Closed adoption has its drawbacks and is rarely a perfect fit for parents and children alike. For birth mothers who gave their children up at a time when they were neither emotionally mature enough to care for a baby nor financially capable, it may pain them to think back to the fact they gave up their child and they may feel regret, sadness and a sense of loss in the months and potentially years afterward.
As for children with knowledge that they were adopted, they, too, might feel abandoned and seek answers to questions about themselves that they realistically may never get. Even adoptive parents may curse the confusion and anxiety they have caused their children by omitting the truth.
On top of this, initial proponents of closed adoption may be at a loss for what to do when vital medical information otherwise would have been a phone call away. Objections like the above could very well hurt overall rates of closed adoption’s prevalence.
The term “adoption” generally refers to the inclusion of an unrelated member into another family. Closed adoptions disallow the adopted child or legal parents to obtain information about the biological parents. Modern laws curtail the total transparency of closed adoptions to grant further protections to the child.
Often, medical complications present a complex web of distressing situations to adopted children since they lack important knowledge of familial illness or chronic disease. To this end, many jurisdictional and State guidelines have addressed the complications posed by closed adoptions and started to allow certain information like ethnicity and medical history to pass to the legal guardian.
Of course, especially in cases where a birth mother elects to give up her eventual child for adoption because she and the child’s father (or she alone) cannot provide for it, it would be beneficial, if not essential, for the adoptive parents to front money to cover the costs of prenatal care and hospitalization, at a minimum. In the event insurance does not partially cover these visits, or perhaps not at all, potentially half the cost could go to this cause.
Adding all of the above onto the money it will take to ready a house before the baby even arrives, for a domestic adoption the total cost will easily cost more than $10,000 USD and potentially $20,000, $30,000 or more. Foreign adoptions are equally hard to gauge costs, as child adoptions tend be different from country to country. Even so, $10,000 or more is not an unreasonable price range.
The most common and widely accepted of the adoption resources, the Federal Adoption Tax Credit, offers significant assistance for staggering adoption costs, but often requires specific knowledge about the application’s intricacies.
Necessary Qualifications
An important requirement for families considering children up for adoption is their general health. Vital parents that can display an expected level of health should not only display their ability to remain healthy enough to rear a child, but also that they will impart a healthy lifestyle on the adopted child.