Adoption Under One Roof

Last week, the Associated Press reported that Russia and the United States are moving closer toward working out an agreement so that adoptions can resume. According to an Associated Press article, the hope is that an agreement will be reached by mid-June. It’s a shame that waiting children and families will have wait to another month, but the news could have been another year … or forever.

Russia halted adoptions to the United States last month after an adoptive grandmother put a seven-year-old adoptee named Artyom Savelyev back on a plane to Russia alone, leaving roughly 3,000 hopeful adoptive families in limbo until the two countries can agree upon certain terms. According to this article, Russian officials want more control over the living conditions of Russian adoptees after they move to the United States.

The same article states that, under the new agreement, adoption agencies and adoptive parents will be required to file reports on the adoptee’s health and living conditions. Also, adoptive families will be required to allow social workers to verify those reports. The article states that Artyom Savelyev’s adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, would not allow a social worker into the house less than a month before her mother put the child on a plane back to Russia. If the adoptive mother had permitted the social worker to visit, the hope is that there would have been a different ending to this story.

I am hopeful that this agreement will be signed in mid-June as proposed and that these waiting children and families will no longer have to wait. I am also hopeful that these new safeguards being put in place will help ensure that adoptive families are educated about what to expect and will be empowered to meet the needs of the children they adopt from Russia.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt