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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.

Wide impact of adoption in the United States

Roughly 100 million Americans have adoption in their immediate family. This means that one in three Americans is intimately connected to adoption. In addition, adoption touches many millions more occasionally or indirectly: the doctors, social workers, lawyers and teachers who deal with adoptive families; the friends, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates of them.

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. * 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.”

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.

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 Caucasian 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 price discrimination. Critics claim this cost disparity implies that minority babies are worth less than white ones. This situation is morally difficult because the adoptive families and government agencies see adoption as a great benefit to trans-racially adopted children, while some African-Americans see it as an assault on their culture.

Adoption reform

In the United States, it has not been until recently that various concepts relating to adoption have been put into question. Two important influences on "adoption reform" are Nancy Verrier and Florence Fischer * Although adoptees make up only 2 to 3 percent of the population, statistics consistently indicate that 30 to 40 percent of the children found in special schools, juvenile hall and residential treatment centres are adopted.

Verrier 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. *"

Reunification

Many adopted people and natural parents who were separated by adoption have a desire to reunite. In countries which practice confidential adoption, this desire has led to efforts to open sealed records (for example, see Adoption reunion registry) and efforts to establish the right of adoptees to access their sealed records (for example, see Bastard Nation).

International adoption

(See International adoption for more information.)

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 relatively well-established rules and procedures for foreign adopters to follow, while others, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for example, expressly forbid it.

International adoption is becoming more popular with more young healthy children available than in most adoptive countries. China is the leading country for international adoptions by Americans.

Another reason international adoption has become popular with U.S. citizens is the American adopting parents are fearful of American birth parents or relatives of the birth parents changing their minds about adoption, either before or after the adoption has taken place. In addition, many U.S. adoption agencies encourage open adoptions, in which some adoptive parents do not wish to participate. Few international adoptions are open adoptions.

One problem with international adoptions is that unethical people see an opportunity to make a relatively high profit, in part because the costs of living are much lower than the adoptive parents' country. There are no firm numbers on illegal or unethical adoptions, as adoptive families are reluctant to publicize such adoptions. However, several countries, such as Romania and Cambodia, have banned or severely restricted the international adoption of children following high profile trafficking and corruption cases*.

Agencies and facilitators

In many states, the number of adoption agencies has risen significantly. California adoption agencies, for instance, have had a marked increase in the number of licensed adoption agencies.

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.

See also

External links

Adoption in the United States | Adoption

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Adoption in the United States".

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