The scourge of illegal adoption of children by foreigners is spreading: 4 people have already been arrested, and charges have been filed against one more person. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan described all this as “shocking” at a government meeting.
He said that when, taking into account the numerous alarms this summer, he held a consultation and instructed the National Security Service and the police to look into the alarms, he was skeptical that there would be revelations: “To be honest, in many cases the alarms we were receiving gave the impression of emotional outbursts, but now, looking back, perhaps our assessment was not quite right, perhaps those people’s feelings were fed by clear facts, and all such cases must be examined one by one, individually, and studied,” he declared.
Pashinyan stressed: “It is important to understand how it happened and how it is happening that such a mechanism can exist and operate in the Republic of Armenia,” the prime minister noted.
Within the framework of the criminal case, the director of the maternity ward of the Republican Hospital, Razmik Abrahamyan, who for years held the post of chief obstetrician-gynecologist of the republic and is, incidentally, a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences, the deputy director of the same maternity ward, Arshak Jerjerian, and the director of the “Yerevan Baby House” for 23 years, Liana Karapetyan, have been arrested. They are suspected of illegally separating children from their parents by prior agreement with a group of individuals.
Two residents of Yerevan are also currently involved in the illegal adoption case.
In recent days, numerous anonymous alarms have appeared in the press; women who gave birth in various years insist on what has been formulated in the criminal case — that they were forced to give up their children. A woman living in one of the provinces, who did not wish to be identified, insisted that 12 years ago she gave birth at the Republican Hospital and had a healthy girl weighing 3 kilograms. She said she was in a depressed, abandoned state: “I just went, they took advantage of my bad state, they said, you are a pretty woman, what about your 2 children, they are to be pitied, and they said, you don’t need this child.”
The woman remembers the doctors’ names very well; she says she did sign the paper renouncing the child, but she was pressured and threatened: “My demand is, what have they done to my child — they deceived me, I was in a desperate state, they took advantage of my helpless, postpartum condition, they took my child from my hands and threw me away like a worthless thing, put me on the road,” she recounted.
Two months ago, she went to the maternity hospital hoping to find the trace of her now 12-year-old daughter, from there to the “Nork Baby House,” and from the documents she learned that her daughter had been adopted months after birth.
