Investigating Child Adoption in the Legal Systems of Islam, the United Kingdom and the US

Abstract

In this research, the issue of child adoption has been examined through applying legal rules, regulations and systems of Islam, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Child adoption means to adopt another person as his/her child by one who is not his/her blood relative. In Arabic, child adoption is referred to as "da'ee" and "tebti". The word tebti means being son-in-law and its term refers to a boy or a girl who has been adopted by a man and which is called son-in-law relating that man. The holy Quran nullified this tradition of ignorance and ordered to attribute son-in-laws to their fathers, and if their fathers are unknown, they are religious brothers. This study, through a descriptive-analytic method, deals with the following issues: the order for child adoption in the Quran, the related narrations and their consequences; the rejection of the claim based on which child adoption is a human phenomenon, regulations regarding child adoption in the legal systems of Iran, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the conditions of the adoptive parents. In the present era, the delivery of the child by the legal parents to child support applicants is one of the increasing problems. Sometimes the applicant does this act with benevolent purposes, sometimes he/she does it due to resolving his/ problem for having no child, and on some occasions this act is committed by paying money in an illegal or inhumane way.

Keywords

• child adoption
• islamic law
• iranian law
• english law
• american law
• unsupervised children