ABSTRACT
Today, adoptive parents who are desperate for a child will find the majority of children who are available for adoption are not only over a year old but are also more troubled. The early days of adoption when it was possible to go to a Mother and Baby Home, choose a baby and take it home a few weeks later have passed and instead, that relatively simple transaction has been replaced by lengthy bureaucratic procedures. To return to the cases where there has been a failure to rehabilitate a child back into the original family, inevitably there will follow a lengthy assessment by social workers of prospective adopting parents. Another way of looking at the increasingly fraught experience of parents and their late adopted child is to realise that the Children Act of 1989 was founded on economic considerations.
