To give a brief background: I am a twenty-five year old who was abandoned in a hospital two days after I was born. I wasn’t adopted until I was about eight months old. I never met my biological family and the information they left has a strong possibility of being an alias/made up.
Whenever a person or group of people want to adopt an animal, they often recommend waiting a certain amount of time after they are born before the little animal can be adopted. This is to help ensure a strong foundation for the animal. This helps reduce the risk of them having social anxiety, among other problems. With human babies? No such thing is considered.
The entire adoption process and triad (adoptive parents, child, biological parents of child) is extremely complex. When looking at the ethics, it is incredibly convoluted. If you look at it from a purely scientific point if view, most scientists agree that the first two years if life for a young human (so from age 0 to 24 months old) are vital to developing a strong mental foundation. Upset these two years and you have an unsteady foundation.
However, if we suddenly made it a law to wait two years after a child is born (to keep them with their biological parents), you then face the dilemma of taking a child away from its family. This was always there with the idea of adoption/abandonment (whether the child is taken to the adoptive family soon after birth or abandoned in a hospital, or wherever they are born), but it’s certainly more prominent of a problem when they are older. People would immediately protest, yet when infants are taken away from their biological family, people are suddenly quiet about this.
Studies conclude that adopted children (when compared to the non adopted community) are roughly 33–65% more likely to have some kind of mental health trouble (mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse are the most notable ones in this particular situation). Adoption is trauma, point blank. A fetus inside of their mothers womb, when having gained some sense of sound, listen to their mothers voice and heartbeat until they are brought out into the world. If they’re abandoned soon after (either by the mothers choice or having the adoptive family take them away), this is traumatizing. They are being taken away from the one source of comfort they had from around 18 weeks post conception (so about the middle of the second trimester). This means for about 4–5 months (up until they’re born, assuming they’re abandoned or taken away soon after birth) their source of comfort was their biological mother.
So, scientifically speaking people should wait a minimum of 2 years. However, try to take a child away from its parent then? It’s suddenly not okay. Why can we separate infants without causing too much of a fuss but the second you bring up an older child, people suddenly lose their minds? It’s a paradox.
Am I saying that everyone is fit to be a parent? Absolutely not. There’s many people out there who are not in a good place to be a parent. However, the adopted child often gets swept under the rug whenever dealing with any aspect of the adoption process (or triad), which is completely unfair.
