Foreign Adoptions
Madonna, as you might have heard, is in the process of adopting a baby from Malawi. The one-year-old boy named David was flown last month to London. The American pop music star and her husband have a home there. Madonna is married to film director Guy Ritchie and is the biological mother of two children.
Madonna recently gave millions of dollars to support efforts to help orphans(孤儿)in Malawi. The southern African country is one of the poorest nations in the world.
Madonna says she wants to give David a better life. But some people criticized her for adopting a child whose father is still alive; even if the father did agree to it. And some child psychologists said children do best if they are well cared for in their own homeland.
The adoption is not yet final. The Lilongwe High Court gave Madonna and her husband temporary custody of David on October twelfth. The court order is for eighteen months. During that period a social worker will report on how the boy is being cared for.
A committee of sixty-seven human rights groups in Malawi argued that adoption laws there normally bar international adoptions. The committee has brought a legal action to make sure if Madonna received special treatment.
Madonna says she did not. But she has supporters. They include Jane Aronson, an influential expert on adoptions and head of the World Orphans Foundation, She says Madonna is offering David a new life.
More than two thirds of people in the United States who adopt children from other countries are not famous. They are people like Miriam and John Baxter of Bethesda, Maryland. The Baxters have a biological daughter named Olivia. Olivia was almost eight when her new brother, Matthew, arrived. The Baxters adopted Matthew from an orphanage(孤儿院) in South Korea.
They had thought about adopting a baby from China. But their plans changed five years ago after the World Trade Center attack in New York. A nearby office where they needed to get a document to satisfy Chinese adoption requirements was closed temporarily.
Waiting for the office to re-open would have delayed the process another month. And the Baxters already faced a year of waiting.
Then they learned that it might be faster to try to adopt a child from South Korea. Miriam Baxter has a brother and sister who were adopted from there. And, in her words, "we wanted the child so much, we just could not wait any longer."
There are many older children in the United States who could be adopted. Finding permanent homes for them is difficult, especially if they have physical or emotional problems. People who want to adopt usually want a child who is healthy and very young.
In nineteen seventy-three, the Supreme Court ruled that women have a right to end unwanted pregnancies. So, for more and more Americans looking to adopt, the answer is to look in another country. The State Department approved immigrant visas for eight thousand foreign adopted children in nineteen eighty-nine. By last year the number was almost twenty-three thousand.
The Census Bureau says two and a half percent of all children in-the United States are adopted. Of those, about thirteen percent are foreign-born.
Years ago, few unmarried Americans or couples older than forty adopted babies. Today, it is much more common for single people to adopt. The same is true of older married couples and older singles. Some couples of the same sex also adopt children.
Adoption laws differ from state to state. People who want to adopt must show they can provide a safe and loving home. But sometimes they have to wait years until an adoption agency can find a child for them. So they might seek a private adoption—for example, by paying a woman to have a baby for them.
By some estimates, the avera
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