In case you didn’t hear, on Friday, Putin signed into law a ban on adoptions of any Russian children to American families. Period. It was in harsh response to a U.S. law targeting Russians as violating human rights.
It’s politics, right? Why should we care? I’m not a mother of a Russian child. You likely aren’t either.
We can’t not care. There are about 740,000 reasons why we can’t not care.
In their government’s lashing back at our government regarding human rights, they are significantly limiting the future of potentially thousands of children who now fill what have been long recognized dismal and depressing orphanages.
Some of these lawmakers claimed that adoptive parents are the real abusers. Some said that Russian children were adopted by Americans only to be used for organ transplants, objects for sexual exploitation, or “cannon fodder for the U.S. Army.”A spokesman for the Russian orthodox church added that Russian children adopted by Americans and raised outside of their particular church would not “enter God’s kingdom.” I’m stunned.
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| Photo from The Toronto Sun |
740,000 Russian children not living with their parents and about 18,000 Russian families currently in the process of adopting, most wanting only the healthy, physically attractive infants. If every single one of those families adopt a child right now, they will provide families for only 2.5% of the current children there who need one. Do the math. That leaves a lot of children.
While about 130,000 more children will come into care in Russia this year, another 15,000 will “graduate” from care at the age of 16 or 17. Of those 15,000, about 40% will resort to a life of crime including prostitution and selling drugs to get by (that’s 6,000 children), 33% will continue to be unemployed longterm (that’s about 4,950 of these children who will never hold a job), 20% will remain homeless on the streets (that’s about 3,000), and 10% simply give up and commit suicide (1,500 children who leave the orphanage because they are too old take their own lives).
While Americans brought home to families a small number in comparison to the overwhelming number of Russian children available for adoption right now–942–each one of those children now have a family and a future they may not have had otherwise. I know a few of these families myself. I know how loved these children are and how they see hope as bright as the sun in front of them.
We can’t not care about this new law–a hasty political retaliation at the expense of children–not just “Russian children” from a distant land with unknown faces but children, children like Levi whose parents are waiting to bring him home right now, anxiously waiting to hear if the son they’ve held in their arms already can come home soon. Children just like our children.
740,000 children. 740,000 reasons we need to care. And, another 130,000 reasons to care in 2013.