Imagine its your seventeenth birthday but instead of getting ready with your friends, you find yourself in the office of your local GP staring at a painting behind his desk as he talks you. But you’re barely listening to what he says because you can’t get over his last two words you’re pregnant.
The million of thoughts that run through your head in that moment overwhelms you so much you can barely breathe. What are you going to do? How are you going to tell your parents? How are you going to tell anyone at school? What about your schoolwork? What about the baby? How are you going to be able to juggle your own life as well as caring for someone else’s?
That’s when the doctor say’s “you have options”. He hands you two leaflets one on adoption and one on abortion. You’d never thought you’d be in this position but now the life of this baby is in your hands.
Adoption is a way of providing new families for children who cannot be brought up by their biological parents. It offers a way for the baby to receive the life it deserves that their biological parents cannot provide them with. It is legal procedure in which all parental responsibility is transferred to the adopters.
This means that an adopted child loses all legal ties with their birth parents and becomes a full member of the adoptive family.
There are two types of adoption:
Open adoption: is when the birth mother chooses the family for her baby before the birth of the unborn child. This involves sharing information, and agreeing to on going contact throughout the years. In an open adoption, the children grow up knowing where he/she came from, their medical history and the reason for their adoption. This is not very popular and is expensive.
Closed adoption: this is when the process by where an infant is adopted by another family, and the record of the biological parents is kept sealed. Often, the biological father is not recorded - even on the original birth certificate. This is more common than open adoption.
Barnardo’s a well-known children’s charity describes adoption as ‘A way of giving every child the best start in life and sometimes this means they become part of another family, taking that family’s surname and being given the same rights, privileges and love and care as if they had been a birth child to that family’. This description does tell us a lot about the good side to adoption but not really the bad.
Some of these bad effects include:
Feeling rejected and having abandonment issues at some point in their lives when they find out they’re adopted. This also relates to when adopted children go to find their birth parents and suffer from rejection when meeting their biological parents doesn’t go as they have planned.
This idea of identity development issues this when they struggle to fit in and really feel apart of their new family because they feel like they’d fit in better with their biological family.
And a lack of medical history means that when an adopted child becomes it is hard to understand what diseases they are more likely to contract without having adequate medical history.
But most feel adopted children do suffer from psychological issues which develop as they get older. At first they don’t understand why they’re not the same as their parents or how they don’t fit in with the rest of their family which develops into them becoming distant AND WANTING TO FIND THEIR BIOLOGICAL PARENTS.
Though these bad affects may not happen to every child that is adopted would you want to give up your child to make them feel this way?
Abortion
Is the medical process of ending a pregnancy so it does not result in the birth of a baby, It also sometimes known as a ‘termination’. Depending on how many weeks the mother is
