On to the letter "H" in our Transracial Adoption ABCs.

Health - The health of the child you are going to adopt is a big concern for many adoptive parents. Often one of the first questions we are asked when we tell someone we are adopting is, “how do you know that the child will be healthy?”

For parents adopting domestically, drug and alcohol exposure is often a concern. For parents adoption internationally, concerns range from malnutrition to minor issues like parasites, lice and scabies (ick, ick, ick), to more serious conditions such as Hepatitis and HIV.

I have written about health-related concerns in adoption in detail in three posts that you can find here. I discuss lots of health issues and offer advice and resources in those posts.


Adoption.com has a great resource for adoptive parents titled “Ask the Adoption Doctor”, where parents can browse the archives for lots of helpful advice to specific medical concerns, and ask their own adoption-health related question and have it be answered by an expert.

Another great resource for adoptive parents is the University of Washington Center for Adoption Medicine website. On this site parents can get information on how to get a referral evaluated by an adoption specialist, read an adoption medical blog (with questions and answers) and find a huge library of resources that address a wide range of adoption health topics.

Health is a legitimate concern for many adoptive parents because when most parents envision the child they desire, it is a healthy child.

While the majority of adopted children do come home in relatively good health and without any big surprises for the adoptive parents, there are of course no guarantees. Much like in the story of the family that I wrote about in this post yesterday, sometimes there are unexpected medical issues with a child that is being adopted.

On the flip side, I also know of many children that were labeled with all sorts of complicated and devastating special needs, only to come home and have no real health issues at all. Our own Amanda is one of those kids.

We were told that Amanda would need heart surgery right away, that she would need corrective surgery on her legs, that she would need surgery to remove a tumor and that she could very well be cognitively delayed.

Well, she has not needed a single surgery, is not on a single medication, and is one of the single most intelligent little girls you could meet. When we had her first developmental screening, and told the therapists running the screening that we had been warned that Amanda could be developmentally and cognitively delayed, they laughed at us! We are so grateful that we weren't scared off by the inaccurate medical information on her.

Whenever someone asks me how we “know” that a child we adopt will be healthy, I tell them that we don’t know that for sure, but that we did not get any guarantees with our biological children either.

I recommend that parents educate themselves through the resources above on common health issues in adopted children, and also educate themselves on the screenings, tests and medical information that are available through different adoption programs, so that risks can be minimized.