Adoption questions

[deelaundry]

Hi! Just heard about this community and am very excited to join in.

I have two questions related to adoption by American parents. I've tried to do internet searches but am not getting the exact desired info. If you have sources I can go and read to get the information, that would be great as well!

1. In the first situation, a pregnant British citizen comes to the US, gives birth in the US, and then decides they want their American friend to adopt the baby. The British person will give up all parenting rights. The baby will be a US citizen given they were born here. Are there any special hoops the adopting parent will have to go through because the birth parent is not a US citizen, or is it the typical process of newborn adoption? Is there anything the British person needs to file or report in the UK since the baby is not going back to the UK? I'm thinking not but just checking.

2. In the second situation, an American wants to take in an orphaned child who is fleeing another country due to an active war. Is there any path to adoption? Sources I've seen say Americans can only foster refugees, not adopt. The child knows for sure that their parents are dead (one died before the war, one died during). This is not exactly a cross-cultural case, as the country at war is England (this is modern-day but AU obviously). It's a little bit cross-cultural, as the American is Jewish and the English child is probably affiliated with Church of England, but I don't think that will really matter.

Comments

[hamatebones]

Something to consider is when/where your AU diverged from reality. There WAS a time when international adoption was simpler in the US -- it progressively got more complicated as people got more thoughtful about the circumstances of those "orphaned" children and as technology improved for finding missing relatives. The 1960s-70s attitude towards young children as a blank slate who would just turn into whatever they were raised as contributed as well.

Let us not say, however, that people don't still hold those attitudes, and try to manipulate the system to get what they want. Here's a recent case of a US Marine attorney -- and a hardcore evangelical Christian -- who swindled Afghan parents out of their child, and got at least one judge to agree that the child "deserved" better than her actual parents could provide. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-marine-used-political-connections-and-courts-to-adopt-an-afghan-baby-the-family-raising-her-didnt-know-until-she-was-taken) The case is ongoing, but now that people are paying attention, that dude is going to lose, (the adoption was voided as of March this year) and might yet go to prison for kidnapping.

[thekumquat]

The time of divergence is also relevant to the UK. Children growing up thinking their mother was actually their older sister was still possible in the 1950s when many babies were born at home, ditto some casual adoptions.

But adoption of newborn babies pretty much died out by 1980 thanks to access to contraception and abortion - certainly by the 1990s when the internet came along, there was a huge cultural gulf between the UK and the US. Adopting a (healthy, white) baby was still possible in the US, but in the UK adoptions were almost exclusively of older children (plus adoption by stepparents), who had been taken into care by the local authority 'the council', ie local government's Social Services.

Unless the scenario is one where access to contraception and abortion have been hugely limited, the concept of someone getting that far in pregnancy then deciding she wants to give the baby away, doesn't really compute. It sounds more like a surrogacy arragement - possibly because surrogacy in the UK is not allowed to be paid for?