I have seen reference to a story of a child adopted from Russia whose parents are suspected of killing him. Catalina's judge asked about it during their court appearance. I saw a post on our agency's list serve from a family who have been asked to postpone travel because the prosecutor in the region has learned of the story. Now, there are issues in regards to scheduling court hearings.Such incidents in the United States and Canada occur in one of every 15,000 adoption cases from Russia. Of course, there should not be any statistics. None of these children should have ever been hurt. The deaths of these children are heartbreaking. But, I believe that 99.9% of adoptive children go to families who love and care for them. These families are required to demonstrate over and over again that they will, indeed, give a child a good home.
The Emelyantsev family is an extreme exception, but this one extreme exception may be negatively affecting the adoption process for many people at the moment. In the past several months I have only seen people who have adopted . . . who are in the process of adopting . . . who want nothing more than the opportunity to give a child a loving home. I have also seen people and agencies who not only adopt and facilitate these adoptions, but also work very hard to support the children who are left behind in the orphanages of Kazakhstan.
I would like to see these headlines as well.
9 comments:
It is very sad when this type of thing happens. It is also sad that it could prevent some children from being adopted by people who would be excellent parents and care well for an adopted child. I agree that the negative always gets more press then the positive too. It is a bad situation all around.
It is horrible that these kinds of things happen, and it is now an international event. After your post I wanted to see what Catalina had posted about their interview in court. How over-scrutinized and overwhelmed they must have felt!
Unrelated and switching gears, I liked your Chicago post. What a great weekend! I am not sure if I told you, my folks live in Valparaiso; is that at all near where you are from?
That is a really sad story. I also didn't realize that most of the children in Russia were not healthy ones. That is sad too.
Just like anything-the postive stories are never told-but all the negative ones are front page news. It's depressing indeed.
These poor children. It is also maddening when you think of all of the people who want so badly to parent a child and people are killing their children. I went and looked around on the internet to find information about this story after hearing that the judges were asking about it in court. I heard that the judges are not too happy if people don't know about it, thinking that the U.S. doesn't care and it hasn't been publicized. When I looked around, I was horrified to find that one article said 14 children from Russia had been murdered - terrible (so which case are they talking about?). I won't be telling the judge that statistic, because we know the positive side of the adoption statistics like you said.
This is a tragic thing that happened but it's even more tragic by the bad press and negative impact it may have. I despise it when that happens.
You know, this happened in 2005 when we adopted Noah from Russia and we were very prepared for them to ask us about it. They never did. It is very very sad!
It's all just so tragic, and the sensationalism of the media is not making it any better. It doesn't paint a clear and true picture whatsoever and just feeds the frenzy and leaves many many more orphans to fend for themselves their whole lives.
Truly heartbreaking stuff all around.
Angela, thanks a lot for the invitation to read your blog. I was trying to read it for a while and I did not have your email, I was planning to ask one of our friends to ask you for it.
I think is very sad what happened, but as you said there are so many children whose life completely change in good after being adoption.
We were also surprised about our judge`s questions, however, even if she sounded scarry, I am sure she meant well. We asked many people if they think they will stop IA from Kaz. Everybody believes that this is not going to happen. Maybe the government will try to slow down for a while, but not forever. I hope everything will get better soon.
It is sad that the media produces the result that adoption is harder for loving parents to accomplish however it is even more tragic that a child was murdered. We do need to know the truth to stop such tragedies but we also need to know the whole truth which does have many more happy stories than sad ones.
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