Adoption | featured news

Reports that a 3-year-old adopted Russian child died in Texas last month set off a furor here Tuesday, with Russian officials declaring the boy had been abused, although U.S. authorities say the death is still under investigation.

France's lower house of parliament on Tuesday approved a sweeping bill to legalize gay marriage and allow same-sex couples to adopt children, handing a major legislative victory to President Francois Hollande's Socialists on a divisive social issue.

The measure, approved in the National Assembly in a 329-to-229 vote, puts France on track to join about a dozen mostly European nations that allow gay marriage and comes despite a string of recent demonstrations by opponents of the so-called "marriage for all" bill.

In July 2011, my husband and I traveled to a Russian orphanage to meet a 2-year-old girl. We petitioned the Russian courts to adopt her, and waited 14 agonizing months to be granted a court date, all along fearing we would never be able to bring her home.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, acceding to the anti-American fervor that has gripped the country’s legislature, said Thursday that he intends to sign a bill barring Americans from adopting Russian children.

Brothers and sisters facing adoption should in some cases be split up for their own benefit, the government's adoption adviser has said. Martin Narey said the presumption that siblings are kept together can sometimes "disadvantage children".

Disney’s “The Avengers” has earned almost universally positive reviews and made $200 million in its first weekend. Yet for some in the adoption community, a joke in the film goes too far.

China does not permit surrogate parenting, but that country's rising affluence has given many couples the option of using U.S. surrogacy clinics. Americans have long gone to China to adopt babies.

An Alaska woman was convicted Tuesday of misdemeanor child abuse after squirting hot sauce into the mouth of her adopted Russian son as punishment in what prosecutors said was a ploy to get on a TV show.

A new biography says Barack Obama’s father told an immigration official in 1961 he and his then-wife planned to give the future president up for adoption. Obviously it didn’t happen — and relatives said they never heard any such talk, writes Sally Jacobs, whose bio of Barack Obama Sr. is out next week.

With Facebook, if you think your child needs you to find a birth parent, you are fooling yourself.