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Old 01-19-2007, 08:42 PM
teranga teranga is offline
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Does your agency have a checklist to clarify? We adopted from Ethiopia, and had a similar question. We knew we were comfortable with correctable "issues", and some "minor" issues, but not "major" issues. The problem was, there are a million potential issues, and our definition of major/minor might not be someone else's, and how could we possibly cover what we would and would not be OK with in a few lines.....

They pulled up a checklist of sorts and that's what we filled out. It was kind of odd to be so...blunt, but it really helped. It had a TON of things on it--
"Would you consider a child deaf in both ears? In one ear? Minor hearing loss? Hearing loss which responds to hearing aid? Hearing loss which does not respond to hearing aid?"

We ended up checking a lot more things as acceptable than we thought we would...probably b/c we talked about specific situations and realized we could certainly accept a child who wasn't entirely "healthy" even though we were still not prepared to adopt a child with (what we consider) major issues.

If they don't ahve a checklist, I think what they are trying to get at is if there are things you know you are not willing to accept (for example, for family history, perhaps you are or are not willing to accept a child whose immediate family has a history of schitzophrenia (sp?). For genetic, a child who has a genetic heart defect, or carries sickle cell...etc). Sounds like they are trying to figure out whether you would consider a special needs child, and if so, whether a minor or major special needs (or potential special needs, based on family history).
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