Adoption from Care: Evolving Directions in Policy and Practice from a Comparative Perspective

This chapter aims to explore the strengths and weaknesses of adoption from care as an alternative for children who would otherwise spend all or a large part of their childhoods in state care. The particular focus is on public authorities who are key actors in initiating adoption for some children and making decisions accordingly. This chapter provides a synthesis of research about the variation across jurisdictions regarding adoption from care as a form of child protection, with a particular focus on decision-making practices and lessons learnt about policies and practices supporting the rights and needs of children in long-term care as well as of birth and adoptive parents. The chosen jurisdictions (England, Estonia, Ireland, the United States, Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway and Spain) range from those which make extensive use of adoption from care to those in which adoption from care is extremely rare or non-existent; they also differ in their overall approaches to child protection and out-of-home care, ranging from risk-orientation (England, Estonia, Ireland and the United States) to family-service orientations (Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway and Spain). In addition, this chapter provides an empirical analysis of adoption decisions from seven of those eight European countries mentioned above, including 233 children. The decisions are those made by courts which we examine in order to provide an overview on children adopted from care.