Putin signs bill banning Americans from adopting Russian children

[piratesswoop]

Comments

[doverz]

This makes me sad. One of the girls where I work was born in Russia and adopted from an orphanage. She has behavioral/emotional issues but her parents really love her and seem that they'll do anything to help her. It really sucks to think about what her life would be like in Russia right now if this bill had been passed 10 years earlier.

[layweed]

What about mail order brides?

[devetu]

not necessarily a bad thing. transnational adoption is rife with all kinds of horrible things.

[angry_chick]

This.

[romp]

That was my reaction--I thought it might have been a way to keep children in their culture. But it sounds like that isn't what drove this.

[niobeeh]

I totally agree.

[maenads_dance]

I have Thoughts (capital T) about this.

There are a lot of really well-documented reasons why international adoption is not as simple as wealthy white Americans rescuing poor brown babies from lives of terrible poverty or deprivation. International adoption can sometimes come very close to the sale of a child, particularly when children are being adopted from VERY poor nations. There have been a number of high-profile cases of adoption where the "adopted" child was not unwanted by the family - where the family had surrendered the child to an orphanage hoping that it would be temporary, until the family could get their legs back under them. Such surrenders are symptoms of a system with no welfare, no safety net.

On the other hand, I really dislike the false equivalences being drawn here between the prospects of a Russian orphan (or unwanted child) in Russia versus the U.S. Russia is not a "first world" nation. There is a lot of poverty in the parts of Russia that are not large cities close to the West. More than that, children

[sfrlz]

Thank you for this comment.

[lady_borg]

Agreed 100% say what you will about international adoption but I honestly believe this had nothing to do with the children involved and their welfare

[redstar826]

So, this just applies to the US? Like, a couple from Canada could still adopt a Russian child? Yeah, that doesn't sound politically motivated at all...

[maenads_dance]

Exactly. Putin is an incredibly creepy leader who uses post-Soviet resentment of Russia's new second-class status on the world stage to whip up nationalist support, and banning US adoption is part of a whole slew of shitty things he's done lately, whether it's threatening Russians with huge jailtime for associating with international NGOs to supporting speech restrictions for LGBT folks. Putin is about as scummy personally as Berlusconi, and about as corrupt; moreover, he also engages in a weird brand of personal propaganda (riding shirtless, diving for 3000 year old pots, shepherding endangered cranes to safety in an experimental aircraft) that have more in common with totalitarian leaders than with democratically elected officials. United Russia regularly engages in voter fraud - my favorite instance is the returns from Chechnya I believe in the most recent example where a whopping 99% of voters apparently turned out for Putin (and in some districts, you got like 106% voting, lol) which given Putin's history of brutal repression

[papasha_mueller]

Putin eats children for breakfast, too.

[knigolubka]

There far less cases of non-American adoption + there were no high-profile cases of babies being killed in, say, Canada.
It is politically motivated but that's not so simple.