Russian parliament advances bill to ban adoptions by gender-transition countries

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday passed final reading of a bill to ban adoption of Russian children by citizens of countries where gender transitioning is legal.

The chamber, the State Duma, also approved a measure calling for banning the spread of material that encourages people not to have children.

The measures, which now go to the upper house of parliament and then to President Vladimir Putin for signing into law, follow an array of acts in recent years suppressing sexual minorities and bolstering longstanding conventional values.

Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who authored the billon adoptions, said on the Telegram messaging app that “it is extremely important to eliminate possible dangers in the form of gender reassignment that adopted children may face in these countries.”

He listed at least 15 countries that the law would apply to, most of them in Europe but including Australia, Argentina and Canada. Adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens was banned in 2012.

The measure banning what it calls propaganda for remaining child-free calls for imposing fines of up to 5 million rubles (about $50,000).

Putin and other top officials in recent years have increasingly called for observing so-called “traditional values” as a counter to Western liberalism characterized as degenerate.

Russia last year banned gender-transition medical procedures and its Supreme Court declared the LGBTQ+ “movement” to be extremist.

In 2022, Putin signed a law prohibiting the distribution of LGBTQ+ information to people of all ages, expanding a ban issued in 2013 on disseminating the material to minors.