International adoption

Introduction

Adoption has been a part of parenting for centuries. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Hindus of ancient times all made reference to adoption in their laws and codes, and adoption is also mentioned in the Bible ((Daniluk, 23-35).

Adoption is a form of fictive kinship in which an individual or a couple assumes the parental status of a child who is frequently not biologically related. In legal adoption, the biological parents relinquish all legal rights to the child; these rights are transferred to the adoptive parents. Because of the permanent and legally binding nature of adoption, the child is socially recognized as “belonging” to the newly constituted family unit and theoretically acquires the same status as the other family members, regardless of whether ties are established on the basis of biological reproduction or not (Sokoloff, 35-41).

Formal adoption differs significantly from other forms of childcare in which the child is raised outside of the biological parent-child dyad, such as guardianship and crisis and voluntary fostering, as such less-formal care systems allow children to inherit from the biological parents, and the biological parents retrain the right to veto decisions taken by the foster parents. In fostering, a child may at any time be removed from the foster care parents, whereas removal from adoptive parents is improbable because of the legalities surrounding adoptive kin (Maskey, 11-15).

Discussion

In the contemporary era, placing a child for adoption occurs for a number of reasons, such as the death of the biological parents, the lack of financial wherewithal for the biological parents to raise a child, and parental pressure exerted on young biological parents to relinquish rights to the child.

Adoptions in the present day occur between both related and unrelated kin. The primary reasons for biological kin adoption include parental death; the inability to care for a child because of age, medical conditions, and alcohol and drug abuse; and a child being formally adopted by a parent's new spouse, which is commonly referred to as stepparent adoption. The most common reasons for choosing to adopt a child include the inability to conceive, maternal yearning, and the desire to provide a safe home to a child in need (Daniluk, 23-35).

Adoption today is divided into what are termed “open” and “closed” adoptions. Open adoption permits free-flowing communication between the child and the biological parents, which may include access to information about the child's well-being and visitation rights. In open adoption, the adoptive parents retain sole responsibility for the child and are able to terminate communication as they deem fit. In the case of closed adoption, the adoptive parents may be given information that does not reveal the identity of the biological parents, such as ethnicity, medical history, and religious denomination, and the adoptive parents are in turn given limited information that does not specifically identify the biological parents. Withholding personal information stems from the ideal of secrecy surrounding adoption that arose with modern adoption (Hochstadt et al., 51-56).

Although adoption has historically been limited to taking place within the borders of a ...