Craig and Erin Fowles wondered what they had gotten themselves into as they returned from the central Russian city of Izhevsk last spring.
The McHenry couple were traveling with two adopted children: Olya, a listless 1 1/2-year-old girl who would not sit up or play with toys in the orphanage, and Ruslan, a 2 1/2-year-old boy who wouldn’t let his new mother touch him and bit, kicked and spat on anyone who angered him.
“He was the child that everyone wishes wasn’t on the plane,” said Erin Fowles, “screaming, pulling the hair of the people in front of him, jumping around. He had to be completely terrified.”
The Fowleses said they have turned the corner on the misbehavior and are happy with their new family members. But experts and many parents warned that international adoptions, particularly those of institutionalized children from East European countries where there are widespread problems with alcohol abuse, can leave unprepared parents struggling with everything from tantrums to physical and mental disabilities caused by fetal alcohol syndrome.
Russian adoptions have been spotlighted recently as first-degree murder charges were filed Dec. 21 against Schaumburg resident Irma Pavlis. She was accused of beating to death her adoptive son, Alex, a 6-year-old Russian boy. Her lawyers said the boy hurt himself banging his head on a wall or floor.
The arrest follows a case in Columbus, Ohio, in October in which an adoptive couple were arrested on charges of scalding their 3-year-old Russian son in a bathtub and then leaving him to die over the following five days. The 32-year-old husband, Gary Thompson, pleaded guilty earlier this month to murder, and his wife is scheduled to go to trial in February.
In December 2002, an adoptive mother in Lowell, Ind., was charged with murder, battery and neglect in the 2001 death of her 16-month-old Russian son.
Over the past decade there have been at least a dozen cases of parents murdering adopted Russian or Eastern European children, said Thais Tepper, a Pennsylvania adoptive mother and co-founder of the Parents Network for the Post-Institutionalized Child. Tepper, who adopted a Romanian child in 1991, said parents are often unprepared for the severity of problems foreign orphans can face.
Tepper said that mothers in Russia who put their children up for adoption often face a host of personal problems that can directly harm their babies. “You have drug addicts and alcoholics and schizophrenics,” she said.
The cases that have ended in tragedy are only a fraction of the thousands of foreign-born children entering the United States every year to be adopted. And experts say most children from Russian and East European orphanages are healthy, adding that the best way to get accurate information during the adoption process is to work with a reputable agency and a doctor.
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Of the 20,099 international adoptions in 2002, 7,049 were Eastern European children–4,939 of them Russian, the U.S. State Department reported. (Children from China topped the list, at 5,053.)
But researchers are beginning to understand the cost of infant depression and other disorders that can develop in institutionalized children, said Dr. Ira Chasnoff of Chicago, president of the Children’s Research Triangle, which specializes in health and psychiatric care for internationally adopted children. Brain development suffers when children spend their first months or years crying unattended in a room full of babies or lying in a crib wrapped in filthy swaddling, ignored by frazzled orphanage employees.
And there can be serious physical problems. One adoptive mother arrived in the United States only to find her Russian daughter had a deadly heart defect and had to be rushed into surgery, he said. Doctors who haven’t treated tuberculosis and hereditary syphilis in years are now seeing it in children from abroad.
“Our systems of care are not ready,” said Chasnoff, who also consults with parents to evaluate children’s medical information before they are adopted.
“We’re bringing in a whole new stable of children who are going to have mental health problems: severe attachment disorders, post traumatic stress disorders. Those are the most common diagnoses we find in our children who are adopted overseas. Are we ready to start providing services to all of them, and who’s going to pay for it?”
For international adoptions, Illinois requires only a basic examination of the home life of the prospective parents to determine whether they are fit to be parents, said Judy Stigger, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services and a licensed clinical social worker at The Cradle in Evanston.
Many adoption agencies in the United States that arrange international adoptions require adoptive parents to complete periodic reports on the child’s progress and perform home visits to make sure that the child is adjusting.
In cases where families adopt through an independent agency in a foreign country, such as the Palvises, they face no oversight once they bring the child into their home, said Jill Manuel, a spokeswoman for the Department of Children and Family Services.
Levels of service differ
Independent agencies aren’t able to provide the education and follow-up care that agencies in America can, child-welfare experts said.
The Pavlises went through an independent Russian facilitator they found through the Internet, and their two adoptions cost about $11,000, said Stuart Goldberg, Pavlis’ lead attorney. The cost was a bargain compared with the $45,000 that some Midwestern couples have paid to adopt two children.
The Pavlises learned the two children and their older sister, Natasha, 11, had been abandoned by their parents in a run-down apartment when Alex was 1, and Julia was 3 months old, Goldberg said. Workers at the orphanage also told the Pavlises that the children’s parents were alcoholics.
When the Pavlises arrived to pick up the children in Yeysk, a port city on the Sea of Azov, they noticed that some of the boy’s fingers were gnarled. Soon after arriving in Moscow to have the children examined, they discovered that Alex had webbed toes.
“When the doctor saw they were from the Yeysk orphanage, he said, `I thought that orphanage was for only special-needs orphans,'” Goldberg said.
Reached by telephone, officials at the Yeysk Infants Home and Yeysk Correction School declined to comment, saying Russian law forbids them from discussing adoption cases.
The Cradle, an Evanston international adoption agency, levels with parents about medical conditions of the children, said Anne Schmidt, director of international adoptions. The organization educates prospective parents through seminars on child development, drug and alcohol exposure, and bonding with their new family member. She said it also sends out counselors to follow up after an adoption.
“Families need to know what they’re getting into and not live with a fantasy,” Schmidt said.
Monika Cavanagh, a Bloomington nurse who is happy with her two adopted daughters from Russia, said it is crucial to have a physician view videotapes of the child before adopting. Doctors can look for behavioral disorders and neurological problems based on signs such as repetitive hand gestures or facial features that indicate fetal alcohol syndrome.
After viewing images e-mailed from Russia, Chasnoff once advised a couple that a scar on a baby’s back indicated that the child had been born with its spine protruding, he said. Doctors had corrected this through surgery, but the child would never be able to walk.
Caution paid off
Cavanagh has good reason to urge caution. After adopting a Russian girl named Nastya in 1996 and already having a biological daughter, she and her husband decided they still wanted one more child.
Through an adoption agency in Michigan, they agreed to host a 7-year-old Russian girl for the summer of 1999. They were told she was healthy and had planned to adopt the child.
When the girl arrived in Bloomington, however, the family quickly learned that she was developmentally challenged and would require around-the-clock supervision–far more than she and her husband could provide. After 10 days, they sent her back to Russia.
“They were not at all forthcoming,” Cavanagh said of the agency. “They only told me what they thought I would want to hear. It wasn’t fair for the child, and it wasn’t fair to our family.”
Dr. Todd Ochs, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Adoption and Foster Care, has adopted Chinese children. But he worries that many parents are not ready for the challenges of institutionalized children.
Lack of support
“Unfortunately, what I see is a tremendous lack of preparation in adoptive parents, and then a lack of support after the adoption,” he said.
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In the six weeks the Pavlises cared for Alex, they had difficulty controlling him, said Donna Rotunno, co-defense attorney. He had inexplicable tantrums in which he scratched his face till he bled and flailed and writhed on the ground, she said.
The boy was not toilet-trained, and he smeared his feces on the walls and around the house, she said. He repeatedly slammed his head against the wall, Rotunno said.
“It wasn’t a case where she hit him and he suffered the injuries that caused his death,” she said. “His death could have been caused by injuries that he inflicted on himself for a long period of time.”
Schaumburg police disputed this account. They said it appeared that Alex had been struck and thrown into a wall, floor or another fixed object.