Back on November 6 of this year, Michelle Ransavage traveled to China and was united with her new daughter, a two year-old with special needs that Michelle and her husband, Andrew, named Mia.

The couple, whose adoption is being handled by Children's Home Society and Family Services, had completed numerous background checks and screenings for their homestudy, their USCIS approval and for their adoption agency. Everything came back fine and the couple proceeded on their adoption journey to Mia.

With the length of time that many adoptions from China are now taking, many adoptive parents are having to have their fingerprints for... more

I have one more transcultural adoption article to share with you. Several days ago the Chicago Tribune had this article titled, "Muhammad's special reception". The article tells about Chicago Bears wide receiver Muhsin Muhammad and his wife, Christa, who recently brought home two new children that they adopted internationally from Ethiopia.

The couple already has three daughters and a son at home, and I was not able to find any details about the ages or genders of the two children the couple adopted from Ethiopia.

While the article in the Chicago Tribune is short... more

China has consistently been one of the most popular countries for U.S. parents to adopt internationally from since the mid 1990's. When people think of transracial adoption, many instantly picture a white couple with a Chinese baby, and when prospective adoptive parents first start thinking about where to adopt from, China is often one of the first possibilities that is explored.

The U.S. Department of State reports over 60,000 Chinese orphans receiving immigrant visas through adoption... more

There are so many stories in the media that focus on the challenges of adoption, or adoptions "gone bad" or just plain sad adoption stories, so I thought I would share this feel good transracial adoption story that I saw on Yahoo titled "GI saves Iraqi boy in long-shot adoption".

I am not a big fan of the title of the story, and I cringe internally when I hear adoption likened to "saving" a child, and yet in this story it is hard to argue that the boys life was very much saved through his adoption.

In a nutshell, Captain Scott Southworth of Wisconsin met his future son when he was deployed to one of... more

Most people involved in adoption have heard about the story of the Danish diplomat and his wife that recently relinquished their eight-year old daughter, who had been adopted by the couple at the age of four months.

A new article about this heart breaking story was published yesterday on Yahoo News titled "Can Adoption Children Be Returned?", and after hearing about this story the obvious and painful answer is, "Yes, adopted children can be returned."

There is a lot of speculation about this story, and like most stories in the news, we will likely never really know what happened. The family... more

This article, titled "When Adoptions Go Wrong", by Newsweek has been making the rounds the past few days.

The article tells the story of an utter adoption nightmare; an adoptive mother killing her child. Peggy Hilt was convicted of second-degree murder after beating to death her two year-old daughter from Russia.

While this article tells their heart-breaking story, it also does a good job showing that there is help available to families struggling with adopted children and that pre-adoption education is essential.

Hilt and her husband had many red flags along the way in their adoption journey. There were several... more

Most of the time when we write about or talk about transracial adoption, we are talking about white adoptive parents with Asian, black, Hispanic, Indian, Native American or biracial children. The assumption that transracial adoption involves white parents and non-white children is a result of that fact that most transracial adoptions do involve white parents and non-white children, as most adoptive parents in the United States are in fact, white.

However, it is becoming increasingly more common (or maybe less uncommon) to see adoptive parents of different races adopting, and sometimes adoptive parents who are not white, adopting children who are white.

National Public Radio... more

A recent broadcast on National Public Radio titled "Study: Adoption Not Harmful to Child's Self-Esteem" has been very reassuring to adoptive parents.

With there being so much information, advice and opinions out there that can lead adoptive parents, and especially transracial adoptive parents, to feel like their children are doomed to face significant emotional struggles because they were adopted transracially, this story and study bring some very good and hopeful news.

The broadcast is just under five minutes so please make sure you listen to it, but in a nutshell, a study was just released... more

If you have not been reading along on the New York Times adoption blog, Relative Choices, you are really missing out on a variety of wonderful articles.

I will continue on with more posts about my definition of adoption in my next posts, but I wanted to call attention to some of these great articles.

Today's article is titled "Blind Date in Addis",... more

For many children adopted internationally, there is very little information known about their birth family and their birth history. Often times there is also very little information on the child's relinquishment or abandonment. It is very common for dates of birth and accurate ages to be known. For many adoptees, their past is a puzzle, with many pieces missing.

While the importance of knowing about one's birth family and early life is becoming more and more acknowledged and recognized in the adoption community, only a percentage of adoptive parents and adoption agencies are putting in the extra effort to get every piece of information available for the children that are being adopted.

The... more