National Boundaries or Walls of Steel in the Face of Children in Need of a

Family

Maj. Hegazy, EGYPT

It seems like in today’s world we have gone global in many walks of life
but not as much when it comes to transnational adoption of children. For
different reasons, many countries have enacted laws and legislations that
either prohibit adoption of a child thereof by a foreign family or person or
have stipulated adoption preconditions and conditions that sound virtually
impossible to achieve. This has denied thousands of children access to a
better life and brighter future for unfair and unjustifiable reasons.

Adoption of foreign children should be made much easier than it is for a

host of reasons. First and foremost, adoption grants the adopted child a new
window of opportunity to become a better version of their future selves
through being taken care of by a loving, more capable family that is willing to
raise them to be good people. On the contrary, if such children are left in their
current environment, this could probably lead them to end up taking very
wrong turns in their lives due to the poverty and poor living conditions they
may have.

Secondly, adopting parents are supposedly scrutinized prior to being

validated as adopting parents in order to ensure they will take good care of
their adopted children. So, this helps in providing better protection of adopted
children against ending up being maltreated or abused. Also, in an attempt to
guarantee that adopted children are safe and are in a more favorable familial
environment than the one where they used to live, periodic checks are
conducted and regulated measures are taken by the competent authorities to
ensure the continuity of good care provision by the adopting parents.

Additionally, having foreigners attempting to adopt children from a given

country is a clear sign that such children do not receive the due care locally. If
so, the need for foreign adopting parents would not have arisen in the first
place. That means that foreign adopting parents are there to fill the gap in the
need for better care of those children and the probable inadequacy of the
care and services provided to them by local entities and families, if any at all.

To sum up, legislative constraints imposed on cross-border adoption of

children shall be reconsidered in a more sensible fashion. This way, more
children will have more opportunities of better lives, and that would in turn
serve as well the interest and betterment of the home country of adopted
children.