adoption

Ella Purkiss will be sworn in as a US citizen next week. Advocates say as many as 15,000 people who were adopted from abroad but never naturalized are waiting for legislation that would give them the chance to get documented too.

It’s no big deal when a single woman chooses to adopt in the US. But in the United Arab Emirates? That’s something new.

When Ayesha and Marco D’Souza started the adoption process, they knew some baby girls in India were not even allowed to be born because of sex selection. And they know that some view girls as a burden. Still, they weren’t choosing a girl out of charity, they say. They just wanted a daughter.

Guatemala shut down international adoptions in 2008. Before that, US families adopted some 30,000 Guatemalan children. Now those kids are growing up, and some want a connection with their birth families. Enter “searchers,” who will try to track down birth families for a fee. But as one adoptive mom found out, that process can be difficult — and it’s as unregulated as international adoption itself once was in Guatemala.

The words you hear as an infant can alter your brain in ways that stick with you as an adult, even if you can’t consciously recall the language you heard. Canadian researchers found traces of Chinese in the brain activity of kids who were adopted as infants from China.