A reader recently asked two excellent questions about persons with serious health conditions adopting. I am paraphrasing the essence of her questions here, as I understand them.
1) Are agencies really allowed to ask about all this? What about health privacy laws?
Most, if not all, of the forms I’ve seen will ask this question. (As well as questions about your debts, your marital communication, amount in your bank account, how you get along with your parents and many other things that wouldn’t be legal in a job interview, at least not in the U.S.)
2)Does having a serious medical condition automatically disqualify a person from adopting?
I do not believe a serious medical condition would automatically disqualify one for adoption. It may affect your prospects of doing a certain type of adoption.
In domestic infant adoption, the relinquishing birthmother usually participates in choosing the parents. I can imagine health issues being a problem for some of them. Many people don’t know much about conditions such as cancer–that some types of cancer are much more curable and less likely to recur than others, for example—or chronic but non-life-threatening illness, or depression.
This doesn’t mean a person with such a condition won’t be chosen by someone to parent her child. Some mothers have been comfortable placing their infants with a single parent, a gay couple, an older couple, a couple who already has several children. However, these adoptive parents tend to wait longer for a child because not all mothers will be open to considering these placements.
Children who are or may be eligible for adoption from the child welfare system may have often experienced disruptions (although there are babies placed at birth in a foster-adoptive placement, in which the foster parents agree to adopt the baby if the birth family cannot get their life together in the next 12-18 months.) Nevertheless, foster care agencies are public agencies and so cannot discriminate against adoptive parents merely based on age, weight, or health factors which don’t prevent them from caring for the child. There is a great need for foster-adoptive parents and often agencies may be more willing to consider parents with special circumstances than private infant or international agencies might be.
My next blog will address the possible impact of health issues for parents looking to adopt from other countries.