What happens if the child is reclaimed in the event of adoption?
A young adoptive mother describes her horror and sends an astonishing message to the birth parents.
Virginia - If you describe what happened to a couple from America as a roller coaster of emotions, that's putting it mildly.
In 2015, a shock diagnosis thwarted the family planning of Sarah and Chris Howell from the US state Virginia: Sarah suffers from endometriosis.
The doctors gave the young woman a one percent chance of ever becoming a mother naturally.
Then, three years later, events came over and over again.
When a newborn girl was put up for adoption in 2018, Sarah and Chris Howell found their family happiness after three years of suffering.
However, the dream did not last.
Just five days after adoption, he turned into a nightmare when Sarah received a devastating phone call stating that the birth parents were demanding their child back.
Five days after the adoption, the phone rings: "Worse than anything"
When the phone rang, Sarah was feeding her baby daughter.
"The pain I felt that day was worse than anything I had experienced in her fight against infertility in previous years," she recalls in an interview with the US magazine
Metro
.
Sarah fell to the ground in desperation.
"Over and over again I said to my husband: 'This is a joke, isn't it ?!'"
But it was not a joke, because in the USA * birth parents have the right to revoke an adoption for ten days after the birth of their child.
The adoption laws in America keep causing strange legal disputes.
Sarah and Chris Howell had their hands tied.
They had to return their little girl after five days in Family Heaven.
"It felt like she died because we knew we'd probably never see her again."
Parents have to give children back after adoption - then the impossible happens
The shock news was by no means the end of the drama.
Because shortly before the girl was adopted, the almost impossible happened: Sarah was pregnant herself, at the time of the adoption in the eighth week.
In addition to the mourning for the lost adopted daughter, Sarah also had to struggle with hellish fear: She feared that her dismay could trigger a miscarriage.
Fortunately, it didn't get that far.
In October 2018, Sarah gave birth to a healthy child - her little Noah.
“The first time I took him to my chest, I thanked God for this miracle,” Sarah says today.
It shouldn't be the only child in the young family.
After a failed adoption: Sarah and Chris Howell find their late family happiness
A year after Noah was born, Sarah and Chris got another chance to adopt a baby. Despite the bad experience from the previous year, the two consent. Noah has a little brother: Levi. At the time of adoption, he was just one day old - but this time the ten-day period passed without a call from his birth parents. However, the Howells' child planning was not yet complete: A foster child has also been living with the family since June 2021.
Today Sarah and Chris didn’t forget the unsuccessful adoption, but at least digested it. Sarah has no grudges against the biological parents of "her" first child. On the contrary: “If we could, we would tell you how lucky your daughter is to have you as a parent.” Nevertheless, she will never forget your little girl. “It has helped us heal part of what had destroyed infertility in us. She made me a mother, even if only for a few days. ”
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