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So what do you think? Personally, I really hate to see potential adoptive families “knocked out” by rules and regulations. There are SO MANY children…even in China…that I have a hard time agreeing with limiting potential families for those children. One of my biggest adoption pet peeves is that most (if not all ) of the states in our country would not even consider my family to adopt from foster care, despite the fact that my family is more qualified than most to handle the issues that would likely come with a child from foster care and there is a huge need for families to adopt older children from foster care.

I always wanted to adopt from China…in fact it was one of our first “choices” when we first started to consider adoption. But then we were too young (and too poor), and then we had too many children (and were still too poor by China’s standards). So, it never was an option for us. It’s a shame, because we saw/heard about so many “special needs” children in China that we happily would have adopted.

But I digress…

Ultimately, it is China’s right to decide who they will and who they will not allow to adopt their children, and like it or not, those rules must be followed. My sincerest hope is that there really are less children available, and that this will not lead to more Chinese children growing up in orphanages and not getting families.

It is sad for single mothers … I know of many single moms who have adopted from China and it has been a popular program for singles over the years, even after China cut back on the number of single adoptions they would process each year.

It is also sad for parents wanting to adopt an Asian child…with these changes in the China program and with Korea also working towards increasing domestic adoptions and slowing international adoptions and with Vietnam just reopening and having a bit of a rocky start and with Cambodia still closed and with Thailand having strict guidelines on who can adopt and with Kazakhstan being a challenging program…there aren’t a whole lot of choices left for a whole lot of people.

Again, if this is all because there really are less and less children available for adoption in these places, that is a good thing, because ideally, all children would be able to stay in the families, or at least the countries, that they are born in. But again, my fear is that this will lead to more children going without families. Hopefully time will prove me wrong.

The new regulations for China adoptions are said to be effective as of May 1, 2007, and families with dossiers submitted before that should be ok under the “old rules”.

Here are the links to the China adoption blog, the Korea adoptiong blog and the Kazakhstan adoption blog in case you are interested in that, and for other Asian adoption options, you can check out my “Transracial adoption option” posts here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this…especially from those of you with experience with and knowledge of China and Chinese adoptions.