March 31, 2014

Adoption News Round-Up

Here’s a look at some of the interesting news stories making their way around the web this week:

A devastating reality of China’s one-child only policy: trapped parents are forced into giving their babies away on the internet. Although it has been deemed illegal and some sites shut down, websites like “‘A Home Where Dreams Come True’ said 37,841 babies had been adopted through its website from 2007 to August 2012.”

So it looks like Charlize is going from an adopted mom of 1, to a co-parent of 2!

The Huffington Post tells the story of an amazing family who adopted a little girl from Russia who turned out to have fetal alcohol syndrome and severe detachment disorders, a post-adoption realization that has changed their lives in every way. While they would never even consider re-homing their daughter, they do represent a faction of adoptive parents who could use help when certain aspects of their adoption perhaps don’t go as planned. Here, they share their dedicated efforts to help their daughter in every way possible, as well as how this adoption has impacted their lives.

These parents, whose child was diagnosed as exhibiting traits of a psychopath, left him at a hospital and demanded he receive treatment. He is now a ward of the state. If your child became a true danger in your own home, what would you want your options to be?

Do you think adoption changes the birthday experience? This birth mother, and author of the ChicagoNow blog Portrait of an Adoption, ruminates. “I’ve read articles written by older adoptees that describe their feelings of grief on their own birthdays, as they process again the separation from their first mothers.  Anniversaries of loss are notoriously tough.  Every Thanksgiving, as I count my blessings, I have a moment where I struggle to take a satisfying breath while remembering the terrible loss of our first baby.  I move on, I heal, but I don’t forget.”

This man was reunited with his mother, after she was forced to give him up for adoption in the 1950s. “Now I have a real mother at last. It feels amazing. When I realized on the phone I was laughing hysterically, then when I got off the phone I was hysterically crying. But in some ways I’m lucky I was adopted. I came to the U.S. and I’ve had a very successful life with a wonderful marriage and children.”