Adoption in the United States

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Adoption in the United States is the legal act of adoption, of permanently placing a person under the age of 18 with a parent or parents other than the birth parents in the United States.

The 2000 census was the first census in which adoption statistics were collected. The number of children awaiting adoption dropped from 132,000 to 118,000 during the period 2000 to 2004 USA Adoption Chart.

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[edit] The foster care system

The United States has a system of foster care by which adults care for minor children who are not able to live with their biological parents. Most adoptions in the U.S. are placed through the foster care system. In fiscal year 2001, 50,703 foster children were adopted in the United States, many by their foster parents or relatives of their biological parents. The enactment of the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997 has approximately doubled the number of children adopted from foster care in the United States. If a child in the U.S. governmental foster care system is not adopted by the age of 18 years old, they are "aged out" of the system on their 18th birthday.

[edit] Wide impact

Adoption is changing the way people form families, as well as affecting the way society perceives the fundamental concepts of life such as nature vs. nurture and the role of biological relations with an adoptive family member. Because of changes in adoption over the last few decades – changes that include open adoption, gay adoption, international adoptions and trans-racial adoptions, and a focus on moving children out of the foster care system into adoptive families – the impact of adoption on the basic unit of society, the family, has been enormous. [2] As adoption expert Adam Pertman has said, “Suddenly there are Jews holding Chinese cultural festivals at synagogues, there are Irish people with their African American kids at St Patty's Day. This affects whole communities, and as a consequence our sense of who we are, what we look like, as a people, as individual peoples. These are profound lessons that adoption is teaching us.”

[edit] Adoption agencies

Adoption agencies can range from government-funded agencies that place children at little cost, to lawyers who arrange private adoptions, to international commercial and non-profit agencies. Adoptive parents can pay from nothing to US$40,000+ for an adoption.

[edit] Trans-racial adoption

The desire for parents to adopt children of the same race is the cause of some controversy within the United States, especially in the African-American community. There are more white families seeking to adopt than there are minority families; conversely, there are more minority children available for adoption. This disparity often results in a lower cost to adopt children from ethnic minorities - usually through special adoption grants rather than fee discrimination. Critics claim this cost disparity implies that minority babies are of less value than white ones. This situation is morally difficult because the adoptive families see adoption as a great benefit to trans-racially adopted children, while some minorities see it as an assault on their culture. In 2004, 26 percent of African-American children adopted from foster care were adopted trans-racially.[1] Government agencies have varied over time in their willingness to facilitate trans-racial adoptions. "Since 1994, white prospective parents have filed, and largely won, more than two dozen discrimination lawsuits, according to state and federal court records."[1] There is also a great need to place these children; in 2004 more than 45,000 African-American children were waiting to be adopted from foster care.[1]

Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas in the past 15 years, half of which come from Asia.[1] This trend has helped lower the resistance to trans-racial adoptions in the United States, at least for Asian and Hispanic children, although there is still high demand for Caucasian children, who usually come from Eastern Europe.

[edit] Adoption reform

No sooner were US adoptions made secretive with original birth records sealed, than those adopted began to seek reforms. Jean Paton, founder of Orphan Voyage, is regarded as the founder of adoption reform and renuification efforts. On the east coast, Florence Fisher founded Adoptees Liberation Movement (ALMA) and then birthmothers joined the fight for Open Records forming Concerned United Birthparents (CUB) in 1980.

As of October, 2006, 22 U.S. states have legal provisions for enforceable open adoption contact agreements.[3]

Nancy Verrier, author of the Primal Wound, describes the "primal wound" as the "devastation which the infant feels because of separation from its natural mother. It is the deep and consequential feeling of abandonment which the baby adoptee feels after the adoption and which continues for the rest of his life."[citation needed]

[edit] Reunification

Some adopted people who were separated from their biological parents by adoption have a desire to reunite.[2] Some biological parents who placed their infants do not want to reunite. In countries which practice or have practiced confidential adoption, this has led to the creation of adoption reunion registries, and efforts to establish the right of adoptees to access their sealed records (for example, see Bastard Nation).

[edit] International adoption

Main article: International adoption

International adoption refers to adopting a child from a foreign country. American citizens represent the majority of international adoptive parents, followed by Europeans and those from other more developed nations. The laws of different countries vary in their willingness to allow international adoptions. Some countries, such as China and Vietnam, have very well established rules and procedures for foreign adopters to follow, while others, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for example, expressly forbid it. China is the leading country for international adoptions by Americans.

[edit] Facilitators

There are also individuals who act on their own and attempt to match waiting children, both domestically and abroad, with prospective parents, and in foreign countries provide additional services such as translation and local transport. They are commonly referred to as facilitators. Since in many jurisdictions their legal status is uncertain (and in some U.S. states they are banned outright), they operate in a legal gray area.

Where the law does not specifically allow them to, all they can do is make an introduction, leaving the details of the placement to those legally qualified to do so. But in practice, their role as gatekeepers can give them a great deal of power to direct a particular child to a particular client, or not, and some have been accused of using this power to defraud prospective adoptive parents.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d Overcoming Adoption’s Racial Barriers by Lynette Clemets and Ron Nixon, The New York Times, August 17, 2006
  2. ^ A Google search for the terms +"Adoption reunion" +"United States", for example, yields over 12000 results. [1]

[edit] See also

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