Sec. 2. Findings; purposes
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Congress makes the following findings: The people of the United States recognize and believe that children must grow up in permanent, safe, and nurturing families in order to develop and thrive. Science now proves conclusively that children suffer immediate, lasting, and in many cases irreversible damage from time spent living in institutions or outside of families, including reduced brain activity, reduced IQ, smaller brain size, and inability to form emotional bonds with others.
Governments in other countries seek models that promote the placement of children who are living outside family care in permanent, safe, and nurturing families, rather than in foster care or institutions, but many governments lack the resources or infrastructure to adequately address this need. Despite the good efforts of countless governments and nongovernmental organizations, millions of children remain uncounted and outside of the protection, nurturing care, permanence, safety, and love of a family.
Without the care of a family, these children are forced to live on the streets, in institutions, in paid foster care, in child-headed households, in group homes, or as household servants. No reliable data currently exists to define and document the number and needs of children in the world currently living without families, but available evidence demonstrates that there are millions of children in this situation needing immediate help. The December 2012 Action Plan for Children in Adversity commits the United States Government to achieving a world in which all children grow up within protective family care and free from deprivation, exploitation, and danger.
To effectively and efficiently accomplish this goal, it is necessary to realign the United States Government’s current operational system for assisting orphans and vulnerable children, and processing intercountry adoptions. All options for providing appropriate, protective, and permanent family care to children living without families must be considered concurrently and permanent solutions must be put in place as quickly as possible. Solutions include family preservation and reunification, kinship care, guardianship, domestic and intercountry adoption, and other culturally acceptable forms of care that will result in appropriate, protective, and permanent family care.
Preference should be given to options that optimize child best interests, which generally means options which provide children with fully protected legal status and parents with full legal status as parents, including full parental rights and responsibilities. The principle of subsidiarity, which gives preference to in-country solutions, should be implemented within the context of a concurrent planning strategy, exploring in- and out-of-country options simultaneously. If an in-country placement serving the child’s best interest and providing appropriate, protective, and permanent care is not quickly available, and such an international home is available, the child should be placed in that international home without delay.
Significant resources are already dedicated to international assistance for orphans and vulnerable children, and a relatively small portion of these resources can be reallocated to achieve more timely, effective, nurturing, and permanent familial solutions for children living without families, resulting in fewer children worldwide living in institutions or on the streets, more families preserved or reunified, and increased domestic and international adoptions. The purposes of this Act are— to support the core American value that families are the bedrock of any society; to protect the fundamental human right of all children to grow up within the loving care of permanent, safe, and nurturing families; to address a critical gap in United States foreign policy implementation by adjusting the Federal Government’s international policy and operational structures so that seeking permanent families for children living without families receives more prominence, focus, and resources (through the reallocation of existing personnel and resources); to harness the diplomatic and operational power of the United States Government in the international sphere by helping to identify and implement timely, permanent, safe, and nurturing familial solutions for children living without families, including refugee or stateless children; to ensure that intercountry adoption by United States citizens becomes a viable and fully developed option for creating permanent families for children who need them; to protect against abuses of children, birth families, and adoptive parents involved in intercountry adoptions, and to ensure that such adoptions are in the individual child’s best interests; and to harmonize and strengthen existing intercountry adoption processes under United States law— by ensuring that the same set of procedures and criteria govern suitability and eligibility determinations for prospective adoptive parents seeking to complete intercountry adoptions, whether or not the child is from a foreign state that is a party to the Hague Adoption Convention; and by aligning the definitions of eligible child for Convention adoptions and non-Convention adoptions to the maximum extent possible.