Rachel, 20, ticks off a laundry list of things Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent ban on adoptions by American families will take from children in the situation she was in then: “They won’t enjoy their families, they won’t get to enjoy friends. They won’t get to enjoy schooling.
“All those kids had a big future and now they don’t,” said Rachel Elder, a 2011 graduate of Northwestern High School.
Natalie Hudson, director of the University of Dayton’s Human Rights Studies Program, says Putin’s move highlights two other issues:
• Increasing threats to human rights in that tightly run country.
• The bleak future of children across the world who never will be on anyone’s adoption list and face the same bleak future as Russian children now in the news.
Like many analysts, Hudson, also an assistant professor of political science at U.D., said Putin’s move “has very little to do with adoption.”
Bristling under U.S.-imposed travel and financial sanctions against suspected Russian human rights violators, Putin was “looking for a way to retaliate,” said Hudson.
Melissa Dallas, a Cincinnati mother active in Families of Russia and Ukraine Adoptees, and her husband adopted their son, Maxim, 12 years ago. She expressed the feelings of many when she said, “I just think it’s a real tragedy that the children are pawns in this act of politics.”
Hudson said that Russian children with disabilities and developmental delays will be particularly hurt by the ban because “they stand no chance of a permanent home within Russian society, and they don’t have any sort of social safety net to protect (them).”
Karen Elder said that news reports of the latest controversy indicate the same future awaits children in Russian as awaited Rachel Elder when they adopted her.
In adoption homes until age 16, Karen Elder said, “the boys are (then) taken into the military and the girls go to the streets.”
Hudson said she’s also worried about “another interesting part of this ban nobody is talking about” — a ban on Russian nonprofit agencies’ connections with their American counterparts.
Given that some of those non-governmental organizations monitor human rights issues, “this has all sorts of human rights implications,” in a society over which Putin seems to be taking firmer control.
“I think he’s got all sorts of things in the works that, on the surface don’t seem too problematic,” said Hudson, “but that will add up to a great deal of power and control.”
But if Hudson says Putin has been portrayed in the Western press as the bad guy on this issue — his move was “much bolder than I think anyone had expected” — she said his actions are best understood in the context of concerns Russia and other countries have about U.S. influence in their internal affairs.
After a U.S.-supported coalition toppled Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Hudson said, “there’s a lot of concern in countries about state sovereignty.”
Worried that Russia would be vulnerable to the same kind of intervention if troubles with Chechnyan rebels persist, it has opposed international intervention in Syria to discourage that trend.
Putin’s use of adoption as the tool also touches on other countries’ worries about Americans adopting and exporting one of their countries’ most basic resources: their children.
Because the people of other nations also see children as their future, “adoptions become a tricky thing,” Hudson said. The issue is made more sensitive by nation’s worries of being seen in the international community as places that don’t or can’t care for those children.
Such concerns have led to an overall decline in international adoptions to the U.S., Hudson said, and have allowed Putin and others to exploit for political purposes the tiny minority of cases in which children have suffered abuse at the hands of their adoptive American parents.
More serious yet, she said, are “the deeper human rights issues going on in those countries that have led those children to be adopted in the first place.”
“Just taking children out of a place fails to address the problem and all these deeper structural things going on,” she said. Nor does it help the suffering children who are left behind.
Because of that, Hudson argues that, adoption aside, those truly interested in children’s welfare have to look beyond adoption and deeper than the current political row for answers.
“If we’re going to talk (seriously) about the rights of children and rights of parents and adoptive parents and biological parents,” said Hudson, “it has to be in that larger context.”
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