Quote:There are plenty of non-political reasons to single out the US: Americans have snapped up one third of all foreign adoptions; the US has never ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; US authorities continue to refuse to allow Russian consular workers to meet with adopted children; the US allows people who are not allowed to adopt American children to adopt foreign children; the US permits the re-adoption of and free transfer of adopted children. While America may have been the first to be struck off the list, it will not be the last. Other countries also play fast and loose with the laws set down by the Duma. I know personally of Russian children adopted by Israelis; against explicit rules they were converted into the Jewish faith and made to forget their original homeland, language and Christianity.

The vocal opponents of the new Russian law claim that the Americans are only adopting the handicapped children that Russians have refused to adopt. This sounds good on paper, but the definition of what constitutes a handicap becomes confusing when so much money is at stake. The Russian officials, social workers, orphanage managers, and doctors who cooperate to produce the necessary documents to turn a healthy child into a handicapped one are merely pawns in a larger game. Out of a thousand of Russian children adopted into the US last year, less than fifty were officially declared handicapped; furthermore, a recent inspection proved that almost all of them were right as a whistle from the start, and that in most cases the verdict of handicapped was given in exchange for a bribe. Impossible as it may seem, some foreign adopters have seemingly conquered the famed Russian bureaucracy, succeeding in extracting a child in one single day. It takes weeks for a Russian to adopt a Russian child, even under the best of circumstances.

Quote:In the wake of the ban, many cases were checked and many violations were uncovered. The previous Russian adoption law allowed children to be adopted abroad only if there were no waiting Russian adopters. To get around this law, the corrupt Russian officials simply scared off the Russian adopters, claiming that the child carried AIDS or other incurable disease. These corrupt officials did not scruple to separate a sister from her brother, sending them off to different countries. In short, the new law exposed terrible breaches of the existing law.

Adoptions that occur within the boundaries and laws of one country are more than difficult enough to evaluate and judge. If a couple (or a single person, or a homosexual couple) has no children, perhaps they are not meant to. People do not have a right to have children: this is a privilege granted by the Almighty. Children do have a natural right to natural parents, and this right is today being infringed by moneyed folk who hire wombs-for-rent or buy babies. Cross-border adoptions are even more troublesome, because then the child can be deprived of his relations, language and faith.

Perhaps in an ideal world, cross-border adoptions would be permitted in certain carefully considered cases. But the real world manifests the unequal footing of international relations: poor people in poor countries are coerced into giving their children to wealthy people in wealthy countries. There may be Americans who come to Russia or Malawi in search of children, but there are no American children flown to Russia or Malawi to be adopted. Swedes import children from Korea, but no Korean has yet been given a Swedish child into his custody. Although every adoptive parent always claims to have the best interest of the child at heart, they are in fact robbing an economically weak country of its most precious asset – its future generation.

Quote:For Russia, this law should have come much earlier: after all, Russia is now a very rich and prosperous country. Moscow is as chic as Paris, and much more expensive. Average incomes in Russia are on the level with other developed countries. America take note: the Yeltsin era is gone. Russia is not a colony anymore. The legal detritus from the quasi-colonial Nineties is being cleared away.  The business of overseas adoption is much too close to the crime of child trafficking, and the boundaries between good deed and crime become blurred by legal documents, medical terminology and cold hard cash. The crime of child trafficking is far worse than the potential good (in an ideal world) of overseas adoption. If the would-be adopters truly care about children, the US is not short of orphans, deserted children, hungry children. Let the Americans take care of them, and let the Russian kids grow up in Russia as happily as they can.