Every child has the right to a family, and that right must be protected in accordance with the child's best interest: this is the basic principle behind all legal safeguards for minors. Adoption is the primary instrument of protection — and in recent years it has become a heated public debate, often because different issues have been deliberately or carelessly conflated.
We need to start with a fundamental distinction. Adoption must first and foremost be an act of freely given willingness to welcome a child into one's home. It is never the exercise of an adult's right to become a parent. People may turn to adoption to fulfill a legitimate and natural desire for motherhood or fatherhood, but that desire is not a right. Whether a couple can actually adopt depends entirely on whether it serves the child's best interest. When a child loses their biological parents — whether through death, incapacity, or abandonment — the state chooses the most suitable parents with the child's welfare in mind. I stress this because if we shift our perspective to the desires of the adult seeking to adopt, we fundamentally distort how society protects its most vulnerable children. We must not flip the question from "which parents are best for this particular child?" to "which child is best for this particular couple or family?" Yet this reversal — legally absurd — is becoming the dominant frame in public discussion of adoption.
Children with any form of disability — termed "children with special educational needs" in adoption terminology — have become, whether they chose to or not, central to this debate. They are the stone rejected by the builders that we must help become and remain the cornerstone of society, like every other child.
Disabled children have been at the center of profound shifts over recent decades. Medical advances in prenatal diagnosis and assisted reproduction have done two things: reduced the number of adoptable children with disabilities, and led many couples to pursue assisted reproduction as an alternative to adoption, often postponing adoption indefinitely. This transformation has been especially dramatic in international adoption. Over the past twenty years, traditional source countries — Russia and China foremost among them — have promoted domestic adoption, sharply reducing the number of children available for international placement. And among those who are placed internationally, older children and those with physical or intellectual disabilities have become dominant. Of the 1,394 children who arrived in Italy in 2018, 981 of them — 70 percent — had special educational needs. Among these, 297 had a diagnosed disability, representing over 20 percent of all children who arrived.
Children with special needs face higher rates of abandonment and longer waits to find families. If we think of adoption as an adult's right to parenthood, it becomes clear these children will face ever-steeper odds. But if we think of adoption as a response to a child's need, then the most vulnerable children move to the top of the list.
These are generous and demanding choices that truly embody the spirit of welcome the law asks of prospective parents. We must never forget that all children placed for adoption, regardless of age or circumstance, carry the trauma of abandonment, which compounds whatever challenges their disability brings. That is why it is so vital to find families willing to welcome them. It is true, as readers of Ombre e Luci know well, that raising a child with a disability is deeply demanding. But it is possible. What families need is preparation and training in the specific dynamics of adoption and disability. They need community and networks to sustain them through the inevitable crises ahead. They need pedagogical tools and an enormous reserve of love to answer the questions their child will ask as they grow. And they need public services that guide parents through the decision and support the child through their development.
Under Italian adoption law (184/1983), if no suitable couple can be found, courts may place a child with a disability with a single adult. This provision — part of the framework for "particular adoptions" (articles 44 ff.) — is an exceptional measure available for children who have waited a long time for placement.
Many adoptable children, especially those with severe or profound disabilities, remain for years in residential facilities — group homes and care communities — waiting for adoption that often never comes. Most often, their time in the facility ends only when they reach adulthood, when they are transferred to adult residences, having never had the chance to experience life in a family.