Back Story:
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.
Disclaimer:
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: There are hundreds of thousands of children available for adoption.
FACT: At any given time, there are about 400,000 children in foster care. About 100,000 of those children are available for adoption. Their biological parents’ rights have been terminated, and they will not be reunified with their biological families. Their average age is eight. Most have been in foster care for more than one year, and 9% have been there for more than five years. (Data from Children’s Rights Now.)
What happens to the other 300,000? The majority – more than 200,000 – are reunited with their biological families or placed for adoption or guardianship. Remember, the intent of foster care is supposed to be to keep biological families together. (Data from Children’s Rights Now.)
It is true that there are not enough foster or adoptive families for all of the children in foster care. We do need parents who are capable of parenting children who have been through the trauma of being removed from their families, who have behavioral and medical issues, who may be developmentally delayed, and who have experienced abuse or neglect. That is a very tall order.
Note that those available are children, not infants. I don’t want to open another can of worms, so suffice it to say that most hopeful adoptive parents want to adopt infants. Biological parents aren’t exactly hoping to birth an 8-year old, so it stands to reason that adoptive parents, by and large, desire infants as well.
As I wrote yesterday, there is no shortage of parents waiting to adopt newborns. There are only about 26,000 infants placed for adoption each year.
Holding to the Ground 