Parenting

I'm not a parent, but my little sister was adopted. The worst experience of the whole process was losing my sister's little brother. The boy was a foster child and my sister had just been adopted at the time and the judge presiding over the boy's case decided he didn't wanna go through the evidence and sent the poor kid back to his abusive bioparents. It tore my family apart to lose him and my parents divorced a year later. My sister didn't understand why her little brother was taken away and I was crushed and haven't fully recovered, and that was 18 years ago. I always tell people who are fostering/adopting in the US to be prepared for heartbreak because apparently this kind of thing is very common. They don't care about keeping siblings together, and jokes of judges can damn a child to more abuse.