You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
THE ADOPTION OF A CHILD IS, IN HUMAN TERMS, ALWAYS A PAINful and potentially traumatic event. In our culture, adoption occurs only when something has gone quite seriously wrong: one or both parents have died, or are unable or unwilling to care for the child they have conceived. From the side of the adoptive parents, the decision to adopt a child often follows years of failure in their attempts to conceive a child of their own. Whether it is based upon physiological anomalies or upon psychological conflicts, this failure is something with which the adoptive parents must painfully come to terms.
The tragedies, inabilities, and failures of both the biological and the adoptive parents are reflected in the adopted child and his psychological development. For the "realities" of the adult world mean little to the young child; the sudden death of loving biological parents may be experienced as a malicious abandonment; his adoptive parents may tell him that he was "chosen," but he may choose to believe he was stolen. No matter how often the adopted child is told that his adoptive parents are now his "real" parents, he can never completely ignore his first parents and the fact that they gave him up.