“Heartbroken”: That’s how Liz Jackson describes her reaction to Russia’s new ban on all adoptions of its children by Americans.
She thought back to the day two years ago when she and her husband prepared their son Landon (now 4) to leave his home at an orphanage in Moscow. She told him to say “Poka Poka” (bye bye) to his friends there. “If I could have brought them all home, I would have. They all deserve to be loved.”
As a teacher in southern New Jersey, Jackson knows the kind of noise 100 kids should make, but the ones in Landon’s orphanage made none.
She recalls picking him up the first time when he was 18 months old. (The Russian process involved visits months apart before the adoption is final.) At that age, most toddlers have learned to wrap their legs around the adult holding them. “He was limp. He just didn’t know how to be held,” she tells me. “His eyes were empty.”
For months after the Jacksons brought him home, Landon “would shake himself violently to fall asleep. He didn’t want to be touched.”
Since then Jackson and her husband have adopted an American 1-year-old and had started talking about returning to Russia to adopt again.
But now Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed the ban on US adoptions into law — retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, which imposes a visa ban and asset freezes on Russian officials involved in the murder of Sergei Magnitsky.
Adoption experts call the move not just unprecedented, but vicious.
“This was particularly cynical and brutal in terms of the children’s rights and their interests,” says Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law professor who directs the school’s child-advocacy program.
Russian politicians justify the ban by citing a couple of high-profile incidents of neglect by American parents of Russian children. Yet “adoptive parents have lower rates of abuse than biological parents do. That’s part of the miracle,” she tells me. “These are overwhelmingly committed parents who help to make up for the damage done to these kids.”
And what damage it is. What Liz Jackson saw is all too typical.
Russell Moore, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, adopted two boys from Russia 10 years ago and wrote about the experience in Christianity Today. “The creepiest sound I have ever heard was nothing at all.”
Standing in an orphanage in the former Soviet Union, he realized, “These children did not cry, because infants eventually learn to stop crying if no one ever responds to their calls for food, for comfort, for love. No one ever responded to these children. So they stopped.”
Without rescue by adoption, “These orphans will produce generations of kids on the streets,” Bartholet tells me. Statistics show they will be “unemployed, drug addicts, criminals, and prostitutes.”
According to David Satter of the Hudson Institute, “Russia has more orphans per capita than any nation in the world. Of the estimated 650,000 orphans, an estimated 95 percent are ‘social orphans’ who have been abandoned by their parents or taken away from them.”
And if Americans can’t adopt them, it won’t happen. Jackson recalls being warned that if at any point in her adoption process, a Russian family wanted to adopt the same child, she’d have to step aside. That just doesn’t happen.
Americans adopt more children than every other country in the world combined, notes Adam Pertman, executive director of the New York-based Donaldson Adoption Institute. It’s not simply a matter of wealth, (though the Jacksons did have to spend over $20,000 to adopt Landon).
“America has the most developed culture of adoption,” says Pertman. “It’s normalized here. It’s considered another way of forming a family, not just a last resort.”
Why? “In other cultures, there is a belief that blood ties are the single most important thing in forming families. . . . But we are a nation of immigrants. This country adopted us. From the get-go we had a different mentality around family formation. We have a culture that’s not just about blood ties.”
So if Putin stands his ground, he’s not just breaking the hearts of countless Americans like Liz Jackson, he’s destroying the lives of Landon’s friends and hundreds of thousands of other orphans.