Pros of Domestic Adoption

* It is more affordable due to reduced costs on travel and additional paperwork, even nonexistent if done through foster care.

* There is a chance of getting a newborn; you may be matched up with a birth mom who has not yet given birth.

* You will receive more detailed and accurate information about the biological parents medical information

* Most of the leg work is done by the adoption agency representatives and/or case workers, you will not be required to spend as much time on the adoption process.

Cons of Domestic Adoption

* Requirements for domestic adoptions are quite strict and qualifications for adopting families are also high.

* The biological mother may change her mind or unexpectedly refuse to give her child up for adoption. I believe there is a restriction on when she can do this, but that is not enough of a safeguard for most hopeful parents.

This can cause delays in the process or the whole adoption may be terminated. Unfortunately, this occurs more often during the final stages of the adoption process just when the adopting family is expecting a child.

*There are fewer children available for domestic adoption, especially if the adoptive parents prefer a child from a minority group.

International Adoption

When the adoptive parents live in a different country than the birth parents it is referred to as an international adoption and there is little or no contact between the parents.

Pros of International Adoption

* There are plenty of children available for adoption in many countries, both healthy and special needs.

* The requirements and qualifications for international adoption are less strict than other types of adoption; your chances of adopting are greater.

* You have a better chance at being eligible to adopt and once your home study is approved you can rest assured that you will have the child of your dreams.

* You don’t have to worry about whether the biological mother will change her mind. These children are most often orphaned. All you have to do is accept your referral of a child and before long they will be in your arms. (On average this process takes between 12-18 months)

Cons of International Adoption

* Be prepared for lots of red tape, delays as well as an increased potential for fraud. Some countries may not be politically stable, eg. you don’t need the government changing hands in the middle of your adoption process.

* Be prepared to travel to the country of your adoptive child. You may even be required to make more than one trip or stay for a few weeks at a time. You will need to learn the child’s culture and customs, maybe even their language

* You will not get a newborn because you will not be made aware of a child for adoption until after they are born. So by the time all the administrative hurdles are cleared and they are finally united with you and your family, they will likely be at least four to six months, maybe even a little older.

* Because the majority of these children have lived their first months or years in orphanages where the living conditions are less than decent, they may experience some developmental set backs.

This is not necessarily the case with all children and if they do have delays, chances are they will often rebound to the norm once they have a loving and supportive family to attend to their needs. Some people believe that, “Love doesn’t conquer all” but I say, “it certainly helps”.

* There may be no record of the family medical history and this could make you feel uncomfortable. You could always turn to modern medical testing to help. You will however, receive the child’s medical history when you get your referral.

The pros and cons of adoption have the potential to discourage the adopting family in many ways. But with an open mind and heart, overcoming the dilemma of adoption will definitely prove to be worthwhile.

A child being deserted by his parents can cause a severe trauma that will mirror through every aspect of child’s life. The baby will experience the mother’s loss as psychological death of his mother.  There will never be closure.

The baby feels he is abandoned and results to a lifelong inability to trust anyone. This experience will gradually affect him all through out his life. That is the reason why most of the adopted child fails to trust anyone because of the fear that he may be left alone again.

The baby perpetually  bothers as to why he wasn’t kept by his mom and will blame himself for not being good enough to be loved. Many adopted adult has this kind of burden that deters a good relationship to others. The child may also feel melancholic and remorseful as if he did something bad that decides his mom to leave  him.

As days pass by and as the child grows up, he may feel that he doesn’t belong to the family where he currently resides and will suffer self-esteem. He may decide not to get involve to any family activities and may prefer to be alone all by himself. He will feel like an outcast within the family who adopted him.

The child thinks of his mother and the reason behind why he was abandoned. This makes sense because the child longs for his mother and misses her terribly!  There is a wound there that can never be filled by anyone other than the mother!  This could cause the child to have trouble concentrating on his school work.  The child may be labeled a “dreamer” or a “bad student” which will harm his chances to succeed in life.  the adopters might not understand the reason for the child’s lack of concentration and this might cause him to be misdiagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).  If misdiagnosed, the child will be forced to take medication he will not need.

The child will loose his true identity while the adopters will try to force him to be like them.  The reason for this is so that the adopters won’t be reminded that the child isn’t really theirs.  The adopters would want the true traits that the child inherits from his family to go away.  The child will not be allowed to be himself.

The child will have no sense of his past which will make it difficult to envision his future.

The child may suppress his real feelings and live an emotionally-numb life in order to survive the tragedy of the separation from his mother compounded by his adoption.

As the child becomes an adolescent he will have great difficulty establishing a sense of self because he will have no sense of his true history or heritage.

As the child becomes an adult, he may have trouble choosing a career and a mate due to his fear of committment and abandonment.

The child’s adopters may not acknowledge that raising an adopted child is different from raising a child of their own.  The adopters want to pretend that the child they raised is not adopted but their own child so they force the child to live a lie by wiping out his past and changing his name and forcing the child to become like the adopters rather than being allowed to be his own person. They will further burden the child by telling him that he should forget about his natural parents and be greatful that they adopted him and gave him a home because the natural parents did not.

Nothing anyone says or does can ever make up for the loss of the child’s first family!

The mother will not be able to change the past and undo the lifelong adverse effects of adoption on her child!

Once there were two expectant mothers.
One carried and cared for you beneath her beating heart
She became your Birthmother.
The other carried the hope of you within her.
She became your Mom.
As the days passed, and you grew bigger and stronger,
Your Birthmother knew that she could not give you all you needed after
your birth.
Meanwhile, your Mom was ready and waiting for you.

One day your Birthmom and your Mom found each other.

They looked into each other’s eyes and saw a friend.
Your Birthmom saw the life your Mom could give you.
Your Mom saw how much your Birthmom loved and cared for you.

They decided that what you needed was both kinds of love in your life.

So now you have two families,
One by birth, the other by adoption.

And you have a home where you can get:
your questions answered,
your boo boos bandaged,
your heartaches soothed,
And much needed hugs.

And a place where you can find:
answers to your questions,
your image in the mirror,
a part of yourself,
And much needed hugs.

Two different kinds of families
Two different kinds of love
Both a part of you.

Surrogate mother is a woman who agrees to bare a child in her womb, in exchange for a fee or agreed upon contract for a couple who are childless due to infertility. Often, the surrogate mother is the biological mother of the child, conceiving it by means of artificial insemination with sperm from the husband. The other kind of surrogate motherhood is what we called in vitro fertilization wherein using the wife’s egg and the husband’s sperm, and the resulting embryo is implanted in the surrogate mother’s uterus. Thus, the surrogate mother is not genetically related to the child.

For over one hundred years artificial insemination was used as a way of managing male infertility that kept the family intact and allowed children to be born to a married couple. Artificial insemination was generally kept secret. Couples did not tell friends, family, or the children themselves that donor sperm was used, thus maintaining the fiction of biological paternity.

Though stories of surrogate motherhood, often with familial surrogates, date back two thousand years, in 1976 the lawyer Noel Keane arranged the first formal agreement between a couple and a surrogate mother in the United States. The marketing of “surrogacy” developed as a solution to female infertility. Brokers entered the scene, hiring women to become pregnant via artificial insemination with the sperm of the husband of the infertile woman. In 1986 surrogacy came to national attention with the case of “Baby M.” In this case, the woman hired as a surrogate, Mary Beth Whitehead, later refused to relinquish the child. After a protracted court battle, in which Whitehead’s parental rights were stripped and then replaced, the hiring couple won custody of the baby, but Whitehead remained the legal mother with visitation rights.

The Center for Surrogate Parenting (CSP) estimates a cost of $56,525 for traditional surrogacy, in which artificial insemination is used, and a cost of $69,325 if another woman’s egg is used. Approximately $15,000 of these fees are paid to the surrogate herself for the time and sacrifice of the pregnancy. When surrogacy agreements first surfaced in the mid-1970s, there was no payment for surrogate motherhood, and it tended to involve middle-class and blue-collar couples, with friends and sisters helping each other. Once payment became the norm, the demographic changed: “the majority of the couples remain largely upper-middle-class people, whereas the majority of the surrogates are working class women”

That surrogacy has become a business has not meant that contracting couples do not value the surrogate or that the surrogate does not care about the child or the couple. Very careful screening—approximately 95 percent of potential surrogates are rejected—ensures that situations similar to that of Mary Beth Whitehead do not happen. Surrogates are chosen for their commitment. In the only ethnographic study of surrogacy, Helena Ragoné found that couples adopted one of two strategies in dealing with their surrogate. “Egalitarians” wanted to maintain a relationship with the surrogate mother and did not see her as a means to an end. Since in all of Ragoné’s cases the children were still quite young, it is difficult to know how this would play out. “Pragmatists” simply dropped the relationship with the surrogate, taking the child as theirs, and considering the payment sufficient acknowledgment of the role of the surrogate.

Embryo donation is a form of a third party reproduction. During IVF treatments, couples may produce many embryos in their attempt to conceive. These embryos are cryopreserved or placed in a cold storage for use as needed. If the couple conceives without using all the stored embryos, they may choose to have the remaining embryos destroyed, to donate them for research or implantation, or to make them available for adoption.

Embryo donation is legally considered a property transfer and not an adoption. The term “Embryo Adoption” refers to the procedural elements of the embryo transfer entered into willingly by both the genetic and “adoptive” parents and not the legal classification. Legally, embryo adoption is the same as embryo donation.

Genetic parents entering an embryo adoption program are offered the benefits of selecting the adoptive parents from the agency’s pool of prescreened applicants. Embryo ownership is transferred directly from the genetic parents to the adoptive parents. Genetic parents may be updated by the agency when a successful pregnancy is achieved and when a child(ren) is/are born. The genetic parents and adoptive parents may negotiate their own terms for future contact between the families.

Prospective adoptive parents entering a program complete an application, traditional adoption homestudy, adoption education, health checks and in some cases, depending on the requirements of both the homestudy and placement agencies, court certification of adoption eligibility. Their completed paperwork and fees are submitted to the placement agency, which reviews their file and matches them to genetic parents with similar preferences including desired level of openness post-adoption. Genetic and prospective parents are then given the chance to approve the match. Once all parties agree, the embryo is transferred to the adoptive mother’s clinic for a frozen embryo transfer.

None of the procedures involved with embryo adoption by either the genetic or adopting parents are legal requirements of embryo transfer. The process is entered in to willingly by both sets of parents because of the added safeguards, knowledge and communication offered to both parties by the system.

In the world of adoption, embryo adoption is currently our new frontier, brought about by new and newer technologies. But is it the final frontier? Changing family structures, new attitudes and ideas about “love and marriage,” and a population seeking to become parents later in life are also spurring us onward to new ways of thinking about old ideas.

The question each of us will have to answer for herself or himself is, “just because I can do it, should I do it?” And since the topic is adoption, and adoption is about children, will our answers reflect the best interests of our present and future children?

Child abandonment is the practice of abandoning offspring outside of legal adoption.The abandoned child is called a foundling or throwaway. According to a reliable statistics, one baby is abandoned every week. A figure that has trebled in the past decades. Causes include many social and cultural factors as well as mental illness.

One factor that leads to child abandonment is teenage pregnancy. Teenage pregnancy is defined as a teenage or underage girl becoming pregnant.This pregnancy of teenagers are a mere result of the gratification of sexual urges. That pregnancy might not happen only if studies were prioritized rather than having relationships with the opposite sex. No premarital sex, no early pregnancy. Worst thing about this is that it is the child that will suffer. If not aborted, they are abandoned by their biological parents.

Another factor is the family break-up. Family break-ups happen after a long period of misunderstandings, fighting and unhappiness. Sometimes they happen suddenly and it is hard to understand why there needs to be change at all. Children are mostly affected by this kind of situation. If both their mother and father decided to a divorce and one cannot raise their child alone, tendency is that they will abandon their child. This child will become homeless and found himself alone.

Poverty is also another factor that fates to child abandonment. Persons in cultures with poor social welfare systems who are not financially capable of taking care of a child are more likely to abandon him/her. Political conditions, such as difficulty in adoption proceedings, may also contribute to child abandonment, as can the lack of institutions, such as orphanages, to take in children whom their parents cannot support. Societies with strong social structures and liberal adoption laws tend to have lower rates of child abandonment.

Psychologists believe that even short-term abandonment can damage a child’s emotional and social development. “Even short separations could have a negative effect on the child’s ability to form close relationships,” said Dr Michael Boulton, a child psychologist at the University of Keele. “Babies often form attachments with their mother before birth. They know their mother’s smell and turn to them when anxious or distressed. If they suddenly find they have gone it can be very damaging.”

Dr Boulton said that mothers who abandon their children normally do so under desperate circumstances. “Having one’s first child is the most stressful experience someone can go through. Young mothers can be vulnerable, especially if they are alone and do not have the experience or social support to cope.”