The Future of International Adoption

This is an article on Rainbow kids called The Future of International Adoption. It seems bad news for families seeking to adopt healthy new born babies. From my observation the future is moving towards Special needs children getting adopted. We saw this same pattern in Korea. At first, thousands of "healthy" Korean babies where available, then more single moms decided to keep their children, and the Korean people also began to adopt the other children. Now basically only SN kids are available from Korea. I suppose you could see this as a bad thing if you had your heart set on adopting a healthy Korean baby. Over all I see it as good. Adoption is not the very best thing for a child. When a child is adopted Internationally, they lose their birth family as well as their birth culture. Sure they gain a great deal too...but they lose these very important things. When a child can be adopted with in their birth nation, they can keep their language and culture (a shared culture). We love China, and Thailand at our house, but that is not the same thing as really giving our children a pure cultural identity. In fact it gets very complicated at our house because I'm American, and Juergen is German. Our kids end up a little of everything. We will see how confused they become when their identity matters more as teenagers? Anyway, you all know I'm a big advocate for SN kids. I personally think it's good if adoption moves in this direction. I'm very sorry that it's harder for single people to adopt. Although I do think it's better for a child to grow up with a Mom and Dad, I know many singles that do an amazing job as single parents. I think it's far more important for a child to have a parent then none! Single people who adopt must go through the same process as married couples adopting. I see the SN kids waiting much longer for families because they know longer allow singles to adopt in China. I hope this changes.