When people adopt a child, amazing transformations occur because of a court order.

People instantly become parents, just as though they had been biological parents. A child instantly gains parents, just as though he or she had been born to them.

Obviously, the child simultaneously sheds its legal relationship to its biological parents. Adoption creates a new family.

But what if the child’s biological parents had other children? Does the legal relationship between a child and its biological siblings end just because the child is legally adopted into a new family?

According to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, a court-appointed attorney for a child in foster care in New Jersey doesn’t think so.

The child’s attorney argues that, even though the child’s relationship to her biological parents will end when she is adopted by her foster parents, it is her right to continue to have visitation with her biological siblings, who were previously settled in another foster home.

Such a holding would seem to call into question the very nature of adoption though.