite having grown up in areas with few Asians. I suppose it probably helped a lot to have an adopted sister who was also Chinese.
The Deputy Headmistress has done a number of very good posts on adoption over the years:
“It was hard enough as it was, but I also had no friends who really understood what we were going through. I never really spoke about it in detail, because I quickly learned they didn’t want to hear it- it didn’t match their fairy tale. Whatever concerns I expressed were quickly dismissed with a wave of the hand and an unrealistically optimistic explanation or excuse.”
“I’m thrilled we adopted, but I don’t believe adoptions is for everybody, and older adoptions are for even fewer people. It’s not something to go into lightly, and absolutely not every something that should be taken up with a ‘savior’ mentality. That never works.”
http://thecommonroomblog.com/2012/10/adoption-and-culture-shock.html
From her comments:
“I am going to be brutally honest here, because every disrupted adoption I know of came from people who thought they were acting altruistically and were giving children something they didn’t have.”
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I think two things can simultaneously be true:
1. The Russian government is up to no good and abuse cases of Russian adoptees in the US are overhyped, given how many tens of thousands there are.
2. There’s something wrong with the international adoption process on our end.
Likewise, when the Russian government kicked the US Peace Corps out, it was both true that 1) the Russian government was up to no good and 2) the US Peace Corps had been screwing up in a variety of ways.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/12/28/peace.corps/
I think one of the complications is that a lot of countries don’t really get the concept of adoption. They believe that there must be some sort of nefarious purpose going on (sex trafficking or involuntary organ donation) because residents of those countries can’t fathom the idea of bringing an unrelated child (or 2, 3, 4 or 5 of them) into their homes permanently.
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I agree that both can be true. My point is, you haven’t established that there’s “something wrong with the international adoption process on our end” by citing a few bad cases and leaving out the 44,900 good ones. The bottom line is that a certain percentage of people make really bad parenting decisions. But no one points to Andrea Yates and Casey Anthony and claims that proves that biological parents tend to be a bunch of yahoos. Non-representative anecdotes is no way to make an argument that there is something wrong with a process that involves tens of thousands of people.
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“But no one points to Andrea Yates and Casey Anthony and claims that proves that biological parents tend to be a bunch of yahoos.”
Adoptive parents shouldn’t be just as good as bio parents. They should be better, because there’s an actual expensive, time-consuming screening process that they go through for international adoption. Nobdy has an “oops!” international adoption. The question is, what is all that money going to, if not to increase the chance of a safe, loving home?
I don’t know how this works, never having done it, but does the international adoption process ensure that parents have a Plan B, C, D, E and F ready for if it turns out that their adoptive child is a handful? I personally have no doubt that many of the abuse situations involved genuinely difficult children and that being unprepared for a genuinely difficult child may lead parents (adoptive and other) into a spiral of abuse, where the more the child acts up, the more abusive the parent is and the more the child acts up the more abusive the parent is, etc. That is unfortunately very predictable.
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“Adoptive parents shouldn’t be just as good as bio parents. They should be better”
How do you know they are not? Again, anecdotes don’t really mean anything. When the Russians imposed a temporary adoption ban in 2010 (in response to the Tori Hansen case), they cited the number of Russian kids who had been adopted by Americans and then died. (it was something like 14 out of the 45k). It turned out that was a better rate than biological kids in their birth families. Probably its because adoptive parents are screened. They have to be financially secure, with no record of mental illness or any record of any abuse allegations. This stuff is hard to measure, but it might be that it does increase the chance of a safe loving home. I actually think it probably does.
But that stuff doesn’t matter because whenever any single horrible adoptive parent hits the news, that person becomes a stand-in for the entire adoption process. That’s just the way the tabloid-driven news works.
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I’ve felt queasy about international adoption for a while now and I think my main problem is the lack of empowerment of the parents of the child. The stories from China about stolen children were dreadful. The stories from Africa about fundamental misunderstandings of adoption (equivalents of “hanai” adoptions, in which children are fostered, or loaned, or even given to others are present in many societies, but they are not adoption in the american sense, where a child becomes permanently part of another family). The stories from Guatamala were troublesome as well.
From the American end, I’ve feared that we’ve empowered private organizations with monetary motives in too much of the approval process.
My fundamental bias is that I think situations need to be pretty dire for a woman to give up her child, and then not know what happens to them, and thus, think that adoption is a solution to a problem that we should first try to prevent in other ways.
And, the comparison to all the terrible biological parents out there are irrelevant, because the state is not involved in the creation of biological children; we do not have the ability to prevent those parents from becoming parents, only to take the children away when we know they are in danger. In adoption, the state is in the role of having a preventive and not just a treatment role.
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“And, the comparison to all the terrible biological parents out there are irrelevant, because the state is not involved in the creation of biological children; we do not have the ability to prevent those parents from becoming parents, only to take the children away when we know they are in danger. In adoption, the state is in the role of having a preventive and not just a treatment role.”
The point is that no one case see the future and any screening process will be imperfect. No matter what you do there will always be bad people who slip through. But if you shut off adoption, you are condemning some kids to never have a family.
You’re right that some of the kids in foreign orphanages have not had their parental rights extinguished, but that varies a lot from country to country. The Hague Convention is specifically designed to address that. China, Guatamala, and the U.S. have now ratified that agreement. But the fact that there are some kids in orphanages who are not real orphans does not mean that there are no real orphans who need families.
And none of those problems have much to do with Russia. One thing that really annoys me, as someone who has spent time in several orphanages abroad is the broad brush that international adoption critics apply to this issue. Different countries are very different from one another. Bringing up Guatamala in a comment to a post about someone who adopted from Russia really doesn’t make much sense. The Guatamalan civil war that drove child trafficking in the 1980s has nothing to with Russia.
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I’m not sure the ratifying the Hague convention can eliminate child stealing. Simply taking the orphanage or local officials at their word doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since there is so much monetary incentive to adopt. I don’t know much about Guatemala or Russia, but in China there really isn’t an excess of healthy orphans or abandoned children looking to be adopted by Americans. In the past 10-15 years, the underlying causes of child abandonment have almost disappeared, most unwanted children are aborted, and there also is a fairly robust domestic adoption market. Most abandoned children are severely disabled, and not necessarily desired by American adoptive parents.
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PS: I only consider domestic adoption better when it’s open — thus resolving the issue that a mother is giving up her child and doesn’t know what will be happening to the child.
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“I’m not sure the ratifying the Hague convention can eliminate child stealing. Simply taking the orphanage or local officials at their word doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since there is so much monetary incentive to adopt. I don’t know much about Guatemala or Russia, but in China there really isn’t an excess of healthy orphans or abandoned children looking to be adopted by Americans. In the past 10-15 years, the underlying causes of child abandonment have almost disappeared, most unwanted children are aborted, and there also is a fairly robust domestic adoption market.”
Maybe that’s why International Adoption in China has slowed almost to a halt. (When my sister in law adopted from China in 2005, they waited 9 months after applying before getting to the front of the line and traveling to China). By contrast, the people who reached the beginning of the line to adopt a non-special needs (i.e. healthy) child from China submitted their application on October 26, 2006, that’s a six and one-half year wait. Each month that passes, the Chinese authorities process one to four days of applications, which means that the wait times grow by a year every one to two months.
That being said, you have overstated it a bit. It is incorrect to say that “child abandonment have almost disappeared.” It’s a big country. But there are a lot fewer healthy orphans than there used to be. And the international adoption rates have plummeted as a result, with a large number of the current adoptions from China being for special needs kids.
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There are hundreds of american families with Russian children referrals and to think there is nothing going on behind the scenes, politically, is nieve. Russian orphanages are not very good, most orphanages are not very good. My children are from an orphanage and in 5 months time they lived in one, about 15-24 months of damage was done. FAS isn’t the only thing that comes out of orphanages, many other issues that adoptive parents/countries really need to address and be prepared for. RAD, ODD are no joke and disruptions, the replacement of adopted child, are happening more and more. Unicef is also another factor as is Hague. Both fighting against placement of children internationally. We shall see how it all unfolds. (see cases in Guatemala, vietnam, kyrgyzstan, nepal…other countries that halted adoption with referrals to american parents.or see STUCK.sometimes adopted kids get through US immigration through different channels)
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