3/18/2013 What do the children who get passed over feel about adoption?

What do the children who get passed over feel about adoption?


Warning: Have your kleenex ready.
In "Stuck" older adoptees tell what it meant to them. Please watch the movie, then join the fight to give all children a family by adding  your name to  the petition.


http://www.change. org/petitions/ make-a-child-
s-right-to- a-family- our-priority

My post on the petition:

I am mother to two wonderful adopted children and expectant mother to two more children by adoption. While my first daughter would probably have eventually found a family had I not adopted her, neither of my sons would have received a family if it were not for me. My first son has a rare syndrome which scared prospective parents off. His birth parents would not have been able to address his needs had they chosen to raise him. The director of his child care center told me no one in his 6 1/2 years had ever even asked for his file. I am a single mother. There were roadblocks to his adoption and weeks before I was to step on the plane to bring him home, the unthinkable happened: I was outsourced. I know you think I shouldn't have proceeded. I didn't turn my back on him. I had the resources. I stepped out on faith and brought him home anyway. He is now a teenager and as awesome a son as you can imagine. Where would he be if I hadn't? He was not allowed to go to school with the other children and would not have been until he had had enough operations so that he looked like everyone else--meaning he would never have gotten an education. He eventually would have ended up living on the streets, the object of ridicule, and suffering all kinds of abuse.

My son-to-be has waited for over 13 years. He has limb differences. That's all. Our local Shriner's Hospital can fit him with the prosthesis he needs. He is a very handsome young man, well-spoken, confident, and very deserving of a family--which all children are. In a few months, he will no longer be eligible for adoption. His future without a family, bleak.

In the course of adopting my children, I have worked two jobs at times, built an addition on my house (doing a lot of the work myself!) and now look toward successfully fundraising for my last two. I wish I could say they weren't my last and maybe they won't be but they likely will be. The need is so very great. Some of us feel called to have and ultimately do have birth children. Others have birth children and feel the pull of domestic or international adoption or both. Others, for whatever reason, only adopt.

I've said it many times: adoption is not for the faint of heart. An adoptive parent must be willing to undergo scrutiny by local, state, federal, and international governmental bodies, independent agencies  and a slew of other people and bodies who hopefully all concur the prospective parent worthy of parenting a child. Adoptive parents often have been through nightmare pregnancies and painful losses to realize their dream of a family. Financial burdens and an ever-changing landscape of requirements leaves many would-be adoptive parents discouraged, disheartened, and feeling the mountain is too high to climb. Biological parents don't typically have to face all this.

Every child deserves the love and care of an appropriate family. They deserve education, healthy living; freedom from abuse, neglect, forced labor, human traficking, ridicule, and stigmatization. Putting the adoption tax credit into law was a great step forward. We must step out in faith and with supreme courage and boldly make it our mission, our cause and our duty to ensure each and every child, everywhere, does not go without their needs being met. Period.