In a perfect world, parents would be able—emotionally, socially, economically, and in every other way—to raise their children. However, would-be adoptive parents of today should realize that, while steps toward this ideal are being taken, the world is unlikely to run out of need anytime soon.
Perhaps the closing of easier and better-known avenues to adoption will spur reforms to make adoption from state foster care systems in the U.S. easier. Perhaps it will spur development of programs to assist people who adopt sibling groups, older children, and children who have suffered abuse.
Perhaps it will encourage the adoption of children with special needs. Many adopters believe that they cannot parent a child with special needs. However, many of the special needs of children on “waiting child” lists have needs easily dealt with in a developed country, such as a cleft lip needing repair. Many children on “waiting child” lists will be exempt from the requirements that workers try to find them a family in their home country first. Many agencies also waive restrictions, such as age or marital, weight or health status, for people adopting waiting children.
Perhaps it will encourage the development of adoption programs in new countries. Many of the most desperate countries in the world today have no adoption programs, not because of lack of need, but because of lack of infrastructure. For example, in a war-torn country adoptions cannot take place until every effort has been made to find family members who may be searching for the child. In any country it takes staff time and communications to ensure that a child is in fact in need of a family, to do appropriate medical tests on the child, and to process adoption paperwork, passports and travel papers, and to have the infrastructure to handle increased travel by adoption workers and adoptive parents.
Author Cheri Register, author of Are Those Kids Yours?, may have said it best when she said (paraphrased) that adoptive parents deal with many paradoxes; we can deal with the paradox of working to promote international adoption while at the same time working to make it unnecessary.
Please see these related blogs:
Book Review: Are Those Kids Yours?
What Kinds of Special Needs Do Kids Awaiting Adoption Have?
Spotlight on African Adoptions
Interview: Adopting from Ethiopia and Liberia