After years when the process simply took so long that it put people off, the government has approved a new law to make adoption quicker and easier.
Outlining the plans yesterday (May 21), Social Security minister Pedro Mota Soares said: “We want to establish obligatory deadlines for decisions” so that the administrative phase “will have a maximum limit of 12 months” to guarantee that families can adopt much more quickly in future.
Along with this level of reform, the government is also planning to speed-up the “process of consent” that has to precede adoptions.
As Mota Soares told Lusa, the ethos behind the reforms is “to protect children”.
But there are those that argue that speeding up the process of consent can cause untold heartache, particularly when families are trying desperately to recover their children from Social Services – as is still happening in UK with the Portuguese Pedro family. (see: https://www.portugalresident.com/portuguese-immigrants-caught-up-in-uk-adoption-scandal)
