Wrongful Adoption

"Wrongful adoption" is a term given to legal action against a public or private adoption agency by adoptive parents. The parents accuse the agency of, whether maliciously or inadvertently, wrongly withholding critical mental, physical, or placement history about the child or his family from the adoptive family. This new area of case law has presented challenges for parents wishing to pursue legal action against agencies as well as for agencies trying to meet new standards for ethical practice.

Related terms include "wrongful adoption," "background information disclosure" (of health and social background information), "agency liability," and in some cases "adoption fraud."

Each State's laws differ on the process for the legal dissolution of a finalized adoption. A few States limit the period of time in which adoptive parents can go back to court to dissolve the adoption based on a medical or emotional condition not known or not disclosed at the time of the adoption. Many States hold that an adoption becomes the legal equivalent of a relationship based on birth at the time that the adoption is finalized and require adoptive parents to follow the same procedures that birth parents must follow in order to relinquish their parental rights.

Learn more about wrongful adoption in the Hot Topic: Wrongful Adoption and Agency Liability.

Wrongful adoption claims are most often filed because parents question the amount, type, or quality of the background information that they received from an agency. Learn more about the release of background information in this factsheet.

You can also access our searchable bibliographic database. Using the keywords listed above, you can retrieve abstracts of documents to narrow and focus your search. The document abstracts also give you publisher and distributor information since most documents are copyrighted.

In addition there are two other Web sites which may be helpful to you regarding your research topic:

Adoption Advocates web site at http://www.fpsol.com/adoption/advocates.html

Cases, Statutes and Other Legal Information provides a series of law decisions regarding wrongful adoption cases filed in a number of states
Issues in Adoption Advocacy - several issues of their newsletter contain articles regarding the changing legal standards for agency liability regarding the disclosure of background and health information on a child to prospective adoptive parents.
The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute provides additional policy information on the standards for background information disclosure developed as a result of these case law decisions on its Web site at http://www.adoptioninstitute.org.