Sen. Grace Poe. JOAN BONDOC/INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
With still too many unwanted children in the country, Sen. Grace Poe on Wednesday pushed for a more streamlined adoption process in order to give these children a better chance to live full and productive lives.
Speaking at the 13th Philippine Global Consultation on Child Welfare Services on Wednesday, Poe lauded the Inter-Country Adoption Board (ICAB) for being on track to equal the number of intercountry adoptions it completed last year.
The ICAB finalized 386 adoptions last year and 194 in the first half of 2015.
The value of ICAB’s task of matching children with welcoming families is not something that can be measured by numbers, she said.
But this also indicates a darker lining.
“However, looking at these figures another way, I will say that they indicate that there is still a huge number of unwanted children in our country,” she said.
Poe noted that there are many reasons for parents to give up their children, and one of them is poverty.
“Yet as legitimate a reason this is for some Filipinos who struggle to feed themselves, let alone another mouth, I cannot help but find this truly tragic—because it underlies a willingness to keep the child if the parents or parent only had the means to do it,” she added.
But Poe said these children given up for adoption by their parents could still improve their lot in life if given a chance to be with families who want to care for them.
She pushed for the approval of her bill that would strengthen the system of birth registration of children in special need of protection (CNSP).
The bill would include foundlings as among the CNSPs and would require that they be registered within 60 days after being taken into custody.
It also seeks to ensure that the adoption process is streamlined, as it requires that any child who is classified as a child in special need of protection should receive, within 48 hours, whatever support is needed, such as documentation, medical attention, temporary custody and the like.
“Our aim is to transition as swiftly as possible any CNSP into a child that you can soon help place in adoption. Our deeper hope is that any trauma suffered by the child be quickly healed and forgotten, especially when the child is integrated into a system of care, preferably one that comes from the adoptive family,” she said.
Poe cited her own life story as a way for adoption to improve a child’s lot in life.
She herself was a foundling, left in an Iloilo church. But her fate took a cinematic turn after she was adopted by actors Susan Roces and Fernando Poe Jr.
“This is the stuff of movies, you might say, and in an instance of cinematic foreshadowing that proved to be true, I did end up being adopted by two movie stars,” she said.
Her fate could easily have been different, she noted.
“But at that moment, as a newborn alone in that church, I was simply one tiny human being on the planet with the least agency and without help. I was at the complete mercy of destiny and dependent on the kindness of strangers. The slightest stroke of ill fortune could have rewritten my life story into something much different and perhaps less happy,” she said.
She said this was the situation of most children being placed for adoption. They are also waiting for a family to raise them as their own, with the proper care and love.—Leila B. Salaverria