Everything about Adoption In The United States totally explained
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
.
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 isn't adopted by the age of 18 years old, they're "aged out" of the system on their 18th birthday.
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.
(External Link) 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 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. 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." Some biological parents who placed their infants don't 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).
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.
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're banned outright), they operate in a legal gray area.
Where the law doesn't 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.
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