Adoption

Adoption (as contrasted to guardianship) generally refers to the legal act of irreversible placement of a child with a qualifying party (adoptive parent). However, there are several different meanings of the word adoption, which encompasses parentage law in general. Each country has its own adoption and parentage laws — However, In the United States, official "adoption" is generally just one form of certification to the legal rights of parentage, more often initiated in foster or direct corporate adoption scenarios. It is important to note that most nations have promulgated legislation for uniform parentage which set out legal presumptions defining a parent. The Uniform Parentage Act (UPA) serves to provide a uniform legal framework for establishing paternity of minor children born to married and unmarried couples. It allows more than two people to be legally recognized as parents and is based on love, commitment, association and responsibility rather b by DNA alone.

Quotes

• The use of human adoptees to separate nature from nurture was first suggested by L. F. Richardson (1912–1913). During the early decades of the century, interest in adoptees first centered around the question of nature and nurture in human intelligence, which was stimulated in part by the development at that time of tests to measure intelligence. The adoption strategy involved a study of adoptees, their biologic parents, and their adoptive parents. As adoptions developed in the early years of this century, children generally separated at birth from biologic parents and birth environment were placed with nonrelatives who legally adopted and raised the children. In nature-nurture studies the focus of the investigation was usually a trait, behavior, or other characteristic—as in the early studies during the teens and twenties of this century when the focus was on intelligence. The crux of the technique involves comparisons between adoptees and both sets of parents, biologic and adoptive.
  • Remi J. Cadoret, "Chapter 2. Biologic Perspective of Adoptee Adjustment". The Psychology of Adoption. Oxford University Press. 1990. pp. 25–41. ISBN 0199772231.  (quote from pp. 26–27; edited by David M. Brodzinsky and Marshall D. Schechter)

• In English law, only children ... may be adopted ...
  Adoption is usually associated with the desire to nurture and protect the child as if one's own, and orphans or illegitimate children are the most frequent candidates for adoption. ...
  This has little in common with adoption among the Romans. ... Those given in adoption are mostly adults ...
  Very few adoptions are directly attested. Roman legal writings are one of our best sources of evidence for the actual practice of adoption among the Romans; inscriptions are insufficiently specific for certainty in detecting adoptions, and the adoptions mentioned in literary sources are numbered in tens rather than hundreds. There is even less direct evidence about the reasons for adoption. Of the adoptions that are mentioned in literary sources, those in successive imperial families are not entirely typical of Roman society at large, since they generally have a specifically dynastic and political purpose. As in private families, however, a definite preference is shown for adopting persons related by blood, or at least by marriage, where any are available. This is the case between Trajan and Hadrian, among the Antonines and the Severi, and is most evident among the Julio-Claudians.
  • Jane F. Gardner, Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life. Oxford University Press. 1998. pp. 114–115. ISBN 0-19-815217-5. 

• By the mid-2000s, Guatemala had overtaken other “sender” countries, including South Korea and Russia, until it was second only to China for the number of children adopted abroad – in absolute numbers, not adjusted for population. It was also the only country in the world to allow fully privatised adoptions from 1977 to 2008. At the height of the adoption boom, one in 100 children born in Guatemala was placed for adoption with a family abroad. “Some countries export bananas,” one lawyer who arranged private adoptions told the Economist in 2016. “We exported babies.”
  Guatemala is often cited as the worst-case scenario for what can go wrong when adoptions are commercialised and children are sent from poorer countries to wealthier ones.
  • Rachel Nolan, (4 Jan 2024)"Guatemala’s baby brokers: how thousands of children were stolen for adoption". The Guardian.

• ... if offspring of poor parents, adopted when newly born into well-to-do and well-educated families, turn out markedly different from the birthright members of those families then the presumption is that the dullness, of whichever is the duller, is a saturated growth. If on the other hand they all turn out much alike there is no proof that growth is saturated for any of them. There remains the presumption that the conditions have been much alike for all the members of one family and we get a more uncertain but still useful comparison of native worth, as pointed out above. A thorough study of a hundred such cases of adopted children would do more to reveal the nature of the poorer than statistics of 100,000 poor persons brought up in poverty.
  • Lewis Fry Richardson, (January 1913)"The measurement of mental “nature” and the study of adopted children". The Eugenics Review IV: 391–394. (quote from p. 394)

• While James and Henry Austen followed their father's footsteps to St John's College, Oxford, Edward (regarded, in the absence of the disabled George, as second in age) left Steventon for a new life, as the adopted heir to a wealthy, childless couple who could offer hims great prospects. Edward's benefactor was Thomas Knight of Godmersham in Kent, son of the kinsman who had presented the Steventon living to the Revd George Austen. The unofficial adoption of children for social advantage — so strange to twenty-first-century sensibilities — was by no means uncommon in Jane Austen's time: in her own fiction it would be central to the plot in two of her six novels, with Fanny Price being sent to live with the haughty Bertrams, in Mansfield Park, and Frank Churchill becoming the adoptive heir of his rich aunt in Emma. In Edward Austen's case, the arrangement worked well.
  • Josephine Ross, Jane Austen: A Companion. Rutgers University Press. 2003. pp. 10–11. ISBN 081353299X.  (1st edition, John Murray, 2002)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Adoption on Wikipedia