RUSSIA — In a new campaign to increase adoption of its
estimated 700,000 orphans, the Russian government this month
started airing national TV advertisements and launched a website
with 180,000 children searchable by sex, age, hair color and eye
color. Profiles include a photo and a description of the child’s
personality, such as sociable, lively, shy, and calm.
The campaign comes as overall adoptions decreased in 2004, but
particularly those by Russians. Over the past decade foreign
adoptions have been increasing and domestic adoptions decreasing,
and many Russians, out of a sense of nationalistic pride, do not
want foreigners adopting Russian orphans. Rumors spread that many
American adoptive parents are murdering or abusing their
Russian-born children, that they sell the babies for profit or
harvest their organs, and that they aim to deplete Russia’s
population.
Russia now has more orphans than the Soviet Union did following
World War II, which saw Soviet casualties estimated as high as 27
million, and the number is rising by tens of thousands each year,
due in part to their struggling economy. The Moscow Times
has called the institutional care of orphans and disabled children
“one of the country’s most serious social disasters.”
The majority of institutionalized children are “social orphans”
who have a living parent. Russian doctors routinely advise parents
to give up children with disabilities, and the government often
forces children of the poor, ill, alcoholics and the imprisoned
into its institutions. The state is trying to replace the family
and failing miserably at great human and financial cost.
The lingering attitude of Soviet propaganda — that the state
could nurture children as well as, if not better, than parents —
is encouraging institutionalization, although a 2004 study by the
Russian government found that of graduates of orphanages, 40% end
up in criminal gangs, 40% become alcoholics or drug-addicts
(widespread alcoholism and drug dependency among Russian men
contributes to the world’s largest gap between male and female life
expectancy), a further 10% commit suicide, and a mere 10% live
“normal” lives.
Worse still, up to two thirds of children put in orphanages
designated for the disabled have been misdiagnosed, according to
separate recent studies by the World Bank, Mental Disability Rights
International, Human Rights Watch, and Christian Solidarity
International. Often a treatable physical defect is presumed to be
a mental defect — children with a cleft palate, club foot, simple
speech defect, dislocated hip, crossed eye, or even tight tendons
are classified as “idiot” or “imbecile” and the state deems them
“ineducable” and puts them in institutions without regular
schooling. In the U.S., children with arthrogryposis, a congenital
fixation of joints, have an above average I.Q. (they use their
brain less for physical and more for rational activity), while in
Russia they are denied education and simple medical treatment.
Institutionalized children fall behind one month of growth for
every 3.4 months in a Russian orphanage, according to a University
of Minnesota study. This comes not just from lack of food and
health, but also the nurturing needed for a child to grow. Medical
evidence is clear that human contact is necessary for proper mental
and physical development of children, especially babies. No amount
of medicine, schooling or feeding can create healthy children
without simple touching, caring and loving.
AT THE DERBISHKY ORPHANAGE, in the western territory of Russia
known as Tartarstan, children with untreated hydrocephalis have
heads twice their normal size. Without treatment, the condition
leads to mental retardation and death before adulthood; early
medical care results in a normal brain and life expectancy.
In a room for children suffering injuries from before or during
birth and brain and central nervous system problems, a child’s
untreated cleft palate has left blobs of flesh on either side of a
nostril, with her upper gum exposed. A nurse sits on a mat with two
children who cannot prop up their severely undersized bodies. Three
gaunt children in wheelchairs watch as a two-year-old girl with
Down syndrome and her tongue sticking out rocks herself
repetitively, a common sign of neglect. Two nurses manage the dozen
children.
The orphanage is surrounded by smokestacks, heavy, dark forests
and, a few hundred yards away, a graveyard. The nearby city of
Kazan hosts a statue of Vladimir Lenin.
Many of the children at the orphanage have abnormalities
associated with fetal alcohol syndrome (caused by the mother’s
ingestion of significant amounts of alcohol around conception or
during pregnancy) — a small head, small eye openings, droopy
eyelids, short noses, a small jaw. Other children’s faces are
covered in open sores and blue stains from the iodine used as an
antiseptic.
In such state institutions children only get worse. Those
incapable of walking are subject to “lying-down rooms” where they
spend most of their lives. Mildly disabled children are not taught
to feed or care for themselves. So-called “orphans” often die
prematurely and are reportedly buried in unmarked graves.
“Deformed kids in the U.S. are treated or prevented, in Russia
they’re warehoused,” says Jonathan Baker, who in 2000 gave up half
his $10 million fortune to create Firefly Children’s Network, a
Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that works to improve
the lives of Russian orphans abandoned due to real or perceived
physical or mental disabilities.
Baker founded his charity after he learned about the awful
conditions of Russian and Romanian orphanages from the TV news
series 20/20. He saw naked, underfed children sitting in
their own feces and urine, and infants starving to death because of
treatable conditions such as cerebral palsy and anemia.
While many nonprofit organizations try to improve orphanage
conditions with more medical equipment and information, Baker
believes the problem is not that these institutions need change,
but that they exist at all. Orphanages should be replaced with
rehabilitation centers so that children can live at home, he says.
The state can’t substitute for families. Rather, he says, it must
help them support their children.
Keeping the orphans at home would not only be better for them,
but also the economy, as the cost to the government of supporting
families with disabilities is far lower than that needed for
institutionalization, according to studies. Like Russia now, the
U.S. used to put most of its developmentally disabled in public
institutions, but today about 90% of the U.S.’s 4.5 million
disabled live in private homes. Washington, D.C. and eight states
have closed every large, public institution for the disabled.
Instead of being sent to orphanages, disabled children live in
homes and have access to rehabilitation centers.
One such rehabilitation center in Russia is the Hope Center in
the city of Nizhnekamsk. The center provides early intervention,
support to families so as to prevent abandonment of disabled
children, and a resource center with medical journals, Internet
access, and developmental toys that can be checked out.
During Baker’s recent visit to the Hope Center, the children put
on a good show for him and other foreign visitors, reciting their
own poetry and singing. A pretty, tall teen who is here because of
a serious heart defect sings a pop song. A six-year-old girl reads
a rhyme about putting out food for a bird so it will feel more
cheerful. In a sunny room three children play with paper boats
among plants, pools of water, and chirping budgies in a cage.
Nina Bukhanova, head of the center, says she wants to create a
sense of comfort and beauty for the children. Parents are often
largely concerned about whether their child will be able to walk,
but Bukhanova emphasizes the equal importance of other skills such
as being able to feed, dress and go to the toilet by oneself and to
have social skills and a good self-image. She frames the children’s
artwork and puts it on the wall.
“In the end the child is convinced he is an artist,” Bukhanova
says.
As Baker leaves the center a baby girl, seen earlier naked on a
table receiving a therapeutic massage, looks like a little present
as she is bundled up warmly to be taken home by her mother.
The Russian government’s new campaign will send more children
home, whether that be to Russia or abroad. Of about 24,770 Russian
children adopted last year, 38 percent were adopted by foreigners
and 5,841 by Americans. The campaign’s new website is currently in
Russian only but an English
language version is scheduled to be launched within a
month.
