Adoption and Gay Adoption in The United States

In the United States, 135,000 children are legally taken in and brought up by an adult that is not their biological parent each year. This action, known as adoption, has shaped an abundant amount of lives. Imagine being one of the 428,000 kids are in foster care. What a blessing it would be to finally be received into something that you had only heard about in books and seen in movies. While foster care has a vast involvement with adoption, not all adoptees have a previous history of foster care. Nearly 100 million Americans have been adopted by a member of their immediate family. 59% of adoptions come from foster care. Another 26% are out of country adoptions. The last 15% of adoptions derive from voluntarily relinquished American babies.

While adoption is an amazing opportunity for all those in need of a family, adoption was not part of God’s original plan. Due to the evil that corrupts our world, children are left without suitable parents. Abuse, neglect, and rejection are just some of the many reasons that kids are in need of being relocated in foster care and adopted by a loving and healthy family. The circumstances that make fosterage a necessity are often heartbreaking and pave a platform for many psychological and emotional disorders. According to the Impact of Adoption on Adopted Persons written by Child Welfare Information Gateway, “Feelings of loss and grief, as well as anger, anxiety, or fear, may especially occur during emotionally charged milestones, such as marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of a parent. Adopted persons may also suffer secondary losses. For instance, along with the loss of their birth mother and birth father, adopted persons may experience the loss of brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. There also may be a loss of cultural connection or language (in cases of intercountry or transracial adoption). For those who were adopted as older children, there may be a loss of friends, foster families, pets, schools, neighborhoods, and familiar surroundings.”

Studies have reported that adopted adults have a higher degree of mental health issues, but some researchers view these differences as minor while others view them as consequential. Adoptees may deal with a range of issues at different points in their lives. The loss of birth parents, as a result of adoption, may set the stage for feelings of grief for many adopted persons. This type of loss could increase the feelings of uncertainty an adopted person feels. Adoption carries a great quantity of weight that not very many people take the time to consider. Emotional damage is to be expected when a child undergoes something as traumatic as adoption. While adoption is a wonderful accommodation, it is not anywhere close to flawless.

As reported by MentalHelp.net there are three variations of adoptions. The three types of adoptions that may be chosen are 'closed', 'semi-open' and 'open.' According Mental Help’s article titled Types of Adoption, these terms describe the approximate level of contact and interaction that the birth mother can expect to have with the adoptive parents both during the adoption process and afterwards. With each alternative adoption option, there is a different set of consequences. Depending on the variables surrounding the adoption, the results could differ tremendously. Numerous things could go wrong when adopting. Even children that experience peaceful adoptive situations deal with a lifetime of effects from it. The effects on a child that experienced a complicated adoptive process would be unimaginable. In September 2009, 7-year-old Artyom Savelyev left Russia to live with his new adoptive family in Tennessee. Earlier this month, Artyom returned to Russia alone. All he had with him was a backpack and a note penned by Torry Hansen, Artyom's adoptive mother. 'I no longer wish to parent this child,' read the note, in part. The mother also reportedly said Artyom was mentally unstable. Artyom’s story is just one of many. Thousands of children experience similar, life altering, and unimaginable circumstances.

Much has changed since the year of 2009 when Artyom Savelyev experienced his trauma. The process of adoption has become more thorough since the early 2000’s. As culture has evolved, so has adoption and the development behind the process. Traditionally, children are adopted from heterosexual couples which consist of one man and one woman. Since gay marriage is becoming a popular thing, it has lead to gay adoption becoming more abundant. Like adoption itself, this situation partners multiple pros and cons. The underlying question is “Which is better: a child in a wavering and uncertain place of care, or a child in the care of someone who identifies themselves differently concerning sexual orientation?”.

Notwithstanding that homosexuality feels like a moderatly recent turn of events, is not a new trend. We can see from 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11 (“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”) that acts of unrightous sexuaility has been a common occurance from the beginning of time. The History of Psychiatry & Homosexuality states that possibly one of the first homosexual activists, a German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, pleaded against Germany's adoption of Prussian law criminalizing sodomy. In pamplets that he published from 1864 to 1879, he argued that same-sex love was a congenital, hereditary condition, not a matter of immorality and it should not be criminally persecuted. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs called himself and those like him 'Urnings' who had a female soul in a male body. Ulrichs’ study aligned with another popular activist of the decade. Sigmund Freud was originally trained as a neurologist and was known as the Father of Psychoanalysis. After completing his studies in Paris, he returned to Vienna to establish his practice for hysterical patients. After research, labor and partnering with colleagues, Freud quit his practice of treating hysteria with hypnosis. He replaced it with his own psychoanalytic method. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he introduced these sexual theories: “The future homosexual child is so over-attached to his mother that he identifies with her and narcissistically seeks love objects like himself so he can love them like his mother loved him”. “If a 'negative' or 'inverted' Oedipus complex occurs, a boy seeks his father's love and masculine identification by taking on a feminine identification and reverting to anal eroticism”, and “Homosexuality could result from reaction formation: sadistic jealousy of brothers and father is safely converted into love of other men.” These ideas suggest that the state of homosexuailty is spurred on by an early experience rather than being “born into the wrong body”.

As time went on, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals became more commonly accepted in society. In 1691, a woman named Deborah Byar was fined and publicly humiliated for wearing men's clothes. In 1895 Angelina Weld Grimke wrote and published a love poem to her female lover, Mamie Burrill. 'If you only knew how my heart beats when I think of you. Your passionate lover, Angelina.' read the poem that made her a celebrated poet of the Harlem Renaissance. As the world continues to spin, society becomes more adapt to those who claimed diffidence. In 2004 Massachusetts legalized same sex marriage, officially becoming the first state in the United States of America to do so. From 2004 to 20015, thirty-seven other states followed the lead of Massachusetts by legalizing same-sex marriage. In June of 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled all state bans on same-sex marriage as unconsisttional therefore allowing same sex marriages in all 50 states.

Generally speaking, society has mostly moved away from the thought that homosexuals are diseased or volatile. It is becoming very typical to work with, talk to, and be moderately involved with someone that openly claims homosexuality even if your beliefs vary. While the common community has accepted gayism, gay and lesbian adoption has been a major issue in our society. It has become an issue that has been recognized by the government as well as the church. While it is legal in every state for a person involved in a same sex marriage to adopt, some states permit state-licensed child welfare agencies to refuse to provide services to homosexuals and same-sex couples. Among these are Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, Michigan and North and South Dakota.

The United States is one of the only countries that gay adoption is somewhat legalized. Very limited anounts of countries have legalized gay adoption. Among these are The Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Spain, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Portugal, Argentina, Denmark in 2012, and recently France and Brazil in 2013. Cultural differences play a big part in the reasons of variation concerning legalization. Gay adoption is not generally favored throughout the world; many people see it as wrong and unnatural. Someone’s age, where they live, their values, their political ideology and their religion may affect their position on this topic. America is a diverse country filled with different cultures, same-sex adoption is a controversial subject that has evoked people of opposing views.