It's a popular misconception that most adoptions occur due to infertility. Infertility is a common reason for adoption, but it's only a portion of the total adoption picture. The top two reasons parents chose to adopt, according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is to expand their existing families and to provide a safe, stable, loving home to children in need. There are literally dozens of reasons families chose to adopt, which vary by situation, family and type of adoption.
Provide Home to Child in Need
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conducted a survey to determine the reasons parents chose to adopt. Between 70 percent and 90 percent of parents, depending on adoption type, reported that the main reason they chose to adopt was to provide a child in need with a home. This reason was most prominent for people who chose to adopt children from other countries. Some families believe that it's morally appropriate to provide a child in need with a home rather than create more children in an overpopulated world. Others adopt from war-torn or underprivileged countries. Still others have the resources to adopt special needs children who traditionally have more difficulty finding permanent homes.
Expand Family or Select Gender
Some couples have several children of the same gender and don't want to chance having another. In that case, they chose to adopt to complete their families and guarantee the sex of their babies. For some families, it isn't about the baby's sex, but about expanding their families or providing siblings for only children when pregnancy isn't the most desirable option. According to the U.S. Department of health and Human Services' Survey, more than half of all surveyed adoptive parents said they chose to adopt to expand their families. Around 20 percent stated they wanted a sibling for their child.
Infertility
Around 9 percent of women, or 7.3 million, turned to doctors due to infertility in 2002, according to the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center. Infertility can be the result of female or male reproductive dysfunction, age or disease. Some couples try infertility treatments to no avail, and others skip that route entirely and make the decision to adopt. These adoptions occur through a surrogate agency, private adoption agency or an independent adoption arrangement by a lawyer.
Family Situations
Sometimes when one or both parents are unable to care for their children, other family members will adopt those children in a process called relative adoption. It's very common for grandparents to raise their grandchildren. According to the AARP Foundation, more than 6 million children had grandparents as their primary caretakers in 2007. Siblings, aunts and uncles and other family members can assume or be rewarded parental rights by the courts if parents are deceased, incarcerated, suffering from drug addiction or are otherwise unable to be the primary caretaker. Sometimes these situations result in temporary custody and often they're complete, permanent adoptions.
If a child has one parent who marries or remarries, the new parent may wish to seek a stepparent adoption, according to Adoption.com, in which he is awarded parental rights, and takes financial and legal responsibility of his spouse's children.
Permanent Fostering
Families who wish to temporarily open their homes to children in need are called foster parents. Social workers and state agencies place children in foster homes while they wait for parents to have their parental rights reinstated by the courts or while they try to find a permanent home. If the biological parents are not able to get their parental rights back, a foster family can chose to permanently adopt a child. If a family takes on a foster child looking for a permanent placement and decides they're a good match, that family can also chose to adopt the child. Foster care adoptions most often involve older children and teens.
