Chapter 6 Journal Entry
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Adoption Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection. 2018. COPYRIGHT 2018 Gale, a Cengage Company From Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Full Text: Adoption is the practice of legally transferring care and guardianship of a child from his or her biological parents to an adoptive parent or parents. The adopted child becomes a part of the new family and acquires all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities that come with membership in that family. Although adoption is believed to have been a feature of human society for millennia, it did not become formally codified in law until the relatively recent past.
In the United States, adoption laws were first passed at the state level in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1851 Massachusetts Adoption of Children Act is commonly cited as the nation’s first modern adoption statute, although the practice of legally transferring an adopted child from his or her biological family to an unrelated family remained rare until well into the twentieth century. Today, adoption is primarily regulated by state-level laws, though several federal laws address child protection, child welfare, and adoption, including the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment and Adoption Reform Act (1978), Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (1980), Child Citizenship Act (2000), and Intercountry Adoption Act (2000).
There are many reasons why biological parents elect to go forward with an adoption, but a large majority of cases involve single mothers who are not financially or emotionally able to care for a child. In decades past, it was a relatively common practice for unwed mothers to put babies up for adoption due to the social stigma surrounding premarital conception and childbirth. While this is far less common today, adoption remains an avenue for people who do not wish to become parents or feel unable to meet the responsibilities of parenthood. Teenage mothers and women who conceive a child as the result of a sexual assault also account for significant percentages of adoption cases.
Similarly, parents who adopt children do so for a wide range of reasons. They may be unable to conceive children, or other medical factors may make pregnancy and childbirth risky or potentially life threatening. In other cases, adoptive parents are single people or same-sex couples who want to start families. Additionally, relatives and stepparents now comprise the majority of adoptive parents in the United States.
Domestic Adoption
Adoption occurs in many ways, and its various forms can be categorized according to the organization or agency overseeing the adoption, or by the nature of the intended future relationship between the child, his or her biological parents, and his or her adoptive parents. Examples include the legal adoption of a child from foster care, in which a child’s foster parents become his or her permanent adoptive parents, as well as private agency adoptions and independent adoptions. Private agency adoptions involve third-party agencies, which match a child or his or her expectant parent or parents with an adoptive family. Independent adoptions are typically handled by attorneys, with child-parent matches being made through independent channels. Alternate ways of defining adoptions include open, closed, and second-parent adoptions. Open adoptions involve ongoing contact between the child’s adoptive family and his or her biological family, while closed adoptions involve no contact between the two. While closed adoptions remained standard for many years, open adoptions have become more common due to the perceived benefits for adopted children. Second-parent adoptions grant legal parental rights to the same-sex partner of an individual’s biological child. These parental rights remain in place even if the couple terminates their relationship in the future.
The legal procedures involved in domestic adoptions vary from state to state but generally follow a similar path that involves detailed application processes, court hearings, and evaluations of the child’s proposed adoptive parents. When the adoption is ready to proceed, the first legal step is to address the existing parental rights of the child’s biological parents. In closed adoptions, these rights will be terminated, and depending on circumstances, this termination can occur with or without the consent of the biological parents. In open adoptions, the rights of the biological parents are limited or reconfigured to conform to the adoption’s agreed-upon terms. Parental rights are then legally and permanently transferred by the court to the child’s adoptive parents.
According to data published in 2017 by the National Council for Adoption, there were 110,373 adoptions in the United States in 2014, the last complete year for which data was available when the council’s report was authored. This marked a 17.4 percent decline from 2007, when 133,737 adoptions were completed nationwide. The 2014 figures include 41,023 adoptions involving blood relatives of the child (37.2 percent), and 69,350 involving nonrelatives (62.8 percent).
International Adoption
In the United States, international adoption is covered under the legal framework provided by the Intercountry Adoption Act (2000). The act assigns authority over international adoptions to the Department of State and ratifies the Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in
Respect of Intercountry Adoption, passed by the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) in 1993. In essence, the legislation implements the intercountry adoption practices sanctioned by the HCCH into American law.
Globally, international adoption rates have been declining sharply in recent years. The number of cross-border adoptions that saw children being taken into American families fell from 22,884 in 2004 to just 5,648 in 2015, with China continuing to lead all source countries. Analysts believe the drop is due to various factors: some source countries have turned their focus from international to domestic adoption, while others have restricted or overturned laws that allow their citizens to be adopted by parents in other countries. These restrictions and program discontinuations have largely resulted from corruption and cases of neglect, abandonment, and abuse of adopted children. Intercountry adoption practices are sometimes used to conceal human trafficking, which sees children ending up in the hands of kidnappers, pedophiles, and organized trafficking rings. Given these problems, international adoption has become a contentious and polarizing issue.
Intercountry adoption policies have occasionally been leveraged for their impact on international relations. For example, in 2012, Russian president Vladimir Putin banned Russian children from being adopted by American parents during a period of strained diplomatic interactions between the two countries. Putin passed the edict as part of a pushback against the United States for imposing sanctions on Russian government officials through the Magnitsky Act (2012), which prohibited certain Russian officials from entering the United States or using the American banking system.
Ethical and Legal Issues
Adoption poses a complex set of ethical and legal issues to both biological parents and adoptive parents. Child welfare officials work with biological parents as they move through the process of relinquishing their legal parental rights, but it is not always clear whether biological parents are doing so voluntarily or if they are being unduly influenced or coerced into it by other family members or loved ones. Ethical adoption practices also dictate that adoption agencies and biological parents disclose accurate, relevant information about the child’s background to the extent that it is legally permissible to do so, but this does not always happen in practice. For instance, biological parents or adoption agencies may withhold critical information about the child’s health or the presence or absence of certain genetic characteristics. Adoptive families are also theoretically subject to intensive screening practices, but screening protocols are not always carried out in full accordance with these principles, particularly in profit-driven private agency settings.
Adoptive parents and adopted children also commonly face issues surrounding disclosure and sibling relations. Parents must decide if and when to tell an adopted child about his or her status, and introducing an adopted child to a family with existing biological or adopted children can have negative impacts on family dynamics. Moreover, adopted children frequently express a desire to know more about their biological parents and personal history, particularly as they get older, but this can be contentious and difficult for all parties. The biological parents may not want any further contact with the child, or the child may learn things about his or her past or origins that he or she would retrospectively rather not know.
Another inherent risk is the possibility of adoption fraud, which is defined as the intentional misrepresentation of pertinent information by either the biological parents or the adoptive parents during the adoption process. In one 2016 case, a Florida woman extracted a reported $13,000 from a set of prospective adoptive parents even though she had miscarried. The fraud continued for months after the woman lost her child, and she was later accused of using the money to cover personal expenses. A similar recent case involved an Arizona woman who was sentenced to one hundred days in jail after defrauding a Boston couple that planned to adopt her baby of approximately $6,000. The fraudster continued to coax the defrauded couple into sending her money even after her twins were born and placed in foster care.
Cultural Issues
Adoption can also involve cultural issues, especially in cases of transracial adoption, which occurs when an adopted child and his or her adoptive parents come from different racial backgrounds. The adoption of Native American children into nonindigenous families has proven to be a similarly contentious issue. As in other cases of transracial adoption, critics of the practice point out that racial differences make it effectively impossible for adoptive parents to avoid disclosing the child’s adopted status, thus creating situations in which a child learns that he or she was adopted before developing sufficient emotional or mental maturity to process the implications of the revelation. In the United States, the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978) was passed to prioritize the placement of eligible Native American adoptees with other indigenous families to the greatest possible degree. The act also gives tribes the legal authority to manage child welfare cases involving community members.
The 2013 case of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, which reached the US Supreme Court, highlighted an additional issue surrounding the transracial adoption of Native American children. Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl centered on an infant girl of mixed-race parentage with a Native American father. The girl was adopted by a South Carolina couple, but due to a processing error that saw his surname misspelled on an information request form, the girl’s father was never notified of his daughter’s adoption and had never consented to it. He went on to seek custody of the child, who had been placed with adoptive parents, citing the terms of the Indian Child Welfare Act. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the girl’s adoptive parents by a margin of five to four.
The adoption of children by same-sex couples has also emerged as a controversial topic. Though Supreme Court rulings have made the adoption of children by same-sex couples legal throughout the United States, many court battles were fought over the issue before it was settled. One high- profile 2015 case, Campaign for Southern Equality v. Mississippi Department of Human Services, challenged the state’s statutory ban on same- sex adoption on behalf of numerous couples who were seeking to adopt a child. The case ended with a Mississippi district court banning the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services from enforcing the state’s existing ban. The 2017 Supreme Court case of Pavan v. Smith resolved the question of whether it is unconstitutional for a state to stop a same-sex couple from being listed as an adopted child’s parents on the child’s birth certificate. In a six to three ruling, the Supreme Court found that preventing such a listing violated the parents’ constitutional rights under the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause. However, some state legislatures have sought to write legislation that will allow faith-based adoption agencies to refuse to adopt children to LGBTQ parents on religious grounds.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Adoption." Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2018. Opposing Viewpoints in Context,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/PC3010999169/OVIC?u=faye20607&sid=OVIC&xid=8c22dc1a. Accessed 12 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|PC3010999169