‘A child in the system cannot have a child’

The covert problem of teen pregnancy in Russia’s orphanages

Grassroots activists who work with Russia’s orphans are clear: teen pregnancy is a widespread issue in the country’s orphanages, though administrators prefer to cover up the problem, sometimes pressuring pregnant teens into having abortions, and sometimes, on the contrary, talking minors into giving birth even though they don’t feel ready for parenthood. Svetlana Burakova, a reporter for the independent Russian publication Cherta, has talked about the experience of pregnancy in the orphanage system with caretakers, social workers, and the teens themselves. (The names of most speakers in this article have been changed at their request.) Meduza is publishing an abridged version of this story with the outlet’s permission.

‘I had to keep the baby’

Katya was sent to an orphanage when she was 14. Her mother was a heavy drinker and would frequently beat her at home. The traumatized teen never wanted to have children of her own.

When Katya was 17, she met a boy she liked. He wasn’t from an orphanage, and lived with his mother. In the first year of their relationship, the girl accidentally became pregnant.

Katya speaks in a barely audible voice, picking her words carefully. She remembers the early days of her pregnancy in detail. After she first felt morning sickness, she took a pregnancy test, and the result was negative. A couple of weeks later, her symptoms grew worse and her period was delayed. She took a second test, and this time it was positive.

“I started to cry, then called my boyfriend and told him about it. He was shocked as well,” she says.

Despite Katya’s fears, the young man accepted the situation and said he was ready to help Katya and raise their child together. Katya, however, said right away that she wasn’t ready to give birth. She wanted to have an abortion. Then it turned out that the orphanage wouldn’t let her do it.

“The orphanage director didn’t want to take responsibility,” Katya says about the their refusal to allow an abortion. “Because I’m a dependent, I cannot make decisions on my own,” the teen adds.

“I realized things were going very badly,” Katya says. “They weren’t going to let me have an abortion. Then the management started trying to convince me that everything would be fine, that they would help me. I had to keep the baby.”

According to several grassroots activists who talked to Cherta, teen pregnancy in Russia’s orphanages isn’t exactly a mass problem, but it is widespread.

Pregnancy taboos

Because the topic itself is taboo, there are no official figures on the rates of orphan pregnancy in Russia’s institutions. In 2022, however, the Russian nonprofit Kultura Blagotvoritelnosti (“The Culture of Charity”) conducted a study of outcomes for young people who graduated from Russia’s orphanages, by interviewing 1,000 emancipated orphans aged 16 or older (most of the respondents being in the 16–25 age range) across the country. What the study revealed was that 23 percent of the respondents already had their own children. Six percent said they had a child aged seven or even older, which suggested that pregnancies occurred when the respondents were still minors themselves.

Media reports also help track cases of teen pregnancy in orphanages. For example, in 2012, an eight-months-pregnant girl ran away from an institution in St. Petersburg. Three days earlier, another girl, seven months pregnant, escaped from another orphanage. In 2018, a 15-year-old orphan girl escaped from a clinic where she was diagnosed with fetal demise.

In 2019, the story of three pregnant teens from an orphanage in Chelyabinsk emerged. The management of the institution assured the press at the time that one of the girls had married the father of her future child, and the others were also engaged to their partners.

According to Svetlana Stroganova, an adoptive mother who heads the charitable foundation Deti Nashi (“Our children”), an orphan’s pregnancy presents a serious problem for an orphanage and its administration. As the legal guardian of a pregnant teen, an orphanage director can be legally reprimanded or lose a salary bonus. Other caregivers can also be disciplined.

Katya recalls another teen who became pregnant at her orphanage. At first, the administration tried to cover up the pregnancy, but later an orphanage volunteer assumed legal guardianship of the pregnant girl, and everything settled down. Katya says that the caretakers were the focus of all the sympathy, since they would lose their bonuses for “letting things happen.”

Katya spent her entire pregnancy at the orphanage and getting prenatal care from a local women’s health clinic. At first, the orphanage nurse would take her to appointments, and later she would go on her own. The institution bought her prenatal vitamins and folic acid prescribed by the OB-GYN, but the other things she needed came mostly from volunteers and occasional visitors to the orphanage.

Although caregivers tried to support her and give her advice, many things about pregnancy and birth caught Katya unprepared. After she gave birth, she had too much breast milk and needed a breast pump, but no one had warned her about this, and she experienced a lot of discomfort.

She also faced judgmental staff members at the orphanage: when one of the caretakers thought she was out of earshot, she called Katya “irresponsible” for getting pregnant and deciding to give birth. The orphanage director, meanwhile, pressured Katya to marry her boyfriend, who was already 18, arguing that he might be at risk of statutory rape charges. Katya didn’t want to get married. As she got closer to her 18th birthday, the administration finally let go of the topic.

When Katya gave birth, she moved in with her boyfriend and his mother. It turned out that his mother drank, which Katya didn’t want to be around her. Eventually, she got an apartment from the state program for emancipated orphans, where she now lives with her partner and their daughter, who is four.

‘A pregnancy is a scandal’

According to Svetlana Stroganova and other grassroots activists, if a girl gets pregnant while living in an orphanage, she will likely be forced to have an abortion. The predominant view of how these decisions get made in practice is that “a child in the system cannot have a child,” as put forward by one of the speakers.

“It depends of what the girl herself wants and at what term the pregnancy becomes known. If the term is still early, they’ll naturally try to persuade her to have an abortion. When the girl is further into her pregnancy, she ends up giving birth but, since she herself is a minor, her child is usually taken away and sent to an orphanage for babies,” Stroganova explains.

Nikolay was sent to an orphanage together with his older brother and younger sister. When his sister was 16, she got pregnant, and the orphanage administrators forced her to have an abortion. “I didn’t know the details, apart from the fact itself,” says Nikolay, “but this has clearly traumatized my sister.” “The adults didn’t want extra problems for themselves, so they persuaded her,” he says.

But it isn’t true that there aren’t any other options. According to Stroganova, a minor who reaches the age of 16 can petition for emancipation. This is what often happens when the future child’s father has already turned 18 and the couple feel ready to get married and live independently. Another option is for a pregnant teen to get a legal guardian who takes her out of the orphanage. In that case, the guardian also becomes legally responsible for the newborn.

This is what happened in 2015, when the 45-year-old Moscow resident Yulia Zhemchuzhnikova became the legal guardian of two 15-year-olds, Polina and Oleg. She first heard about them when one of her friends sent her a link to an article about two teenage orphans from the Smolensk region. The article mentioned that Polina was pregnant, but her child would be sent to another orphanage if the couple couldn’t find a legal guardian to get them out of the system.

“In one of their interviews, they used all my emotional catchwords — about love, freedom, and being together,” says Yulia. She was compelled to try to help.

Polina and Oleg had both come from high-risk families. Oleg’s mother had alcohol dependence, and killed Oleg’s father during a drunken episode. When she went to prison, Oleg went to an orphanage. Polina’s mother lost her custody rights because of psychiatric problems. When the two teens met in a state boarding school in Safonovo, they fell in love.

“They were both so traumatized that they just clung to one another, like two wolf cubs, together against the whole world,” Yulia says. “They really wanted to be a family, but they didn’t have a chance in the system, because for an orphanage, a pregnancy is a scandal.”

To keep Polina’s baby from being separated from her, Yulia had to act quickly. Polina’s due date was just a month away. The paperwork was extensive and time-consuming: the social workers releasing the orphans from state custody had to do their part of the job before handing it over to another set of social workers on the receiving side of the custody case. None of them seemed to be in a hurry. There was also a requirement that each of the teens Yulia was taking into custody should be given a separate room, and their baby should be allotted a third.

Yulia still feels that she has done the impossible. In the two weeks leading up to the New Year, she collected all the documents and managed to gain legal custody of the young couple. A week after the New Year, on Orthodox Christmas day, Polina gave birth to little Sophia. From the maternity ward, the young family came to Yulia’s home, where the mother of seven lived with four of her children.

Polina and Oleg lived with Yulia for a year. It was a hard period for everyone, as the teens developed drug and alcohol problems and started running away from home — sometimes back to the orphanage. Yulia was ultimately forced to give up custody. Polina and Oleg went back to the orphanage, while Sophia remained with Polina’s aunt.

Still, once the teens reached the age of 16, they got married, got emancipated, and reclaimed their daughter. By the time they reached 18, they got their own apartment, where they still live together. Instead of one, they now have two daughters. Yulia keeps in touch with them but admits that they don’t speak very often.

‘Life as a non-value’

Maria Fedorova is an experienced adoptive mother now working as an adoption specialist in a charity called Naidi Semyu (“Find a Family”). She describes adoption as a complicated, multi-layered process that can also be very precarious:

People often want to help because they’re emotional: they don’t want a baby to be born into an orphanage, and they think that their desire alone will help them get around some tight corners. But in practice, even when the kids themselves really want to be in a family, a very difficult adaptation process begins for both sides literally within a month. Children from an institution always show up with the trauma of rejection and abandonment.

“If we’re talking about a pregnant girl, that trauma overlaps with pregnancy complications and bodily and hormonal changes, leaving practically no chance of an easy, uncomplicated life,” she says. Fedorova believes that first-time adoptive parents should take specialized courses to get ready for all the particulars of helping a pregnant teenager. None of it, though, guarantees that the young woman will not abandon her baby after giving birth, she says.

According to the Russian state statistical agency Rosstat, 25,000 children were born to underage mothers in 2021. How many of those mothers lived in an orphanage is unknown, since the state doesn’t collect such data, but Svetlana Stroganova, the program director at Our Children, believes that teen pregnancies are more common in orphanages than in families.

The problem is partly about the orphans’ lack of information on safe sex and contraception. Because they don’t have any money of their own when growing up in an institution, they cannot buy contraceptives either. Nor do they have access to emergency contraception, even in cases of sexual coercion (which they often keep to themselves). And there’s finally the sad factor of treating their sexuality just as carelessly as orphans treat themselves: abandoned children often “see their own life as a non-value,” the expert observes.

Maria Fedorova agrees that girls living in orphanages are at a higher risk of unplanned pregnancy. “The thought that you don’t have a family yourself but you can just create one and give your baby everything you yourself didn’t have sometimes makes pregnancy a welcome piece of news.”

According to Svetlana Stroganova, this expectation is often deceptive, since teens living in orphanages don’t have any role models who could show them what normal family life looks like. “They give birth to a baby and don’t know what to do with it,” she says, “and this is why we have whole dynasties of orphans, with the grandma, the mom, and the child all growing up in orphanages.”

‘Family placement is the best solution’

The problem of teen pregnancy in orphanages is an ethically fraught matter, says Yelena Tseplik, executive director of the Find a Family foundation. The question doesn’t boil down to sex education either, she says, since even the most forward-looking and caring institutions face the same problem.

As an example, Tseplik describes a regional orphanage she visited eight years ago. At the head of it was a very passionate principal “who was constantly learning herself and organizing training for her colleagues, bringing experts from Moscow.” Children in that orphanage lived in spaces that looked like real apartments, in mixed groups of different ages, each group attached to an unchanging caregiver.

“During the meeting, we learned that there was a baptismal room for newborns,” Tseplik says. “The director told us, ‘please understand, we have babies born all the time, so I thought we should have this room,” she remembers. The director also didn’t feel that it would be right to increase supervision of the teens: “This is an orphanage, not a prison,” Tseplik recalls the director saying, adding that the children would leave the grounds for extracurricular activities: “They had various contacts with the outside world, and this is normal.”

Tseplik herself cannot say what’s better, to let a teenage girl get pregnant or to put her under lock-and-key. It all depends on the situation, she says, but the best solution is to place as many children as possible with families, where they can adapt to living as a family:

You can kill yourself trying to make an orphanage a good and happy place. But an orphanage is, among other things, a story about the orphans’ sexual lives. When a child is with a family, the mom and dad can keep on eye on them. I won’t pretend that teenage girls don’t ever get pregnant in families, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often. And if an adopted girl gets pregnant, the adoptive mom becomes the legal guardian of the baby, who then grows up in the family. And that’s a completely different story.

Story by Svetlana Burakova (Cherta)