I have been reading Joel's blog about his position on pro-choice vs. pro-"life". Great, visionary, albeit unlikely to ever happen. Then I read in one of my women's groups that one of the ladies and her husband in Australia had decided to adopt another child. She had three before her body gave out and they had wanted at least 4. When I read this email from her my first thoughts were of Joel and his vision of how it should be. This one is for you Joel...
"Well, today I rang the department that organises our state adoption services, and found out a few surprising things! It seems that here in my state, and most others as well, they almost never really 'adopt' out kids anymore... Instead, they are placed with a family under a 'permanent care order' from the courts. So, it's like you really do adopt the child into your family, but they keep their original name (including surname) and the birth family has supervised (my us) visitation rights to the child on a schedule set up by the Department on Human Services (that run all this)... And they almost never take in newborns... The children they give out to families are usually at least 12 months old, usually a little older... and they have some up to 10 years old. However, because of the age of my existing kids, with V being the youngest at eight years old, the oldest child that would be placed with us would be six years old, as they prefer them to be at least two years younger than any existing children in the family. So, we could end up with a child anything from 12 months old to six years old. The other thing she stressed was that these are usually children that have been taken away from or given up by families with traumatic backgrounds... such as drug or alcohol backgrounds, domestic abuse, and things like that... Which also means, there could be behavioural, psychiatric or any other problems with the child when we get it... depending on the abuse it suffered with the birth family, and that we would have to be prepared to deal with that as it develops. Even a child as young as 12 months can be effected by what it has experienced, and we have to be prepared to deal with that. After all this, I was still happy to at least go ahead with the preliminary steps of the process, but I'm not sure how Jason will feel about it all, so told her I would ring back tomorrow after discussing all this with Jason. I'm hoping that he will at least agree to have the initial sit down session with one of the department staff and have a question and answer session with them before completely making up his mind if he changes it at all after all of this... One thing I was surprised about though was the amount of children to families ratio. They only have around 10 to 15 kids to place each year, which isn't a lot so I thought we would be in for a long wait... but then she said they only get three to five families a year wanting to take children on... Now that REALLY surprised me! Anyway, I have to talk to J about it all tonight, and then I'll see what happens from there."
From another email:
"Here they try and encourage mothers to hold onto their children for as long as possible... offer all kinds of support and counselling, and only after months of trying will they finally take the kid from her... She said she's only had one baby given up for complete adoption in the last four years in our state!"
at 8:46 AM :: ~#~
