A while back I wrote a blog entry about President Putin's proposal that each family giving birth to a child will be given a sizeable stipend in order to encourage more Russian people to have children. The Russian population is on the decline, and the theory is that if people have more money they will be able to better support children so they'll have more.

In my post I was on the fence about this possible proposal. People in Russia are very poor and a stipend of any kind could mean a lot. On the various lists I read people were getting worked up because they saw it as causing a possible reduction of kids in the orphanages, which would mean fewer adoptions would take place. I thought that was a horrible reaction, honestly, because the kids in Russia aren't in an orphanage for our benefit, and the fewer number of kids who are in the orphanages the better.

I'm also somewhat of a Pollyanna, I'll admit, and I thought that maybe if Putin was giving parents money to have children that the orphanages would become better funded too.

But then today I read this thread on the Soul of Adoption message board. It is a response to this article in the Moscow Times about the financial proposal. The article gives this detail about the proposed payment:

The law establishing the procedure for disbursing those 250,000-ruble payments hasn't been passed yet, so this rural couple, like most other people, probably haven't explored the details of Putin's proposal. They don't know that the money will not be delivered in an envelope to the maternity ward. It will be deposited in special accounts and will be earmarked for housing or the child's education. In a rural town this amount of money might buy you an extra room, or it might pay for a year or two of junior's college expenses. After the child turns 3, the money can also be applied to the parents' pensions.

The people discussing this article paid special attention to that last bit - that when the child turns 3 the money could be applied to the parents' pensions. So at 3 the child is of no further use to the parents and in fact will be the kind of burden that they tried to avoid by NOT having children before they got the bonus.

So what will happen then? Will the orphanages start to fill up with 3-year old children? It's a horrible, very non-Pollyannaish thought. But for people who are that poor and who might consider anything for that kind of money (about $10,000 US - the average yearly salary for people in Russia is somewherearound $2000 - higher in some areas and much lower in others; 25-35% of the people live under the subsistence level in Russia) will this be an incentive to simply have a child...and then discard him once he's served his purpose?