In the post Moral Adoption Questions, I started tackling the issues of adoption, poverty, money and if adoptive parents’ money would be better served going to a birth family to help it stay together than towards having a child adopted internationally.

Without repeating everything from the last post, in a nutshell, I said that adoption is an answer for children needing a solution right now. It is not a perfect solution, but in my opinion, it is the best possible solution for many children. Randomly giving money to families in an attempt to keep them together in my opinion is unlikely to have long-lasting positive effects.

I believe that the morally “right” thing for adoptive parents to do is to care. We have to care about the children left behind, the families left behind and the country left behind. We can’t just bring home a child and “forget” where they are from and what has led to them becoming a part of our family and not the family they were born to.

And then once we care, we need to be educated on the issues, whether they be lack of medical care and resources, social stigma against unwed mothers, a one-child policy or extreme poverty, that are creating so many orphans.

And then we need to do something about it.

Adoptive parents, adoption agencies and others have a responsibility to do something towards positive change in the countries these children are coming from. Programs that change the conditions that created orphans in the first place are what will change the life stories of the next generations of children.

So how do we do this? It can be done in big or small ways. You can sponsor a child so they can receive the life-saving surgery that they need so they can be healthy and their birth family can care for them and continue to raise them. Or you can sponsor a child so that they can receive an education and become an educated, self-supporting member of their society. Or you can buy a cow or a pig or another farm animal for a needy family. Or you can gather donations so that the children remaining in the orphanages can have things like shoes, pens and paper, toothbrushes and toys. There are many organizations that provide opportunities for us to stay connected and do something to help make a difference. Each life changed by a sponsor is a life that can touch and affect many others.

If every parent that has adopted a child sponsored just one person in their child’s birth country, think of the differences that we could make.

I am currently working on a list of organizations globally that provide opportunities for donations, service, sponsorship and other such programs. Please email me or send me a comment if you have one (or more) to recommend. I will post my list when it is complete.