This is extremely rare and focusing on it promotes an unhealthy mindset among potential adoptive parents. No one is entitled to a healthy infant with no strings attached, and adoption inherently does come with strings attached, even if people try to pretend otherwise. I daresay if this is explicitly on someone’s mind, they should consider whether they should be adopting at all. It’s literally a smaller risk than that your kid will die in a car crash, with the added relief of said child not being dead.
Children deserve actual parents. Zero pity for anyone who abandons their child because of negligence or bad decisions.
Yes, they do, and 99.99% of parents who fuck around and neglect their kids do indeed lose them forever. So do 99.99% of biological parents who did nothing except sign the papers under duress. It’s just that it’s a statistical non-issue that someone is going to even try to steal your baby back, and the 4-5 years of court cases are there specifically to make sure that all parties are heard. Honestly, the only time I’ve really even seen this recently has to do Native American tribes, who have a very different relationship with this process and some pretty strong reasons to distrust the system.
I can tell you feel strongly about this, and I don’t want to imply there’s no room for nuance or that negligent parents deserve an unlimited number of re-tries, or that adoptive parents don’t love their kids. My adoptive parents are/were broken people in many ways, but I never felt unloved or unwanted. I do feel very strongly that infant stranger adoption has an outsized role in family planning options that pushes it to a darker place than it needs to be, and that in foster situations reunification should be the goal if it’s practical. For both, if all parties are acting in good faith and in the interests of children, then the numbers will land where they land. I just don’t think we’re there right now, through a combination of cultural norms and governmental policy.
