According to the Adoption Institute, 1.5 billion children are currently adopted. This puts the percentage of all U.S. children that are adopted at 2%. Clearly, there is a great need for families to step up, take orphaned or abused children into their homes, and care for them as their own. There are many different reasons that people adopt children and just as many different ways to go about doing it.

Embryo Adoption

When a couple is having trouble conceiving on their own, they sometimes visit a fertility doctor and have their sperm and egg conjoined outside of the womb. The resulting unborn embryos are then nurtured outside of the womb for a time before being inserted into the woman and brought to full term. Often, many embryos are formed outside of the womb for any given couple and after one has been successfully implanted in the female, there are frozen embryos that remain.

It is now legal for couples who cannot conceive on their own to adopt the surplus embryos from other couples and bring them to full term in the woman's own womb. There is much controversy surrounding this type of adoption but many childless couples are braving the opposition and paying sizable sums of money to adopt unborn embryos that they can birth themselves and nurture on their own.

International Adoption

Brad and Angelina have brought International adoption to the forefront of the media eye in recent days. However, families have been adopting children this way for decades. Many children in third world countries, such as Romania, are being badly mistreated in orphanages or have to fend for themselves on the dangerous streets. These children often have not seen their parents since soon after birth and are often times left completely alone in the world.

Many couples are deciding to adopt these International children and raise them as their own. The adoption process for families wishing to take in International children can be lengthy and complex. In addition to the usual home and background inspections, there is also a need to the needed papers to visit your adoptive child in a foreign country and to create a dossier (legal papers) for the government from which you wish to adopt your child.

Private Adoption

This is the most commonly recognized form of adoption, wherein families adopt children via licensed agencies or through direct contact with the birth parents. In the private adoption process, there must be a total revocation of the birth parents' rights to the child in order to make the adoption final.

Many potential problems arise in the case of private adoption, when the birth parent is not fit to raise the child but still refuses to relinquish rights and let the child be adopted by a fit family. Laws on this matter vary from state to state, and should this problem arise it is imperative that the adoptive parents hire a skilled lawyer as soon as possible. The courts tend to favor birth parents when it comes to parental rights, but in some cases, the birth parents can be clearly proven as unfit to raise the child.