Legislation to be amended to make adoption easier

Amendments to Jamaica’s adoption laws and administrative changes at the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) will help make the adoption process less burdensome, says Education Minister Dr Dana Morris Dixon.

The minister noted, too, that critical to the process is a framework around fostering.

“We have to look at how we can make the process go quicker. We have to look at, obviously, the right of the parent versus the right of the child and how we can move it along more quickly. We have a lot of children in state care, and we all know that the best place for our children is in a home with a loving family. It’s a family structure that you want them in, and so we have a responsibility to move that along more quickly, but legally, based on the Adoption Act, we are not able to move it at the speed we want to from that basis,” she said.

Morris Dixon was responding to questions during a post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House in St Andrew on Wednesday.

“So we have to fix the law and then we have to fix, administratively, everything in the CPFSA to make it move more quickly, so we’re going to do that … it’s really about facilitating faster adoptions in the country and also about adding a framework around fostering, which currently does not exist in our country,” she said.

Morris Dixon said that a joint select committee of Parliament would be formed to incorporate the views of more Jamaicans on the country’s adoption process.

“One of the things we are exploring is rolling everything into the CCPA (Child Care and Protection Act) because … when you think about it, it would be about adoptions, fostering, and so we’re looking at putting everything under that one umbrella. So it’s going to be a big piece of legislation, and we’re going to take it to a joint select committee because we know a lot of Jamaicans do have an interest in this area, and we want to be able to ventilate any changes that we are going to make,” she continued.

Caption: Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon. 

Photo credit: Contributed