Essay On Adoption

Adoption is defined as to take a child into one’s family and raise it as its own. Adoption is popular both domestically and internationally. Adoption goes back thousands of years. Adoption was first mentioned in Hammurabi’s code. Hammurabi declared that if a child was taken in at birth, the original parents could not reclaim the child. Hammurabi also decided that if the adopted child was sent on their way, the adopted family would give them money, or something they could use to stay alive. Later in the 19th century, a minister named Charles Loring Brace, revolutionized adoption. Brace and a few other reformers created the Children’s Aid Society. The society took about 200,000 children between 1854 and 1930 and placed them on trains, nicknamed the “orphan trains” from popular and urban cities on the east coast and sent them on trains to small, rural towns in the Midwest and Canada. Brace’s main goal was to remove poor catholic children and place them with Anglo-Protestant families due to the society believing that if the children left their catholic homes early enough, they could become worthy citizens. This led Catholics to create orphanages to house the catholic children and competed with the society. In the 1940s

On November 19,1997, President Bill Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act that allowed extra funding to go into adoption programs and allowed children to be placed with a safe family. The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act wanted children to be placed with a biological family member instead of being put into a safe environment. The Adoption and Safe Families Act also was signed to fix problems with the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act. The Adoption and Safe Families Act also allowed spe...

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...cost of adoption ranges from $25,000 and $50,000. In America, Girls are more preferable than boys, and potential parents are willing to pay $16,000 more for a girl than a boy. Also potential parents prefer non-Hispanic and non-African American children. Domestically, 50% of Caucasian babies will be adopted while less than 5% of Asian babies will be adopted. These minority babies can cost as much as $38,000 less than Caucasian babies. Foreign adoptive parents rarely have a preference on gender, race or country of origin. 13% of Americans prefer adopting international children. In past years, adopting a special needs child was a foreign concept due to medical bills. Now many people are adopting special needs children due to government aid helping out with medical aid. The government gives out a maximum of $12,900 per year to families who adopt special needs children.