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Adoption Process

Introduction

It is important to know what are adoption and its process, before going taking the step of adopting any child. Adoption is a form of fictive association in which an individual or a couple assumes the parental status of a child who is frequently not biologically related. In legal adoption, the biological parents relinquish all legal rights to the child; these rights got transferred to the adoptive parents. Because of the permanent and legally binding nature of adoption, the child got socially recognized as “belonging” to the newly constituted family unit and theoretically acquires the same status as the other family members, regardless of whether ties are established on the basis of biological reproduction or not. Formal adoption differs significantly from other forms of childcare in which the child got raised outside of the biological parent child dyad, such as guardianship and crisis and voluntary fostering, as such less formal care systems allow children to inherit from the biological parents, and the biological parents retrain the right to veto decisions taken by the foster parents. In fostering, a child may at any time be removed from the foster care parents, whereas removal from adoptive parents is improbable because of the legalities surrounding adoptive kin.

Adoption has a history which starts from the Roman Empire. In Roman antiquity, adoption was the foundation of the aristocracy and served the primary purposes of strengthening political ties between wealthy kin groupings and providing a readily available pool of potential male heirs where no biological children existed who were able to assist in running estates. Although the emphasis, on adoption during the Roman Empire was evidently founded on the expansion of the family, with strictly political motives, adoption recorded in other parts of the world during this period, such as in Ireland and China, served the purpose of the continuation of religious and cultural rites that required male intervention; for example, ancestral veneration.

The process of adoption in Ireland was adopted from the history of Roman Empire. In the medieval period, strong emphasis was placed on biological genealogies, and ruling families who were unable to provide suitable evidence of a biological heir were routinely replaced (Tran, pp. 13-21). The move toward the prominence of the biological child parent dyad saw many children abandoned during medieval times; these children were often absorbed by churches, resulting in the establishment of the orphanage system. The increasing numbers ...