California Law Requires Disclosure : Prospective Parents Due Full Background on Child

California law requires that before any adoption becomes final, prospective parents must be given all available information on the child.

But rather than rely completely on an adoption agency, experts in the adoption field advise prospective adoptive parents to do a little research on their own.

Robert DeBolt, on the board of several adoption agencies and founder of AASK America, a private adoption agency in San Francisco for hard-to-place children, suggests that anyone interested in adopting a child should first get in touch with other adoptive parents. There are several adoptive parent groups in Southern California.

“They will tell you where the good agencies are, who the good social workers are, what the rules of the game are,” DeBolt said. “This is an extremely important resource that a lot of people are unaware of.”

DeBolt and his wife have adopted 14 children, many of them handicapped. He said that anyone seeking to adopt a child through an agency should also be comfortable with the social worker. If they are not, he added, they should request another.

And although the law requires it, he stressed that parents should ask for the complete history of the child, including medical, psychological and school records, and the background of the biological parents. Even though this information is available to parents under California law, some social workers withhold it.

In general, the older the child is, the more information will be available. Records of all foster homes and any trauma that the child may have encountered should be included.

Although some agencies frown on prospective adoptive parents visiting the child’s foster family, DeBolt and others encourage it.

Before a child may be adopted in California, the prospective parents must sign a document acknowledging that they were shown the available records. But that document could also say, for example, that no medical information was available.

Attorney Christian van Deusen, a Santa Ana attorney who specializes in adoptive law, said that in cases where complete information on an adopted child is not provided, parents in California usually have until five years after the adoption to petition the court to set aside the adoption.

The parents, however, must show that medical or psychiatric conditions existed before they adopted the child and that those conditions were not revealed to them.

After five years, Van Deusen said, the parents must prove to a court that they were misled or deceived into adopting a child.