For adoptive parents, love lights the way  

A very frisky young girl, almost two, was beside me on the day her mother and several others shared their stories about adoption. 

 

Felice is the girl. Nette Santos is her mother. 

 

“Before we had Felice, we were a two-person family,” Santos said. They often went out for dinner and traveled, but they felt that they still had lots of love to impart despite their happiness. “But when Felice came into our lives, we became a bigger and richer family. Tatlo na kami ang nagkukulitan (Three of us were bugging each other), and there was a big abundance of love.” 

 

Santos and her husband adopted the baby from the White Cross Orphanage in San Juan with the help of the Kaisahang Buhay Foundation. “We felt we had to get our apprehensions [about adoption] across so that [the group] could help us through them,” Santos added. “From day one, we told our daughter that God gave her to us.”

Adoption stories
 

This was just one of four stories in “Love Sees Beyond Differences.” It was an adoption advocacy event that took place at the headquarters of McCann Worldwide (formerly McCann Erickson Philippines), not far from a nearby park where the advertising agency's employees would be hosting a picnic for the families. 

 

Co-sponsored by the Department of Social Welfare and Development, and the Inter-Country Adoption Board, the event aims to promote legal adoption as a way of making it possible for persons to expand their family members—and diverse ones too. To illustrate this theme, a song by Ogie Alcasid was performed by a chorus of deaf students from the De La Salle-College of St Benilde. The song spoke of differences between parents and child not being a hindrance to love.

 

Marvin Narvaez, a math teacher, spoke about the ongoing process in adopting his daughter. One of the couples spoke of their experience adopting children from Kazakhstan and the Philippines. Meanwhile, the Logans discussed their experience pertaining to adopting a child with special needs. The child is unable to talk or walk at all. But the father is an avid runner, and has taken the child with him on a cart while he runs.

Legal adoptions are a long and challenging process for the uninitiated; a lot of paperwork is required from the potential couple, and the DSWD requires that babies are matched with parents rather than selected directly by the couple. It is a careful process that involves scrutinizing whether the potential parents have the child's best interests at heart. 

 

For instance, in Ms. Santos's case, the process took about a year. Until recently, foster families were not allowed to adopt children, but a recent change in the law allowed for that.

Foster Care Act and the legalities 

Senator Pia Cayetano is herself an adoptive parent. The new Foster Care Act was drafted under her watch as chair of the Senate's committee on women, youth, and family. After losing a child born with severe disabilities in 2001 and being separated from her husband, she decided to adopt a child with the consent of her other two children. You see, it is legally required that children above ten consent to an adoption. At the moment, Senator Cayetano is foster mother to Lucas, now two-and-a-half. 

 

Cayetano emphasized that inter-family adoptions, usually by parents who leave their children with other relatives especially when seeking work abroad, are not recognized unless proper legal process is followed. 

 

“If something happens to the [pseudo-adoptive] parent [of the child],” the senator said, “the child may not enjoy the same rights. Sometimes some documents require the [signature of the] legal guardian or the parent. So even if the child is with you [informally], you may not really be the guardian.”

 

Pilar Tolentino of the Center for Family Ministries at the Ateneo campus emphasized that, in the end, the joys and challenges facing families adopting children or awaiting the birth of one are often similar. 

 

“For instance,” Tolentino said, “when I heard about Nette talking about the challenges of waiting for her baby, I couldn't help but think of the time when I was expecting my own child.” With both adoptive and natural parents, it is a leap of faith, she added. “The stories that we share should help end the stigma of adoptive families because they are the same stories, the same challenges.”

 

The stories of adoption, and the implications it has for public policy and our community at large, are indeed worth hearing. If there is one thing I learned and would love to share about all the families who spoke that afternoon, it is that they are hoping that people would, like them, take that risk. – KDM, GMA News