Mary over at the Ethiopia Adoption blog as a great post today about "true orphans", and about the conflict some people feel adopting children who still have living parents. I was going to leave a comment, but decided I have enough to say to warrant a post or two of my own. :)

In this post I am going to discuss who I feel qualifies as a true orphan. Is a child who has been orphaned by the death of his parents "more" of an orphan than a child who has been relinquished by parents who cannot care for him because of poverty of illness?

Honestly, I do not believe that one child in an orphanage or foster care can be "needier" than another based on their family history. An orphaned child is an orphaned child.

We have adopted children who had both of their parents die. We have adopted children who were abandoned by single mothers. We have adopted children who had both parents alive (in the U.S.) but those parents had chosen to place the children for adoption. In all of those cases, the children were in need of a new family, because for one reason or another, their first families were no longer parenting them. In all of those cases, without adoption, those children would have grown up without a family.

I do not think that my children who were orphaned by the death of their parents were any more deserving of an adoptive family than the children whose parents chose to place them for adoption. They were all true orphans.

However, where things get sticky, is that to me, there is a difference between children being relinquished for adoption in the United States and children being relinquished for adoption in countries struggling with poverty, illness and lack of resources.

Now I am not saying that children who are relinquished for international adoption in poorer countries are not deserving of being adopted or that all of those adoption are unethical, but it is definitely more complicated and there is a lot more "gray area" in between right and wrong.

In my next post I will write about some of the issues involved with parents relinquishing children for adoption in countries suffering from poverty and illness.