The New Deal with US-Russian International Adoptions

The world’s two biggest bureaucracies have become more involved in the international adoption process.

For once this is good news.

Russia and the United States recently signed a treaty that requires greater oversight of what had once been a somewhat loosely supervised trans-national adoption process. Americans have been adopting Russian children since 1991, just after the follow of the Iron Curtain. During that twenty-year period, the Russian government has alleged 17 adoptees have died of abuse or neglect after placement in the United States.

On the other hand, because Russian health screenings were often inaccurate or falsified, American families often had to deal with Russian children suffering with previously undiagnosed health issues including cases of hepatitis, HIV/AIDS and fetal alcohol syndrome.

Last year, the Russian government threatened to suspend all adoptions to the United States after a Tennessee woman sent her son unescorted back to Russia with a note stating the child had mental problems. While Moscow never followed through on the treat, the highly publicized incident forced a new agreement.

The new agreement includes the following changes:

• All adoptions must be completed through agencies certified by the Russian and American governments, ending private international adoptions from Russia.
• American families looking to adopt a Russian child must complete a psychological screening.
• Adoption agencies must gather more information about the child’s history and medical background during the pre-adoption case study.
• Adoption agencies will complete regular home study visits after the placement.

International adoptions began declining since 2004 for a number of reasons. First, the world economy has struggled for much of that period, while the cost of adoptions has swelled well-above $25,000.  A number of highly publicized celebrity adoptions cast international adoptions in a bad light and called attention to abuses in the systems many nations use to place orphans with parents. The spotlight on international adoptions revealed horror stories about kidnapping and child selling rings profiting off vulnerable families. In many countries where domestic adoptions were previously stigmatized, the culture has begun to change. A new emphasis on placing orphans within their birth culture has arisen in parts of the world where single mothers and orphans once had no social standing. Therefore, international adoptions have declined as domestic adoption has increased in those countries.

The new US-Russian adoption regulations would seem to be another step toward the demise of international adoption. Currently, 10 percent of the international adoptees coming to the US are from Russia. There have been 60,000 US-Russian adoptions in the last twenty years. The new adoption treaty will likely reduce the number of international adoptions each year and slow down the process considerably.

However, the international adoption process needs to be cleaned up. Celebrities can’t wave their checkbooks and jump to the front of the line. Babies and orphans in impoverished countries can’t be a commodity bought and sold on the black market. Adoptive parents need better health information about children before the placement is completed.

The only important consideration in any adoption is what is best of the child. Adoptions are about finding loving, nurturing homes for children who might otherwise be condemned to orphanages, revolving foster homes, even child labor.

If a child is going to be transported thousands of miles from its place of birth, raised in a different culture, taught a different language, then everyone, governments and families, need to be assured that the adoptive home offers a physically and emotionally healthy environment.

There is no room for mistakes and failure in the adoption process.