Abandoned children

1. Due to controversy over the issues and debates that hospital babies have sparked, besides our own reporting The Moscow News has decided to publish an official statement from the Health Ministry, in its own words, about the scope of the problem and how it is addressing it:

2. Pursuant to the existing normative documents of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Public Health and Social Development, babies left without parental care will be sent to children's homes of the public health system.

3. Children received from maternity homes, families and hospitals will be sent directly to a quarantine (isolation) department, where the necessary medical, health-improving and educational activities are conducted with due regard paid to the children’s ages.

4. Children suffering from severe infectious or skin diseases and other diseases requiring hospital treatment will not be placed in a children’s home. Children left without parental care must stay in a hospital for medical and not social reasons.

5. However, according to data for late 2006 from the Russian regions, there is evidence that 280 children (of different ages) left without parental care were kept in hospitals without medical reasons for a period of eight days to two months. That was due to lengthy preparation of the necessary legal documents and to a lack of accommodation in the educational system's boarding houses and in a number of children's homes.

6. Registration of children in a children’s home requires, in addition to medical documents, papers confirming the absence of parents or the inability of the parents to bring up their children: A certificate of death of the parents (or of the mother), the relevant ruling of a law court, a paper certifying abandonment of the baby by the parents, the parents' written consent to the adoption of the child by someone (their renunciation of their parental rights), etc.