Appropriate Child For The Adoptive Parents example essay topic

... The birth of a girl has never been a cause for celebration in China, and stories of peasant farmers drowning newborn girls in buckets of water have been commonplace for centuries. Now, however, as a direct result of the one-child policy, the number of baby girls being abandoned, aborted, or dumped on orphanage steps is unprecedented. Adopting Internationally Adoption is procedure by which people legally assume the role of parents for a person who is not their biological child. Adopted children become full members of their adopted family and have the same legal status as biological children. Although the majority of people who adopt are married couples, many single people also adopt.

Many people seek to adopt when they discover that they cannot give birth to biological children. Others adopt children to add new members to a biological children. Many people adopt simply to give a home and family to children who might not otherwise have them. Likewise, children become available for adoption for a variety of reasons. Some children are orphans. Somebiologicalparents make arrangements for their children to be adopted because they cannot care for them due to illness or personal problems.

Other children are abandoned by their biological parents (Adoption, CD-ROM). Adoption is a common practice throughout the world and throughout history. However, laws regulating adoption vary from country to country. People seeking to adopt in a country other than the one in which they live, a process known as international adoption, should familiarize themselves with the laws of that country.

Similarly, although every province recognizes adoption, provincial aspects of adoption vary. INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION significant number of people seek to adopt children from other countries, a process known as international adoption. People seek to adopt abroad for many 1 reasons. Many people want to adopt an infant or a very young child.

Somealsohope to adopt children who share their ethnic heritage. Such prospective parents may find a shortage of suitable children available for adoption in Canada. Publicity regarding the availability of infants in a particular country also encourages some people to seek to adopt there. Many people adopt abroad because domestic adoptions, especially fears that the birth mother will refuse to proceed with an arranged adoption after she gives birth to the child.

In a few, well-publicized cases in the United States, biological parents have attempted to reclaim their child years after it was adopted, adding to the worries (Adoption Services, Internet). Three methods can be used for international adoption. The majority of prospective adoptive parents use an adoption agency. Others in Canada. Some prospective parents choose to establish direct communication with contacts in a particular country.

Many provincial-licensed adoption agencies place children from other countries. These agencies the adoption laws of foreign countries and usually maintain contacts many children are waiting to be adopted. Agencies send information about the adoptive parents directly to their contacts, who then locate an appropriate child for the adoptive parents (Adoption, CD-ROM). Facilitators in the United States also help prospective parents abroad. Facilitators usually have foreign contacts who help resolve legal issues pertaining to adoption in a particular country. In some cases, facilitators travel 2 to other countries and directly assist in adoptions.

Prospective parents can also work with facilitators in another country or deal directly with foreign institutions, such as orphanages (Adoption, CD-ROM). People who wish to adopt abroad must follow the procedures and requirements of the Canadian Citizenship and Immigration (CCI). Before an go forward, the results of a home study and extensive documentation to both the and the courts in the child's country of origin. Required documentation usually includes birth certificates, marriage certificates, letters of employment, medical letters, and personal references (Americans Adopting, Internet). The legal process in the child's country of origin results in either a full and final adoption or a guardianship, in which the prospective parent is granted custody of the child until the adoption is finalized. If a full and final adoption has been approved in the child's country of origin and the Canadian Citizenship and Immigrationhaspermitted the child to enter Canada, parents can usually get a Canadianbirthcertificate and citizenship papers without readopting the child in the Canada.

However, the Canadian Citizenship and Immigration recommend readopting in Canada. When a guardianship is established in the child's country of origin, prospective parents must complete normal pre-adoption procedures, such as, in their local county court in order to obtain a visa for the child. The adoption must be finalized when the child comes to live in Canada. All adoptive parents worry about the health of their adopted children.

Inmanydeveloping nations and in some countries of Eastern Europe, poor lead to health problems among young children. Medical records may be 3 unavailable or incomplete. Prospective parents should consult a health of the child they are seeking to adopt prior to the adoption. After a child has been adopted from abroad, parents should try to find a pediatrician with the medical conditions in the country in which the child was born. Many local hospitals in Canada have doctors on staff who are well-versed in this area. TRANS RACIAL ADOPTIONS Additional issues arise when adopted children come from a different adoptive parents.

Adoptions in which the adoptive parents and are of different races, known as trans racial adoptions, pose special difficulties. When children belong to a different race than either of their parents, others in the community very quickly become aware that the children are adopted. Transracialadoptive families often face everything from innocent curiosity to prejudice. Many adoptive parents educate themselves about their child's o that they can offer their child support and help build self-esteem (Wong, Globe and Mail). Some people believe trans racial adoptions should be allowed only as a last resort or banned altogether. Other groups feel just as strongly that race should not be consideration in the placement of children.

In 1994 United States Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act, which forbid adoption agencies waiting lists to match children with adoptive families of similar ethnic or racial heritage. However, the act permits agencies to consider ethnicity and race a sone factor in determining the best home for a child (Frequently, Internet). 4 ONE CHILD POLICY IN CHINA In 1979 China initiated the 'One-Child Population Control Policy'. Thismeantthat their could only be one child per couple. Women's menstrual monitored, and they had to have there pregnancies authorized. All unauthorized pregnancies were terminated by abortion when detected regardless of what stage the pregnancy was in...

They use forceps to crush the babies skull, or they inject a pure formaldehyde into the soft cap of the baby's head during or upon birth. These are their means of 'aborting' fully developed babies. Drowning in rural areas. All women with one child have a mandatory insertion of an IUD. A one size large steel 'O' ring IUD is used. There is mandatory sterilization of couples with two or more children (One-Child, Internet).

This policy created a high rate of infanticide and abandonment of female babies, because in accordance with Chinese tradition, daughters join the families upon marriage and are seldom able to offer support or care for their parents in old age. By 1990 thousands of ultrasounds machines were being importedtoChina. Domestic factories in China began manufacturing at the rate of 10000 a year. In 1993 authorities banned the use of ultrasound for the purpose of sex selection, but the ban seems to be virtually unenforceable. Reports of sex ratios at birth for some areas has been 300 males to 100 females. A 1991 article in a Shanghaijournalwarned that if the sex ratios continued to rise, by the end of the century China would have an army of bachelors numbering some 70 million strong (One-Child, Internet).

Official data on abortions show the annual number of abortions increased between 1985 and 1990. Official data on birth control surgeries after 1990 are not 5 available. In 1983, the all-time peak year, family planning work teams carried out 21 million sterilization's, 18 millions IUD insertions, and 14 million abortions (79 percent of the 21 million sterilization's performed were performed on women) (One-Child, Internet). Women who resist abortions for unauthorized pregnancies are harassed, visited repeatedly, and sometimes held by family planning workers until they comply.

Night raids have occurred to capture women hiding or trying to flee from the. If a couple does have an unauthorized child the fines are so big that they often exceed the family's total income. The illegal children (unauthorized births) are not entered on the population register so the child receives no medical benefits, no grain rations, no opportunity to attend school, and no chance for employment (One-Child, Internet). A man and his child stand in front of a billboard that advocates a policy of one child per family in China. The Chinese government's campaign for one-child families, along with its promotion of birth control and late marriages, has slowed the growth of China's huge population (China, CD-ROM). 6 (China, CD-ROM) Because of this policy there are an exceptional numbers of children to be adopted.

THE DYING ROOMS OF CHINESE ORPHANAGES The birth of a girl has never been a cause for celebration in China, and stories of peasant farmers drowning newborn girls in buckets of water have been commonplace for centuries. It is impossible to overstate both how crucial the one-child policy is to China's stability and how rigidly it is enforced. Everyone agrees that if the population, already at 1.2 billion, is allowed to grow, the result will be economic collapse, environmental ruin, famine (Hilditch, World Press Review). 7 But while most Chinese citizens can accept the mathematics of the problem, the population continues to rise. Every year, some 21 million children a reborn.

In March, President Jiang Zemin was forced to set new, tougher population control policies and tougher punishments for those who ignore them (Driedger, Maclean's). According to author Steven W. Mosher, coerced abortions, sometimes the baby is due, are now commonplace, as are reports of enforced sterilization and of hospitals fatally injecting second babies shortly after their birth. This means, Mosher says, that 'however overcrowded China's orphanages are now with baby girls, the problem is going to get worse. Very much worse. ' For Kate Blewett, producer of The Dying Rooms, the investigation was the heart of darkness, 'I did not know human beings could treat children with such contempt, such cruelty.

Some of the orphanages we visited were little more than death camps. ' (Hilditch, World Press Review). To protect the Chinese who helped the team that gained access to orphanage, the documentary does not name any of the orphanages. In one, a dozen or so baby girls sit on bamboo benches in the middle of a courtyard. Their wrists and ankles a retied to the armrests and legs of the bench. A row of plastic buckets is lined up beneath holes in their seats to catch their urine and excrement.

The children will not be moved again until night, when they will be lifted out and tied to their beds. They have no stimulation, nothing to play with, no one to touch them. Inone scene, a handicapped older boy walks up to one of the girls tied to a bench and begins head-butting her relentlessly. The girl doesn't move or make a sound. Such is the lack of 8 stimulation for the children that few of them will ever learn to speak. An endless rocking is the only exercise, the only stimulation, the only pleasure in their lives.

An official of the orphanage says the orphanage had some 400 inmates last year. They were kept five to a bed in one airless room. The summer temperatures soared to around 100 degrees. In a couple of weeks, 20 percent of the babies died. ' If 80 children died last summer, there should be 320 left,' Dr. Blewett says to one of the assistants, 'but there don't appear to be more than a couple of dozen children here. Where are the others?' The girl replies: 'They disappear.

If I ask where they go, I am just told they die. That's all. I am afraid to ask any more. ' (Driedger, Maclean's). Brutal neglect is the common theme of many of the orphanage scenes. Inone sequence, a lame child sits on a bench near the orphanage pharmacy.

It is full of medicines, but none of the staff can be bothered to administer them. The child rocks his skinny body listlessly back and forth... The worst orphanage is in Guangdong, one of the richest provinces in China. When the documentary team arrived, there were no children to be seen or heard. Then from under one of the blankets laid over a cot, there was the sound of crying.

Lifting the blanket and unwrapping a tied bundle of cloth, their was a baby girl. The last layer of her swaddling was a plastic bag filled with urine and feces. The next cot was the same, and the next and the next. Many of the children had deep lesions where the string they we retied with had cut into their bodies. One child, described by staff as " normal,' was suffering from vitamin B and C deficiencies, acute liver failure, and severe impetigo on her scalp. All the non-handicapped children were girls.

9 The Chinese government was approached several times, both in Beijing and atitsLondon embassy, to provide comment or an interview for the film. Eventually, the documentary's producers received a two-page letter from the London embassy. ' The so-called dying rooms do not exist in China at all,' the letter read. ' Our investigations confirm that those reports are vicious fabrications made out of ulterior motives. The contemptible lie about China's welfare work in orphanages cannot but arouse the indignation of the Chinese people, especially the great number who are working hard for children's welfare. ' (Adoption, CD-ROM).

The day after the program was shown, questions were raised in the House of Commons about China's one-child policy and its dying rooms. Predictably, however, no one has raised the subject of providing massive aid for a collapsed and famine-ridden China in the event of its population rising to, say, 2.4 billion if this generation is allowed to have two children per family. ' We don't want to criticize the one-child policy,' says Dr. Blewett. 'Butte want to focus on the problems it is causing which can be solved.

' The documentary features a tour of a privately run, locally funded orphanage where the children are happy, healthy, and loved. 'We were very keen to show what can be done with the right attitude,' says Blewett. 'No child should suffer the kind of neglect we filmed. ' (Hilditch, World Wide Press).