When Humans are Treated Worse Than Dogs
Some people re-home their children
After one of my sons joined our family after experiencing an adoption disruption, I had four calls from people offering up their children.
Ours had arrived via the more traditional placement route that included a home study and social workers who had viewed our home and interviewed us and our children.
Somehow, however, the word was out that we would take anyone’s unwanted child. It wasn’t true, but the story hung in the air and the ripples spread.
During this time, I was an adoption support worker. I had connections to many families who were adoptive and foster parents and those waiting to adopt. The community was relatively small and people talked.
The calls I received included a woman who planned to stand up in church and offer her pre-teen to the first willing person. Another was someone with a teenage son they had adopted from the US and no longer wanted to parent. One family had an eleven-year-old they told me about in an email. I could come and pick the child up whenever I wanted. She had been adopted along with a sibling from an orphanage in another country and they didn’t like her. The child wasn’t cute enough they said.
The calls I received included a woman who…
