Adoption

Adoption is a legal or customary process through which a person assumes the parenting of another, most commonly a child, from that person's biological or legal parent or parents, transferring the rights, responsibilities and social status of parenthood to the adopting parent or parents and, in most modern legal systems, severing the legal ties and obligations of the biological parents. The practice has ancient roots, documented in law codes including the Code of Hammurabi in ancient Mesopotamia and in Roman law, where adoptio and the related adrogatio provided formal legal mechanisms, used especially among the Roman elite, to secure an heir, continue a family line or transfer paternal authority, a practice famously exemplified by Julius Caesar's adoption of his great-nephew Octavian, later the emperor Augustus. Adoption differs from the kinship institution of fosterage in that adoption is generally intended to be permanent and to fully substitute the adoptive relationship for the biological one in law and social recognition, whereas fostering arrangements historically and in many contemporary child-welfare systems preserve the birth parents' recognized status and are often intended as temporary. Modern adoption practice is governed by formal legal procedures intended to protect the interests of the adopted person, and includes both domestic adoption within a single country and intercountry adoption across national borders, the latter regulated internationally since 1993 by the Hague Adoption Convention.