So this is one of those questions where both sides make complete sense until you actually sit with it, and then it gets pretty complicated fast.
Yeah, Let us be honest about what the current adoption situation looks like. The adoption processes in countries , Nigeria included are exhausting, so here we are talking about mountains of paperwork background checks, home assessments, court appearances waiting periods that stretch into years financial requirements that price out loving but financially average families and bureaucratic back-and-forth that would make anyone want to give up.. Many people do give up, they start the adoption process with hope and somewhere between the third document request and the second year of waiting they quietly walk away, but meanwhile children sit in orphanages.
So on the surface loosening the adoption rules sounds like the solution. Accessible adoption process equals more adoptions equals fewer children without families, just simple math, yeah right?
Except the adoption process is not simple at all.
The reason those adoption rules exist. Even the annoying excessive ones Is because children are vulnerable not just emotionally vulnerable in the way all children aree , but specifically vulnerable to people who would use a relaxed adoption system to do terrible things, you know that Child trafficking is real.
Abuse behind doors is real too, People who present well in public and are monsters in private are real too,the strict adoption process, frustrating as it is is supposed to be the filter that catches those people before a child ends up in their hands.
So if you loosen the adoption rules and a child suffers for it , that is not an abstract policy failure, That is a child in a specific house experiencing something no child should experience.. And that possibility has to sit at the centre of this conversation.
But here is my pushback on the other side too.
The current strictness of the adoption process is not actually protecting many children as we like to think because the children still in orphanages are not safe either, An orphanage is not automatically an outcome just because it is structured, Many orphanages are underfunded, overcrowded and understaffed, Children grow up in them without love, without a parent figure , without the kind of attachment that shapes healthy human beings, So now the choice is not really between an adoption process that keeps children safe and a loose adoption process that puts them at risk, The choice is between one type of risk and another type of risk in the adoption process.
What I think actually needs to happen is an adoption process is a smarter process not necessarily a shorter or easier one, the red tape that exists to genuinely vet prospective parents, Background checks, psychological assessments, follow-up visits after placement, that should stay and probably be strengthened..
But then the red tape that exists because the adoption system is slow, poorly funded or just bureaucratically bloated? That one needs to go, there is a difference between an adoption process being thorough and an adoption process being unnecessarily punishing.
The financial requirements especially need to be looked at in the adoption process, Now in many places being poor enough that you cannot afford the adoption process automatically disqualifies you from adopting even if you have genuine love, stability and community support to offer a child, That is a bias baked into the adoption system that we do not talk about enough.
To the question about whether more children are in homes than orphanages ,then If that is true, it actually strengthens the argument for better regulation of the adoption process rather than less, it means children are already moving into homes through various means, formal and informal.ways, so the question becomes whether those homes are being monitored, whether those children are safe and whether the adoption system knows they exist.
Strict adoption rules do not automatically mean more children saved.
The adoption process might just mean children, in danger quietly, where nobody is looking.
That is the part we cannot afford to get wrong in the adoption process.
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