Adoptive parents are taking on enormous responsibility, both emotionally and financially. Quite frankly, they need as much disclosure as possible about the child's background and health to assure the best fit and be prepared.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges - the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws.
Adopting means opening your home, and heart, to a life you've never known. But there is nothing as richly rewarding as being an adoptive parent.
I say to everybody, 'Adoption is not for the faint of heart.'
As an adoptive parent myself of foster children, I have seen firsthand the glaring problems of the system currently facing this Nation.
We have so many kids in America to be adopted, but it's expensive. All these families that want children aren't able to because of the financial aspect, and that, to me, is just the most disgusting thing ever.
The process of open adoption is not discussed in the way it should be. Everyone I know who has adopted domestically has at least one tragic story. It was important to me to be able to describe those situations.
It can be a huge help to parents considering the adoption of an older child, when college is just a few years away, to know that there are post-adoption resources and specific financial assistance opportunities available to them.
The adoption process was not an easy one. The paperwork took nine months. It's a full-time thing!
The journey into adoption started for my parents, as it does with so many families: my mother and father desperately wanted to have kids, but they couldn't.
My mother is a realist, and she's had biological and adoptive children, and she said it's no different: No matter what, they're putting a stranger into your arms. You don't know them yet.