Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. (Khalil Gibran)
It's natural and right to imagine and want a healthy, intelligent child—someone perhaps who resembles you, someone who might realize the dreams you couldn't fulfill yourself.
What, then, moves a couple to choose adopting a child with a disability? The danger is real: the desire to perform charity, to prove you're good and mature and socially conscious. A sense of challenge can emerge: "I will save this child!" But what if you can't save them? What if they refuse to be saved? What then? Send them back?
The reasons that lead a couple down such a demanding and uncertain path often spring from emotion—from an affective bond kindled by encounter, a spark of mutual empathy. In such moments, social services may quickly propose fostering or adoption, sometimes easing the bureaucratic process. Yet we must always reflect with humility, with care, with the necessary measure of concern for the adult this child will become.
Some couples consciously choose a special adoption not as heroes or moral exemplars, but as people naturally open to "the other," even the different—people formed by hospitality and sharing. They welcome a child with a disability as many couples welcome a child born with disability, loving and caring for them without fanfare or superiority. This approach often appears among couples who already have other children, with whom they share their reasons and whom they recognize will be enriched by welcoming a disabled sibling into the family.
How many recognized that laws including disabled children in schools offered an educational gift to all students—not charity or mere social justice, but genuine pedagogy? Not many, I suspect. Most overlooked, and many still overlook, the transformative power of difference in a classroom. Within a family, as in society at large, the same exchange could happen: each person gives what they have and receives what the other offers, beginning from the truth that we are all born different from one another, yet absolutely equal before God.
Rita Massi, 2012