Adoption Myths 101: Pro-Lifers Need to Sign Up to Adopt Babies

The recent Supreme Court ruling has brought out so many adoption myths. When society as a collective talks about adoption, it does not know what it is talking about. People say flat-out stupid things. Correcting those things has made me decide to blog again, although blogging feels so 2010.

It’s important to understand that, when people compare adoption and abortion, some people assume that any would-have-been-aborted-fetus will become an adoptable infant. This assumption is false. I may go into that later, but for now, I’m just focusing on adoption.

MYTH: “Pro-lifers need to sign up to adopt all of the unwanted babies.”

FACT: There are far more hopeful adoptive parents waiting to adopt newborn babies than there are newborns to adopt. No one – regardless of their opinion about abortion – needs to sign up to absorb the overflow of infants they assume will occur as a result of restricted access to abortion.

Unfortunately, reliable statistics on private domestic adoption are difficult to come by. An anti-choice website once published an article that stated there were 36 waiting couples for every infant available to adopt. The article did not cite the source of that statistic, yet it’s been accepted by many in the adoption community as true. I don’t like that assumption, so I present here some known facts:

• According to Creating a Family, 25,900 infants were placed for adoption in 2019 and 19,800 in 2020.
• RESOLVE wrote that 1 in 8 couples, comprising about 7.4 million women, have difficulty becoming pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy.
• According to the US Government, there are about 1,012,000 same-sex couples in the US.

Certainly, not all 8 million+ of those people are waiting to adopt. However, you do get an idea of how many people there are who might want infants, while there are relatively few infants available for adoption.

So, you don’t need to call on “pro-life” people to step up and adopt all of these “unwanted” infants. Infants in the US don’t lack for prospective families.

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