This is obviously not the kind of issue I usually blog about, but I am doing so now because (a) it’s absolutely horrifying; and (b) it has international implications:
Russia said on Friday it planned to halt the adoption of its children by U.S. citizens after a U.S. woman returned her adopted son on a plane to Moscow with a note disowning him.
Artyom Savelyev, 7, arrived alone at a Moscow airport on Tuesday with a typed letter asking the Russian government to annul the adoption on the grounds the child was mentally unstable, officials said.
“The way he was treated was beyond immoral,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with state-run news channel Rossiya-24 broadcast on Friday. “We have made a decision that the Foreign Ministry will insist on freezing all adoptions by U.S. families until Russia and the U.S. sign an interstate treaty setting out adoption terms.”
Russia is the third largest source of foreign adoptions to the United States with 1,586 in 2009, according to the U.S. State Department.
Artyom, renamed Justin Hansen by his American parents, was adopted from an orphanage in the Primorye region in Russia’s Far East in 2009. After six months, his adoptive mother decided he was not fitting in and bought him a one-way ticket to Moscow.
“The child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues. I was lied to and misled by the Russian orphanage,” said the note, which was shown on Russian television. “For the safety of my family, friends and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”
Television pictures showed the fair-haired Artyom nervously waving at a line of cameras. He was undergoing tests at a Moscow hospital on Friday as authorities considered who would take care of him, officials said.
I don’t know what further brilliant comments I can make about this. The story really speaks for itself. Aside from the grievous harm done to this child, it’s truly terrible that every potential American family who has the desire, the means, and the emotional capacity to adopt and raise a child from another country is now at risk of paying the consequences for this one family’s astounding irresponsibility and callousness. (This, I hasten to add, is not to denigrate the Russian government’s right to make such a decision.)
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