Xistential Experience of Women with Regard to Challenges in Attempting Adoption

Motherhood, the beautiful sense of affection and having children is the symbol of this emotional necessity. The essential feeling of being a mother to a child in its natural and biological form is not possible in some cases, however, individuals could fulfill this issue to the fullest extent through adopting nonbiological children. Although with high statistics of infertility amongst Iranian households, the belief of being capable of becoming a mother without giving birth to a child and acceptance of a non-biological child is yet unfulfilled. The main issue of this research is examining the challenges of women in the process of adoption. Hence by adopting a qualitative approach and by interviewing 28 women thoroughly who had the experience of having a nonbiological child with analyzing the content of the interviews, challenges of adoption is extracted and underpinned. "Social, Cultural, and Religious Perspective", "Legal, Religious, and familial Structure", and "Selective, Responsible, and Conscious Function" are recognized and represented as the most important challenges in attempts of adopting a nonbiological child. The interior content extracted of these issues is entitled "Individual and Social Perspective arising from Institutionalized Traditional Values and Beliefs towards Stepchildren" which in fact this issue sets the scene for challenges that arise concerning adopting a nonbiological child.
 
Keywords
 Infertility, Motherhood, Adoption
 
Introduction
 When it comes to parenting, it is an indisputable fact that individuals just have an innate instinct to have a child. Maternal instinct is one of the tangible/clear examples of innate instincts that enables a mother to love, protect and nurture her child as no one else can. There is no doubt that marriage is a safe way to form a family, and for most people, the concept of family is formed with the birth of a child (Mirzaei, 2016). Maternal love is a mother's feeling for her child that is given to her with no expectation, (Latafati, 2006). To parents, children are the reason to continue living and cause them to be happy (Arab Khorasani, Ghiasvand, 2017). A significant number of families, nevertheless, are affected by infertility problems and couples are unable to conceive a child after years of waiting for childbearing. Going through difficulties and time-consuming, expensive treatment processes, eventually, they find no way but to adopt. However, this path is not smooth and causes many challenges for families and, as it will be elaborated, for women.
    The deterministic biological view considers "motherhood" to be the natural and biological destiny of women. In such an approach, maternal behavior is a function of the maternal instinct that is rooted in human nature and biology (Chodorow, 1976). According to a functional definition, when family functions, such as biological, social, cognitive, and emotional functions, are impaired one after another, its members gradually lose their sense of satisfaction (Chaboki and Zare’an 1397:96). Infertility medically means that a couple is infertile after a year of having unprotected sexual intercourse (Lannfeld et al., 2004: 318; Larsen, 2000: 285). According to the report from the World Health Organization, the universal rate of infertility is 12 to 15 percent. In terms of different definitions of infertility, it has been reported that the prevalence rate of infertility worldwide is up to 20 percent (Akhundi et al. 2019; Dadkhah et al., 1399). This research aims to review the lived experiences of women who have attempted to have a child by adoption and seeks to answer the question “what issues and challenges do women face in the process of adoption?” In this regard, to understand the mental meaning of mothers, which does not fit in the form of quantitative methods, their lived experience in relation to childbearing has been studied in order to obtain a deep view of the hidden layers of this phenomenon.
Research Method
This study tends to examine the childbearing challenges for women. In this study, data analysis based on the Klaizi method has gone through seven steps to reach the final goal (Emami et al., 2012). First, the text is carefully reviewed and all the information are carefully read and written to gain a sense and understanding of the mothers' beliefs and experiences in a way that is understandable to the researcher. Then codes with meaning and related expressions are identified. In the next step, a concept is extracted from each phrase. In the fourth stage, the concepts are categorized based on similarity. Codes were assigned to the phrases and sentences of the interviewees. In the fifth step, the results are linked to describe the phenomenon under study and more general categories are obtained. Themes (themes) are then obtained by re-reading the information and categorizing it. At this stage, the researcher tries to find the relationships between the themes and the sentences related to them, as well as the relationship between the themes themselves, and obtain a comprehensive description of the phenomenon. In the last stage, the participants in the study are asked about their opinions on the research findings and the validity of the results are evaluated. Strategies used to validate the results include listening to and reading interviews frequently and using peer feedback. External monitoring has been used as well; That is, part of the data is given to a researcher who has nothing to do with the research and is an outside observer, to determine if he or she has a similar understanding of the data. Consistency in coding between observers and researchers was more than 80%.
The most important questions asked from the interviewees were about the causes of and challenges in the adoption process. While examining the answers of the interviewees, the author came to the fact that what women participating in the study mentioned as their personal experiences in the course of action, can be taken as reasons for the unwillingness of other couples. As a result, their experiences are significantly important to be investigated. Another question in this regard is mothers’ concerns after adoption; such thing can also be on the one hand a guide for others to make decisions in the process, and on the other hand, can help policymakers and planners in dealing with such issues.
 
 
 
Findings
Based on the present study and the categories obtained from this research, three main issues have been attained from the codes found in the interviews with 28 adopting women about the challenges of adoption: 1. Attitude toward childbearing (which is the product of society, religion, and culture’s approach to childbearing) 2. Structure of childbearing (which is an outcome of law and legal structures, family and the power structures within the family, and religious laws related to adoption and inheritance) 3. The performance of an individual in adoption (which is the result of a conscious, selective and responsible approach to adoption). The theme extracted from the issues obtained in the course of the research is entitled "individual and social attitudes arising from traditional values ​​and beliefs institutionalized around adoption" which may be an important factor, underlying or reinforcing the emergence of abiotic adoption challenges among women.
In other words, according to the findings of this study, beliefs and perceptions of the individual and society at both micro and macro levels, in relation to the category of adoption such as conflict of individual and maternal roles, confrontation of custom and individual need, the duality of tradition and custom, legal gaps and The real needs of adoptive parents lead to a conflict between what is and what should be, and as a result, impose many psycho-behavioural tensions on the path of abnormal adoption to women applying for adoption.