[wlbooklady]

Hi!
I hope you don't mind me butting in -- I'm from the U.S. -- but I was reading another thread last night on Adoption Reform and someone posted an article by an Aussie SW saying what's good about adoption in Australia and wrong with adoption in the U.S. -- and apparently, it's everything. The article went point by point and listed how the Aussie systems worked and why it was better than the U.S. As an adoptive mother myself, I'd be the first to admit our system has flaws, but what really offended me about this article -- and I sincerely hope the author is a loose cannon and doesn't represent general Australian policy -- is that it was virulently anti-adoption. For example, it said that in Australia payments are made to single parents to enable them to care for their children (and we do that, too here in the U.S., through welfare, although the article made it sound like U.S. adoption was all about taking children from the poor and providing them to the rich), that the first priority is to preserve families of origin. It gave an example of an area of Austalia with a million people which had only had one adoption in the past year. Also, it said that older child adoption was too traumatic to children who had already been traumatized. So it's better fo them to have no family ties, at all ?! Basically, the whole article implied adoption was a bad way to create families, rarely done in Australia. I was offended and angry, but it did make me think. It especially disturbs me, if, as someone earlier said, the AUstralian system is held up as a model of "good" adoptions. Do you mind if I ask a few questions? 1) If adoption is so rare, what about families where there's abuse? I know government agencies in the U.S. have been criticized when a child dies and there's been a long pattern of abuse but they've tried to keep the children with their families of origin. 2) What if a parent just doesn't feel ready or able to parent a child? It's not just about money, but lots of other things, like readiness, maturity, etc. Can people NOT put a child up for adoption? 3) Are international adoptions supported? Are they funded through the state? The article said that all costs for domestic adoptions were covered by the state; but if there are so few, it would seem to me that couples wanting to adopt would have to go overseas. Thank you so much for filling me in -- I'm trying to get past my initial knee-jerk reaction to reading this article.