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{
    "id": 962666,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/962666/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 308,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Gilgil, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Ms.) Martha Wangari",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13123,
        "legal_name": "Martha Wangari",
        "slug": "martha-wangari"
    },
    "content": "ahead. The adoption process in this country is quite tedious because you have to apply and make a formal application with an adoption agency. You have to declare your financial capacity of taking care of a child, you have to be of proper mental capacity, you must not have been convicted by a court of law or served a jail term, and you must divulge as much information at that stage as possible. After you apply for formal adoption, what happens is that you get a social worker, if the adoption society feels that you could adopt a baby. The social worker will be with you at your workplace. He will talk to your family members and your friends. He will talk to people who know you to be able to say whether you are capable of bringing a child home. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, after that you will get a counsellor. You have to be taken through what it means to adopt a child who is not biologically yours. This means every member of the family who is expected to stay with that child would be taken through a counselling process and at the end of the day, the National Adoption Committee will select a committee that will actually get the report from the social worker and the counsellor. They may say that so-and-so is not of mental capacity to adopt a child or have a child at home. So, they may reject your application. If they agree that you go on with the adoption process that is exactly where now the process begins. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, today we have spoken about children a lot in this House. How women sometimes have to choose between having their babies and going to work. If you are living in Rongai and you have been given a go-ahead to adopt a child who is two months old and the adoption society wants to see how you stay with that child, they will want to see continuous interaction. For you to be at work at 8.00 am, you leave Rongai at 5 a.m. By the time you go back it is 10.00 p.m. Most people fail that test not because they are not compatible with the child, but because they do not get the chance to demonstrate that they have the capacity to go ahead with the adoption. That is where this Bill comes in. If you read Section 29 of the parent Act, you will appreciate that it contemplates leave for only biological children; not the ones that are brought forward through surrogacy. This means someone else renting a womb – If am not able to carry a child I can rent a womb and someone else carries that child for me – is not given maternity leave to bond with her child even when she is the commissioning parent. It also applies to adoptive children. Every time a child stays in a children’s home when they are below three months or below six months, they lose one month of development. For that reason, this is to expand that meaning in order to encourage as many people as possible to do the adoption. I know many questions have been raised on how it is done, but I want to say that the laws are very clear. Our Children Act is very clear. There are people who cannot adopt children. You cannot just come in and adopt a child, if you are a lone person from the USA or outside the country. It is a tedious process and at the end of the day, it ends in court. It is the court that gives a go-ahead to someone to take a child home. It also gives you a time that you cannot travel with that child outside the country. Clause 29 is discriminative to parents who start families through other means. It is discriminative to those who cannot be able to biologically bear children. It does not encourage the taking of the many children we have in children homes to homes where they can be taken care of by proper families. I know we have societal breakdown in this country. We have children being thrown in pit latrines, and others being killed. People who suffer postpartum disorders and are not able to take care of children just kill them. If we were able to make adoption easier and more straightforward, we would get so many children off the streets. We would get them out of children’s homes and give them proper homes where they could grow up to be productive members of the society. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}