What is an adoption (regular) ?

When a child is born, the biological parents will subscribe the newborn under their name. Next to be biological parents, they now also have become the legal parents and therefor they are responsible for the child until he/she reaches the age of a legal adult (as per the applicable laws in the country of birth).

Adoptions can come into place for several reasons. For example, when a child is facing a difficult or maybe even a dangerous situation in the household where he or she lives, the situation can come under the attention and care of of the country’s “child protection authority”. In Chile this is known as SENAME (Servicio Nacional de Menores). When this authority decides that the situation is not getting any better for the minor, it can be escalated to court so that a judge has to decide what will happen with the minor.

The judge can decide that the minor will be better off in an other family or can even decide for the child to be adopted. This would be in the basic sense by a family who will take care of the child and give it a good and solid future. How this selection process takes place will not be discussed here as there are simply too many variations worldwide however, there are interesting podcasts available today which might be worth listening to. (links to follow)

Once a judge has decided that the adoption of the minor goes forward, then the biological parents will loose their “legal parent-ship ” over the child. The legal parent-ship will be “given” to the adoptive parents through the judge’s order (and only is this possible through a judge’s order). This is what we call an adoption: an adoption which has taken place in a regular form.

Inter-Country Adoption

When we are speaking about an inter-country adoption, it will also mean that the child, who is about to leave the country, must be completely eliminated from the public system records. In some situations we have seen that on the birth certificate, a notation is available making clear that the child left the country to be adopted in the new country of residence. 

It should not be possible for the child to maintain registered in the country of birth as being a citizen of that country.