ALERT: Ukrainian Post Placement Reports Now Due

Post Placement Special Notice:

Ukrainian Post Placement Reports Due the Third Week in January
Whether or not you adopted in Ukraine, Russia, or another Eastern European or Central Asian country, please read this important message about post placement reports. They are a fact of adoptive family life.  When we signed our adoption documents, we agreed to file these reports with our child's birth country, to provide information about the adjustment and progress of our children. Failure to do so is a violation of our adoption agreements.

There is another, equally important reason to file our post placement reports: they are one of the few tools that we adoptive parents can deploy to help keep inter-country adoption open.  When we file our reports - telling of our child's and our family's challenges and how we are working to overcome them - by sharing our children's triumphs, we provide the moderate voice of successful adoptive experience. When we don't, this balance is missing from the view birth countries have of our children and our families.  Without our voices, the tragic, but rare, instances of abuse, picked up and magnified by the media in the birth country and by U.S.  Media becomes their narrow and inaccurate view of American adoptive parents.  This should not be their only word of our children.

Ukrainian Post Placement Reports are due the third week in January.
Ukraine uses alternating report years for reports. Reporting Year 2014 is for those families who adopted Ukrainian children in 1999, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2013. If you adopted in one of those years....it's time to file! Please comply!

You can go to the Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption, Including Neighboring Countries (FRUA) website, for more specific information about Ukrainian post placement reports and where to pull reporting forms. Use this link: http://www.frua.org/resources/post-placement-reports
FRUA's new winter issue of The Family Focus also provided great detail about the filing of post placement reports and their importance.

A Request for Each of Us to Do Our Part
This year, make it a point to file your reports about your children, no matter which country from which you adopted. If your child is from Russia, your reports can support the long term goal to re-open the doors of inter-country adoption in a country that is greatly divided over the care of its orphaned children.  For those who adopted in Ukraine, or are hoping to adopt, there is this stark reality: your FRUA chair has been told directly by the Ukrainian government that immediate improvements in American family's post placement reporting statistics will help keep the doors of inter-country adoption open for us. If those statistics do not improve this year, the government may well take steps limiting adoption to Americans.  I do not think that a single one of we adoptive parents, who value our children, want to be responsible for such a tragic step preventing other orphans and adoptive families from experiencing our joy.
Please, won't you please do this one thing for your child, and for all the families still waiting to adopt.

Thank you,
Jan Wondra
National FRUA Chair
www.frua.org