When a person decides to adopt, he takes the responsibility of raising a child who is not biologically his own. There are various reasons why people decide to adopt. Some say adoption is the best thing for certain children and many successful stories prove it to be true. However, there are also numerous tragic reports of adopted children being abused. “Basically, adoption may be defined as the process of providing parents for children and children for families when birth parents are unwilling or unable to care for their offspring” (Harnack 12). How the adoptive parents go about raising the child is completely up to them. Although there are many different types of families in today’s society, one special kind of family that has become more and more common are the families created through adoption. There are various and somewhat difficult processes and laws concerning adoption. New laws are being created year after year to make this process easier and the outcome positive. Adoption is not exactly new; the idea of adopting has been around for a long time. “It was late in the nineteenth century that legislative bodies in the United States began to grant legal status to parents of adoptive children” (Harnack 12). It is hard to pin point when and how adoption first originated but Governor Sir William Philips of Massachusetts was considered the first adoptive father in the original thirteen colonies, he adopted in 1693. “By the first Quarter of the twentieth century, all states had ratified laws granting to children the right to be legally adopted if and when the criteria for such adoptions were met” (Harnack 12). There are many different types of adoption such as: “relinquishment, independent, intercountry, and stepparent” (Rates 7). This is why “every year Americans adopt more than 100,000 children, 61,000 of whom are complete strangers” (McKelvey 1). This ma...
