Adoption

4 Pages 1049 Words

Adoption

When a person decides to adopt, he takes the responsibility of raising a child who is not biologically his own. There are various reasons why people decide to adopt. Some say adoption is the best thing for certain children and many successful stories prove it to be true. However, there are also numerous tragic reports of adopted children being abused. “Basically, what adoption meant, and still means, is that someone (the adoptive couple) is promising to assume all responsibilities for taking care of someone else” (Powledge 4). How the adoptive parents go about raising the child is completely up to them. Although there are many different types of families in today’s society, one special kind of family that has become more and more common are the families created through adoption.
There are various and somewhat difficult processes and laws concerning adoption. New laws are being created year after year to make this process easier and the outcome positive. Adoption is not exactly new; the idea of adopting has been around for a long time. “The oldest written set of laws is the Babylonian Code of Hammarabi, which contains a long, sophisticated section on adoption” (Benet 23). It is hard to pin point when and how adoption first originated but Governor Sir William Philips of Massachusetts was considered the first adoptive father in the original thirteen colonies, he adopted in 1693 (Academic XXI). Americans adopt more than 100,000 kids a year (Harnack 13). This may seem like a large number of adoptive families but there are still over 400,000 kids left in foster care or in shelters. With this in mind it seems like Americans should be desperate to place the homeless kids in a family. But through trial and error it has become known that only certain families should be allowed to adopt and in some cases kids are better off left in foster care. “In 1917 Minnesota was the first state to require an agency or state welfare ...