International adoption should continue - U.S. official

MOSCOW, September 8 (RIA Novosti) - The president and executive director of the U.S. National Council for Adoption, Thomas Atwood, told journalists Thursday that international adoption should not be stopped.

At a meeting with Sergei Fridinsky, a deputy prosecutor general of Russia, Atwood apologized for the suffering that some adopted Russian children had endured in the United States. He said people who maltreated children should be punished.

Atwod said 49,000 adopted Russian children were living happily in the U.S. He proposed increasing the mandatory number of reports sent to Russia by American adoptive parents.

Atwood said that most of the deaths that had occurred in foster families had happened within six months after the children had arrived in their new countries. Under Russian law, the first report on the progress in an adoption case should be sent in six months. Atwood proposed that reports be sent in a month, three months and six months after children arrive in their new homes.

According to Russian data, 13 Russian children have died in the United States, two of them in 2005, after their foster parents subjected them to physical violence.