Isn’t an adopted child in Canada legally indistinguishable from a child by birth? Aren’t children in Canada considered citizens? Canadian children don’t lose citizenship when they find themselves, say, orphaned, do they?
I don’t understand how this situation ends other than with the child as a ward of the Canadian government, and the former adoptive parent prosecuted for the abandonment.
Ah, I see. The Canadian parents were supposed to “apply” for the child’s citizenship. Seems to me that should be automatic with the adoption. I assume Canadian parents don’t have to apply for the citizenship of their birth children.
Has this been resolved since 2005?
I can’t say about Canada, but its only been the case since 1999 that adoption confers automatic citizenship in the U.S. At her age, if her adoptive parents had pulled the same thing in the U.S., she’d have the same issue.
This doesn’t seem logical to me. BF thinks his parents didn’t love him as much as they should have, not that *he *didn’t love *them *as much as he should have, but he’s worried that his potential adopted child won’t feel like s/he’s as well-loved by BF/dad as she should be. Well, the only way the child wouldn’t *be *as well loved as she should be would be if BF/dad had an issue with her different-ness. BF is projecting his own past issues onto the potential event of having a different child (whether because of non-bio-ness or different race), but placing the reason for doing so onto the child. If he could remove his issues with his own parents from the equation, I think he’d be just as loving with any child he raised, bio or not. Especially since he knows how it feels to think your parents don’t give you enough love.
Citizenship isnt automatic in Oz either, even if the child was born here from someone overseas. Many of the children locally adopted are from students studying here who cant take them back home.
Basically the adoption gets finalised, then the birth certificate changed to the parents name, then citizenship is applied for. Its all fairly routine, but not automatic, so for about a year the child is technically stateless.
Otara
But why isn’t it automatic? Is there some circumstance under which such a child would ever be denied citizenship?
As far as I can tell, its simply so that the adopters do the work rather than the department.
Otara
In the U.S. it was a matter of changing naturalization law. There just was never a provision to make a child adopted from another country a U.S. citizen upon adoption in the U.S. The adoption was one legal process, naturalization a second. It took a couple of bad cases (a kid born in S. Korea got caught for possession when he was twenty and was deported - he didn’t speak Korean or know anyone in Korea) to hit the light for people to say “wait, this needs to change.”
And yes, the INS (no longer the INS) used to review your case and could deny citizenship. That didn’t happen OFTEN but if your adoption agency couldn’t provide paperwork stating that the child was removed from the country in accordance with International Adoption Law (i.e. no baby stealing, no baby selling) then the INS would reject.
I actually linked to that Motherlode article and I believe Tedaldi’s original blog when the story came out. She has since taken down the personal websites, but the information about her “birth control failures” was publically available at the time the Motherlode piece came out. If you read through the comments, people dug up a lot of dirt on her due to her stupidity in not taking down her original blogs. She also adopted this child knowing her husband wouldn’t be in the home for significant periods of time and she’d be alone with several young children and a special needs child. She is an incredibly irresponsible individual but I’m somewhat appalled that the kid even made it into their home. Didn’t a social worker once question whether or not a mom that would be home alone with several young children and a routinely deployed husband might not be able to handle a kid with that many special needs?
This recently happened w/ a young lady adopted from Mexico, but I don’t remember why. I think it had something to do w/ her immigration status as a baby.
In our case the girl’s issues (6 yr old) were DRASTICALLY downplayed by the caseworker and foster mom. Is it fair to make your marriage and relationship with other family members suffer possibly irreparable damage because you were basically lied to?
When a child is born to you with issues - they are not hidden from you - and you have at least some level of control over how they are taught to deal with these issues.
If that’s the case, you have to decide who’s life you want to screw up more: yours or that of an innocent 6 year old.
A child who is born to you, if they have issues, are certainly hidden; you don’t know ANYTHING about what your child will be until they are born.
Everyday we struggle with the tools our children were not given in life and everyday we work to make it better for them.
If someone told you this would be easy, they were lying.
If you are looking for someone to say it is okay to turn your back on this child, you are looking in the wrong direction.
Ugh, let’s not resurrect this painful and offensive thread.
Can we lock this, mods? Please? It was painful enough for parents of adopted kids and adopted adults last time.