The parents who opt to adopt for HIV positive orphans say they are driven by a desire for social change and confidence that handling the deadly disease is more manageable than it was few years ago.
According to Adoption Advocates International (AAI), an experienced international adoption agency focusing on children from Ethiopia, China, Thailand, Ghana, and Washington State, there is a steady rise in such adoption in past two years.
There were only 2 such adoptions in 2005, four in 2006, 13 in 2007. But the year 2008 has 38 either completed or pending adoptions of HIV positive children from Ethiopia. Nearly one of 14,000 Ethiopian newborns are diagnosed with the HIV virus every year.
Children orphaned by AIDS /HIV can be adopted by other citizens since a huge number of them end up in institutions and don't get a chance to grow up in a family setting.
According to World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 2.1 million children were living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2007, 2 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these children acquire HIV from their HIV-infected mothers during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding.
With successful interventions the risk of mother-to-child HIV transmission can be reduced to 2 percent. However, such interventions are still not widely accessible or available in most resource-limited countries where the burden of HIV is highest, and an estimated 1 500 children get newly infected with HIV each day. The number of children receiving ART increased from about 75,000 in 2005 to almost 200,000 in 2007.
