When I was about 1-year-old, my mother put me up for adoption in Chennai, India. My mother did not have enough resources to take care of me and she wanted me to have a better life. She could not take care of me even if my grandparents helped her out.  My father was unnamed on my adoption documents. My mother said that there was something illegal about him.  I tried looking for my birth mother when I was in 8th grade. However, since I was born in south India the language is different. They speak either Tamil or Tamil Nadu. My adoptive family does not speak Tamil or Tamil Nadu. My parents asked their friend Sriram, who spoke the same language as most of the people living there. And who was going to India, in his free time to hire a private investigator to look for my birth mother.  My dad gave him the address, so Sriram wanted to see what he could do by himself before hiring a private investigator. He went to the house that my birth mother listed on the adoption papers.  No one was living in that house so he asked the neighbors if they knew where the people were living. It turns out that my birth mother had moved to a different house.  He went to the new address that he was given. A lady answered the door and they started having a conversation.  He asked her if she ever gave up a child for  adoption. She never said yes or no to him.  But there were young kids running around the house.  At the time, I did not understand why the lady did not say “Yes, I gave a child up for adoption” or “No, I did not give up a child for adoption,” but now I understand.  No one wants to admit that they gave up a child for adoption because they could not take care of their child themselves.  It took me years to understand why I was put up for adoption and to become comfortable talking about it.  

For my Capstone Project, I chose adoption as my topic because I want to learn more about it. The common reasons for children to be put up for adoption are because their parents can not take care of them, their parents might be drug addicts or alcoholics, or they just don’t have the right amount of money to raise a child.  I also already know, however, that adoption is not that common of a choice for many people. When women are told that they can not conceive a child, someone often brings up adoption as an option.  However, most women never think about adoption; most of the time women want to have their own child. Since not that many people think of adoption, children who do not get adopted end up living in foster care for the rest of their lives, and they don’t have a way of getting out of it.   

By the end of my Capstone Project, I want to have these questions answered:  What is the long-term effect for the adoptee? Why does it take longer for international adoptions compared to domestic adoptions?  How come some countries don’t allow certain people from different countries to adopt a child? For example, in India, only Indians can adopt a child from India in order to keep the culture with the child.  How can society make adoption more common?  Are adoptees better than non-adoptees? Will society benefit from adoptees? I would also like to disprove these two myths that I found over the internet: Not all adoptees turn out to be drug addicts or get depressed and sibling relationships don’t matter. In an article, I was reading it mentioned how the children would be depressed and eventually get involved with drugs. That is definitely not 100% true considering no one knows if those genes will be strong in the child. Also, children or teens who become depressed or do drugs it doesn't always have to do with genetics. I want to prove that adopting one sibling and not the other does matter.  It may not matter to the adoptive parents or the agency but it matters to the adoptees. Adoption agencies do not do a good job at making sure siblings are adopted together.  It’s common for siblings to be split up by the adoption agency.