Abstract
Adoption is the transfer of legal parenting rights from one parent to someone else. Related adoption is when a relative takes over the parenting of another person, usually a child, from the biological or legal parents of that person. In non-related adoption all rights and responsibilities are assumed by someone who has no genetic links to the adopted person. Adoption has been a common practice historically in diverse cultures. Today it is a global practice. The country with the largest number of children adopted per 100 live births is the United States. Each year 135,000 children are adopted, which means 1 of every 25 US families with children has an adopted child. According to the US Census about half of these families have both biological and adopted children. In other countries the numbers are much lower. For example, in Italy there were 3,158 adoptions in 2006 and 1,044 in Sweden in 2002.
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ten Have, H., Patrão Neves, M. (2021). Adoption. In: Dictionary of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54161-3_43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54161-3_43
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