blog 7

My good friends, Mark and Ikuko, have been happily married for 27 years. They met while Mark was in Japan serving as a Marine military policeman, and Ikuko was the Japanese interpreter for the military police. About 5 years ago they decided that they wanted to adopt a child and started the arduous process that is the federal adoption program. This blog will be about their struggles, hoops, and hurdles in the seemingly attainable procedure of adopting a newborn child and how the federal government made their dream impossible.

In the United States, there are currently about 500,000 children, from infants to sixteen year olds, waiting to be adopted. There are in upwards of 2 million people on the adoption waiting list. It is blatantly apparent that there are enough children to fulfill the dreams of the perspective parents. However, some of the stringent requirements to be approved by the federal government to adopt a child pose obstacles that discourage, and even make the goal of adoption downright unattainable. Some of the requirements are completely necessary, i.e. criminal background checks, fiscal security, and home and health checks.

Then there is the unspoken, but obvious discrimination against gay and lesbian couples, single parent households, and transracial adoption. Transracial adoption is when the parents are of one race and the prospective adopted child is of another race. Obviously the federal government cannot come out and say that they are against these groups of people, but they can make the task so difficult to reach that said couples usually give up altogether, or go overseas to adopt a child. How infuriating is this?! Perfectly able couples being turned away because of the prejudice from the federal government.

Mark and Ikuko started the adoption process on their own, they filed the papers by themselves, and sent them off to one of the many Federal Adoption programs. They paid the $300 filing fee, they paid a few grand for representatives from the program to comeout and interview both of them, check their living situation, and perform psychological evaluations on both of them. Then they were told to wait. They experienced long periods of time waiting on a phone call that never came. They waited 4 years on that phone call, and eventually came to the realization that acquiring an adoption lawyer, and considering an overseas adoption might speed up the adoption process.

What was the Federal Adoption program’s reasoning for not calling them back? They were in good health, had a completely clean criminal background, had excellent healthcare, their finances were in order. About 6 years later the adoption agency called them and stated their reason for denial was that that Mark and Ikuko were in their late 40s, which is evidently too old to raise a child. With so many children needing homes, and so many people willing to love and raise the children, why is this still an issue that the United States of America faces?