Reform and reunion trends
Adoption practices have changed significantly over the course of the 20th century, with each new movement labeled, in some way, as reform. Beginning in the 1970s, efforts to improve adoption became associated with opening records and encouraging family preservation. These ideas arose from suggestions that the secrecy inherent in modern adoption may influence the process of forming an identity, create confusion regarding genealogy, and provide little in the way of medical history. Family preservation: As concerns over illegitimacy began to decline in the early 1970s, social-welfare agencies began to emphasize that, if possible, mothers and children should be kept together. In the U.S., this was clearly illustrated by the shift in policy of the New York Foundling Home, an adoption-institution that is among the countrys oldest and one that had pioneered sealed records. It established three new principles including "to prevent placements of children...", reflecting the belief that children would be better served by staying with their biological families, a striking shift in policy that remains in force today. In addition, groups such as Origins USA (founded in 1997) started to actively speak about family preservation and the rights of mothers. The intellectual tone of these reform movements was influenced by the publishing of The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. "Primal wound" is described as the "devastation which the infant feels because of separation from its birth mother.
Negative perceptions result in the belief that such children are so troubled it would be impossible to adopt them and create "normal" families. A 2004 report from the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care has shown that the number of children waiting in foster care doubled since the 1980s and now remains steady at about a half-million a year. "Attitude toward Adoption Questionnaire (ATAQ): this questionnaire was first developed by Abdollahzadeh, Chaloyi and Mahmoudi(2019). Preliminary Edition: This questionnaire has 23 items based on the Likert scale of 1 (totally Disagree), up to 5 (Totally Agree) being obtained after refining the items designed to construct the present tool and per-study study. The analysis of item and initial psychometric analyses indicate that there are two factors in it. Items 3-10-11-12-14-15-16-17-19-20-21 are reversed and the rest are graded positively. The results of exploratory factor analysis by main components with varimax rotation indicated two components of attitude toward adoption being named respectively cognitive as the aspects of attitude toward adoption and behavioral-emotional aspects of attitude toward adoption. These two components explained 43.25% of the variance of the total sample. Cronbachs alpha coefficient was used to measure the reliability of the questionnaire. Cronbachs alpha coefficient was 0.709 for the whole questionnaire, 0.71 for the first component, and 0.713 for the second one. In addition, there was a significant positive relationship between desired social tendencies and the cognitive aspect of attitude toward adoption as well as the behavioral -emotional aspects of attitude toward adoption (P ≤ 0.01).