Introduction to Adoption - Child Welfare Information Gateway.
Adopting a child is an experience that promises to bring great joy as it changes a couple or individual’s life forever. But what happens if the mother of that child wants to endorse their child? Those are the issues that many adopting parents and birth-right mothers are facing today. Many biological mothers want their child back.As a birth mother or the adopting parent one must realize consequences that could lay ahead. The legal and social transfer of all parental right, responsibilities, and roles from one parent or parents, usually biological, to a nonbiological parent or parents is the definition of adoption.An open adoption is a process in which the birth parents and the adoptive parents know each other and are involved in the adopted child’s life. A closed adoption is when there is no contact at all and no identifying information is given between birth and adoptive parents (Byrd).
Adoption is the social, emotional, and legal process in which children who will not be raised by their birth parents become full and permanent legal members of another family while maintaining genetic and psychological connections to their birth family.To be adopted, a child must: be under the age of 18 when the adoption application is made not be (or have never been) married or in a civil partnership.
An adoption order made by an “authorised court” (that is, a Family Proceedings Court, a County Court or the High Court) transfers a child from one family to another by vesting parental responsibility for the child in the adopter(s) and terminating the parental responsibility (if it still exists) of the child’s birth parents or the local authority.
