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Costs and administrative issues aside, mothers who successfully adopted their children all recalled the adoption process as being overwhelming.<\/p>\n
It also left them feeling that their ability to parent a child they had already been raising was being <\/strong>heavily scrutinised.<\/p>\n The ASA involves a detailed examination of a prospective adopter\u2019s circumstances and readiness to adopt, which can include lengthy interviews, home visits, background checks and character references.<\/p>\n One mother, who wanted to be known only as Ms Maia, said the ASA was stressful and invasive.\u00a0<\/p>\n The self-employed 38-year-old began the adoption process in September 2025, just before her daughter turned two years old. She decided not to marry the child’s biological father as she felt “he was not fit to be a father”.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n She was taken aback at the amount of information the process required including extensive background checks that extended to relatives, a police criminal record check, a full-body medical screening, and financial information such as her Central Provident Fund and income to show she could support her daughter.<\/span><\/p>\n For Ms Moon, home visits where a social worker scrutinised her living arrangements were “rather scary”. \u00a0<\/p>\n She said the process left her with anxious thoughts about whether she might be deemed unfit to parent her daughter, particularly because she worked long hours and relied on her parents, childcare and, at one point, a helper for support.<\/p>\n Ms Lim added that the ASA was emotionally draining as it required her to revisit and describe in considerable detail her relationship with her child’s biological father and the circumstances surrounding her child\u2019s conception.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I had spent a lot of time trying to heal from that period of my life, <\/strong>so having to face the biological father and revisit painful memories as part of the adoption process was difficult, even though I understood why the assessments needed that information,” she said.<\/p>\n “I keep questioning why I have to be assessed so thoroughly when I was the one taking care of this child alone from day one.”<\/p>\n She questioned why her parenting was subjected to such close scrutiny simply because she was unmarried, noting that being married did not necessarily mean someone was capable of raising a child.<\/p>\n Ms Diana similarly described the process as being “frustrating” and “unfathomable”.<\/p>\n “My experiences of doing everything I could to make things work with the father of my child … as a daughter who felt she had let her family down, and an unwed mother, have allowed me to accumulate enough shame, regret and pain to last me a lifetime,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I do not need the legal process to be an additional source of distress in this situation.”<\/p>\n Some of the mothers CNA spoke to also pointed to the emotionally taxing process of having to get the biological father’s consent to relinquish his parental rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ms Lim said obtaining that consent from her daughter’s biological father involved “challenging conversations”.\u00a0<\/p>\n “This was particularly difficult given the circumstances surrounding our relationship and the verbal abuse I had experienced from him during my pregnancy,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Ms Diana, who is currently going through the adoption process, said she expects dealing with her child\u2019s father will be arduous, as he has not consented to the adoption at this point.\u00a0<\/p>\n She said that if the matter is contested, her legal fees could increase significantly, and the process could be prolonged.<\/p>\n For Ms Thivya Pillai, who became a mother at 18 and has raised her son largely on her own, having to contact her son\u2019s father again is one of the main reasons she has put the adoption process on hold.\u00a0<\/p>\n The pair have not been in contact for about 10 years, and the 31-year-old business owner fears reigniting the conflict they went through when she was seeking sole custody of her child.\u00a0<\/p>\n “The whole custody fight was one of the craziest moments of my life. Going through the adoption process feels like I\u2019m going back there, and I don\u2019t know if I have the ability to go through it all over again.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Costs and administrative issues aside, mothers who successfully adopted their children all recalled the adoption process as being overwhelming. It also left them feeling that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/89836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}DREDGING UP PAINFUL MEMORIES\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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