II. Are There Lots of Babies to Adopt?, Page 4

So, There Are Children Available to Adopt, Then?

Yes there certainly are. In fact, there are plenty of children available for adoption in the UK. Some of them have been waiting to be adopted for years because there aren’t enough families out there of the right kind. Some wait their entire childhoods, their faces repeatedly appearing in “advertisements” (agencies prefer the term “profiles”) placed by agencies looking for families for children who need more than just a good home and love. Why the surplus? Mostly because people are too picky.

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Most families want a tiny baby, preferably a girl, the same colour as themselves, straight from the hospital, healthy and alert, with no legal complications lurking in the background. Most of these couples are going to be disappointed, as the statistics above show. Because the children waiting for adoption these days are not babies, many of them are not healthy, most have special emotional or educational needs because of their past experiences, and many are members of family groups of two or more children.

So here is the first hurdle. If you are a white couple and definitely determined that you only want to adopt a tiny, healthy, trouble-free baby, you are highly unlikely to succeed. Remember that less than three such adoptions take place in the UK every week. Not even by adopting from overseas are you likely to find what you want. You might as well stop reading this right now and seriously consider alternatives such as surrogacy or IVF, if you haven’t already done so. But if you are Asian, Black, in an ethnically mixed marriage, or white and willing to think about alternatives, read on.

So, what kinds of children are available for adoption? Most children waiting for new families fall into one, often more, of the following crude categories:

• Children aged five years or older, including children of broken marriages where neither parent wanted custody, especially boys,
• Non-white babies,
• Children with mental handicaps or learning disabilities,
• Children with physical handicaps too severe for their parents to cope with,
• Babies born to mothers addicted to drugs or alcohol, who may themselves have been born addicts,
• Children born with HIV infection,
• Children with genetic disorders and illnesses,
• Children from families who have neglected or abused their children,
• Sibling groups: brothers and sisters needing adoption together.

In the past most of these children would never have been considered suitable for adoption, but thanks to persistent and energetic lobbying by individuals and groups like Adoption UK, many more are being found permanent homes with families. That is one reason why there are so few children’s homes left in the country. There is hardly any degree of handicap or combination of intractable problems which would render a child unadoptable today (and can you imagine what it would feel like to carry that sign around your neck?), and tremendous effort is put into finding the right permanent families for them and in supporting their new families after the adoption.

If you are serious about adopting, why not give some consideration to these children? In the next chapter we will take a closer look at each of these groups.

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© Roger Ridley Fenton