Are you longing to give a child a loving home? Adoption could be the answer.

Are you longing to become a parent, or to extend your family – to provide a child with a loving home? Adoption could be the best option for your life, but it’s not necessarily an easy one… Before you embark on this journey, you need to consider the pros and cons. Adoption is a lifelong commitment that has the power to change lives forever, whether this is for the good or bad is up to you...

Adoption involves making deliberate choices and asking oneself important questions, including:

• Can I accept and love as my own a child born to someone else?
• Can I accept a child of a different race?
• Can I become a parent to a special needs child?
• Which of the children who need a family could we be suitable parents to?

Every year, hundreds of people choose to pursue adoption for a variety of reasons:

• some people have simply always wanted to adopt for as long as they can remember,
• some adopt because of infertility,
• some just want to increase the size of their family, and
• some are single and see adoption as a way of becoming a parent.

It is also important to remember that adoptive parents are a resource for children who cannot, for whatever reason, remain with their birth families, and not the other way around.

Adoption is the legal process by which the rights and responsibilities for a child are given up by one set of parents and taken on by another. It is however much more than a legal process. It is also the creation of a family. It involves deep human emotions and has the potential to create great happiness as well as great disappointment.

Before you decide that adoption is the right plan for you, much thinking and discussion should take place. You need to consider carefully every aspect of adoption and scrutinise your own feelings about it.

If you are part of a couple, both of you need to feel convinced that this is the right decision for you before you introduce an adopted child into your family. Be aware that for adopting parents, the adoption process can take from 6 months to a year to complete.