How did I miss this one?

In mid-July, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ran a story about Russia's efforts to find more families interested in domestic adoption. It is an eye-opener, both for what it reveals about Russian attitudes toward adoption and for how the domestic adoption process differs from inter-country adoption. And somehow, it didn't make it onto my radar screen until this morning.

I was only on my first cup of coffee when I clicked on the story, and I had to read the opening paragraph twice to make sure I was doing the math right.

The reporter profiles an 18-month-old girl and her "little brother", who were adopted by a Moscow region family three months earlier. The rules for inter-country adoption are that children must be on the database for six months prior to being considered for a referral. But the reporter says that "little brother" is six months old at the time her story published, which means he was just three months old at his adoption. At first I thought it was some sibling group rule that I was not aware of, but the reporter, also in the first paragraph, refers to the children's "mothers", so it seems as if they were not biologically related. The reporter never explains this bit of mystery, alas.

The story seems to have been prompted by an interview with Carel de Rooy, UNICEF's representative in Russia, because UNICEF is working with Russian officials to increase domestic adoptions. (You can read all about its work on the Web site for UNICEF in Russia.) De Rooy opines, at one point in the article, that complex procedures are keeping more Russians from adopting. "The mechanisms for adoption are Byzantine," he says. Earth to UNICEF: Talk to parents involved in an average inter-country adoption, and then pontificate on something that is difficult.

Don't get me wrong--I have nothing against Russian domestic adoption. I hope that all the children now in Russia's orphanages, and those who will go there in the future, quickly find homes with loving families. But it would seem that the best thing for all these children is clear, straightforward procedures for screening prospective parents regardless of national origin.

It is, however, a quote from the adoptive Russian parents near the end of the story that gives me most pause. Natasha and Sergei Petrov tell the reporter that they will never tell the two children that they were adopted.

"We aren't trying to prove that we've done these children a favor by adopting them, or something," Sergei said. "No, we simply adopted two small people and are bringing them up as our own children. So that they know in the future that we are their parents and we raised them, not just that we took them on temporarily and then got rid of them. These are our children, and we will keep this a secret from them till the end."

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