What is adoption to me? Adoption to me is getting a new member of the family. It is getting to be a part of someone’s life who you share no blood relationship to. My Uncle Matt and Aunt Michelle have adopted all four their kids, due to they were unable to conceive on their own. Then there is this family friend, Missy, who adopted her first two kids. So what is adoption to me? Adoption is adding another crazy member to my crazy family. Macmillian Social Science Library states that adoption is a legal process to gain responisiblilty of a child that is not your own:
Adoption is the process of taking legal responsibility for the care and protection of a child that is not one's own by birth. The number of adoptions in the United States has ranged from a low of 50,000 in 1944 to a high of 175,000 in 1970. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the number of adoptions remained relatively consistent at more than 120,000 per year (“Adoption”). Adoption should be encouraged because it saves a child’s life, makes a family, and provides and alternative to abortion. When people hear adoption, they think of families getting an infant to raise, but adoption can also rescue children from abuse, neglect, foster care, or even give a child with special needs a family who can help them thrive (Bartholet 21). Adoption out of foster care proves to be the best way out of the system. For the only other options are that they possibly get reunite with their abusive or neglectful parents under the Child Welfare Act of 1980, notion that children should be reunited with parents at all cost, or they age out of the foster care system at the age of eighteen. With either of these options, the children lack the guidance, advice, material, or emotional help of an adult figure in their life ( Marshner). Estimations show that thousands of the available children up for adoption in the United States alone have special needs. These needs vary from chronic physical illnesses like AIDS or epilepsy to mental illnesses like attention deficit disorder (ADD) and Tourette syndrome. Children who have these diseases generally are hard to find adoptive parents for, but the families who do adopt these precious children gain a different view on life (“What issues”). Adoption helps gives children of all circumstances a striving chance at a life never thought possible. Furthermore adoption is a great way to make or extend a family. “According to the National Center for Health Statistics, infertility affects 6.1 million people in the United States. This figure represents one in ten couples in which the woman is of reproductive age—this very significant number demonstrates that infertility affects a huge percentage of our population” (Gilbert). When infertility affects every one in ten couples you see it is a huge epidemic among Americans, but even when fertility treatments do not work for these couples due to a multitude of reason. Couples find it reassuring that they are able to turn to adoption to still make the family they always wanted. Some couples find adoption to be an embarrassing and inconvenient process just to make their family (Olasky 34), but when the process is complete they are thrilled and ecstatic to finally have a family to call their own. Where some couples are unable to conceive on their own, others who are able to still choose adoption as an option to expand their family even more. We see adoption can start a family or even complete a family. Likewise adoption can provide a alternative to abortion, which can help spare a women of the physical and emotional damage that follows along with preventing future medical issues. “Since 1973 when [the court case] Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion, an estimated twenty-eight million women in the United States have had one or more abortions” (Vandegaer 188). Sometime after a women goes through an abortion they feel like they are unable to get close to someone while in a relationship, some women suffer some form
