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Adoption
Process |
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International Adoption is a very complicated and at
the same time is a very rewarding process. Thousands and thousands
families adopt every year from overseas. Orphans Adoption is proud
to be part of this exciting process and making some ground braking
changes in the way it’s done. Our agency solely focuses on the
family and its needs rather then simply on the paperwork alone like
many other agencies do. We stay close to our families through the
whole process of international adoption from start to very end.
From your fist phone call or email to Orphans Adoption you will be
working with a live person and will be able to talk on the phone
with a live person whenever you needed in order to resolve any
obstacles or confusions (we are not supporting automated phone
services, and if you call us during business hours there always be
a live person answering your phone on the other side with the
greeting from Orphans Adoption).
Learn more
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Adoption
Stories |
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Disruption is the term most commonly used for ending an adoption. While technically an adoption is disrupted only when it is abandoned by the adopting parent or parents before it is legally completed (an adoption that is reversed after that point is instead referred to in the law as having been dissolved), in practice the term is used for all adoptions that are ended (more recently, among families disrupting, the euphemism "re-homing" has become current). It is usually initiated by the parents via a court petition, much like a divorce, to which it is analogous.
While rarely discussed in public, even within the adoption community, the practice has become far more widespread in recent years, especially among those parents who have adopted from Eastern European countries, particularly Russia and Romania, where some children have suffered far more from their institutionalization than their parents were led to believe.
Reasons for disruption
Despite the intense and careful screening that most who wish to adopt children must go through, sometimes the adoption does not succeed. The child may have developmental or psychological issues that the parents cannot handle, had not been informed of prior to the adoption, or both. Or the parents may have had unrealistic expectations of the child, and they just may not get along.
Aftermath of disruption
A child who is disrupted is usually put first into foster care, pending placement with a new family, unless they reach the age of 18 and legally become adults before this happens. In more and more recent disruptions, however, the disrupting adopters have been in direct contact with a family wishing to adopt and the child can be directly adopted by the new family.
Some adoption agencies and facilitators have even begun specializing in post-disruption placements.
If the child was placed privately, either through a lawyer or an adoption agency, that party is usually required by law to ensure a second placement of the child. However, that requirement is not always enforced, and many parents of Eastern European adoptees in particular have found their agencies to be of no help in finding a new home for their children.
Some don't find state social-services agencies to be much help either, since they're already so overwhelmed and they would have to pay child support. An underground, possibly illegal, network has arisen in the U.S. over the past decade to help these parents disript their adoptions, authorities believe. Some of the people in this have taken in large amounts of children at the same time and have sometimes been arrested for child abuse and neglect.
Attitudes toward disruption
Few parents who have disrupted adoptions have been willing to talk about the process, since it carries a strong social stigma. It is seen by many as essentially legally sanctioned abandonment, especially since there is no corresponding legal procedure available for biological parents who find their children beyond their ability to handle.
Those who do disrupt and discuss it describe the experience as, unsurprisingly, extremely painful, almost like a death in the family, and shameful but ultimately worth it for both the parent and the child. This resolution, however, usually cannot be reached without undergoing extensive counseling and therapy.
High-profile disruptions
One of the rare public accounts of a disruption took place in 2000 when the CBS News program 48 Hours told the story of an Atlanta-area couple who ultimately decided to disrupt the adoption of their nine-year-old Russian-born daughter and return her to the orphanage in Moscow she had previously lived in. The girl had severe reactive attachment disorder and the family feared for their physical safety due to her increasing violence. Since the girl had not acquired U.S. citizenship, her treatment options for that were more limited than they might have been for a domestically-born child.
After she was returned to Russia, Frank Adoption Center, the Washington, D.C.-based agency that had originally placed her, was able to find a new American family willing to adopt her.
Statistics
Since no records are kept or required to be kept of how many disruptions occur beyond those filed in court, which are confidential, there is no way to be sure how many are occurring. Anecdotal evidence, however, has suggested that while they may have decreased as a whole through 1997 (when the Adoption and Safe Families Act was passed), for adoptions of Eastern-European born children they may well have increased, and thus the rate may have stabilized.
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review of what was known as of 2004 suggests that overall, 10-25% of adoptions are disrupted or dissolved, and that the rate tends to rise with the age of the child at adoption. It admitted that much data remains to be collected before any clear policies to prevent disruptions can be formualted and implemented.
A similar review in 2002 by the British Department for Education and Skills, done to lobby for changes in data collection procedures, also reported the lack of any centrally collected data to work from.
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