Even though Sophia is blood family, it was horribly difficult to adopt her. Despite the fact that her parents had been MIA for almost two years, and no one on that end was responding to legal contact, there still had to be a long process of “opportunity” for her parents to get her back.
Our new attorney started the process for adoption.
The first steps are to serve papers, in person, that Mema and Tom were pursuing a legal adoption of Sophia. Once the papers had been served, they had thirty days to respond to fight against it. The trouble, and time consuming part, was trying to find them.
After the papers were served to each parent, and the thirty days were up, they were required to serve them papers again, and give them another 10 day chance to get her back. And then again! This process went on way too long in my opinion… The COST for all of this! Attorneys, doctors, therapists, hearings, process servers, private detective… Just to choose a little kid… It’s backwards it seems.
At this point her parents are complete strangers to her.
After going through this, I feel like any family willing to take on the life changing responsibilities of parenting someone else’s child, any child, and all of the financial challenges that already go along with that, shouldn’t be paying thousands for adoption as well. I can see it’s benefits, but maybe a case by case law for different situations. It’s just no wonder there are approximately 153 million orphans worldwide, and more than 443,000 children in the foster case system in the U.S. alone…