Tale of Two Boys, III
Posted on November 14, 2007
Filed Under Life, Social Issues, Physical Health, Dr. Dobson's Broadcast
Not too long ago there was an article in a Russian paper about a baby house where kids with defects live. A few days later the readers wrote a reply, that these kids should be killed. “We don’t want to see them,” they said. What a disturbing sentiment, devaluing life and seeking to avoid confronting handicapped individuals.
That same mindset came out in an article published in a Moscow daily in 1993. A letter appeared in a leading Russian weekly from the mother of a child with Down syndrome. The letter was entitled, “Why Coddle Such Freaks?,” and it included this line, “I am asking the doctor to put my (handicapped) child to sleep. (Why) let them live?”
You can see that there is a lack of value associated with any individual who is not “normal,” and that life is not given any inherent value. This, of course, is a reflection of a godless government and culture, which still is part of the fabric of Russian society. It is a humanistic philosophy that devalues life.
Against that backdrop, a child who has no parents to defend him or her, and who has a physical or mental handicap, will not thrive they may not even survive.
I say “survive” because an international advocacy group that has researched conditions in Russian orphanages indicates that
…these orphans are at significant risk of premature death. One leading child welfare advocate in Moscow told Human Rights Watch that estimates from government figures indicate the death rate in these asylums is twice the rate in the general population. He also knows one asylum where he said that the death rate rose to as high as three and a half times the rate in the society outside its walls.
Additionally, a national statistic from the Ukraine indicated that
“approximately thirty percent of all severely disabled children in special homes—a staggering figure—die before they reach eighteen.”
Back to the story of Savkin, which I started yesterday. He was a boy who was diagnosed – at age four - as a heavily disabled child, labeled an idiot and placed in one of the many asylums in Russia. There he stayed.
So you see, with a handicap, Savkin’s hope for any normalcy in life is pretty much erased. He won’t be educated adequately, he won’t receive treatment for his ailments, he won’t be eligible for adoption, he will instead be sent to an asylum for the rest of his days.
And even if Savkin is born “normal” in every way, with no apparent handicaps, statistics indicate he is not likely to become a healthy adult, and instead will likely go on to a life of crime, drugs, prostitution – or all of those.
Not a hopeful situation for anyone to be in.
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