Baby is sleeping
Noah is playing legos. Brett is cooking. And my playdate hasn’t sent me her address yet. I’m going to try to write some about statistics first. We’ll see what kind of light that sheds on things and then maybe next entry I can talk about fertile/infertile people adopting from an emotional standpoint.
The problem with adoption statistics is that they are incomplete. Adoption happens in so many different ways in so many different states that it’s difficult to find out what’s really going on. A lot of adoption studies don’t take into account the different ways people adopt (lumping domestic infant adoption, foster-to-adopt and international adoption all into one category). Also there are kinship and stepparent adoptions that can end up in the mix.
We can extrapolate from what we do know and play around with it, however.
This was the article I used in my last (deleted) entry: Voluntary Relinquishment for Adoption: Numbers and Trends. In it we learn that Ashley (in Karen’s comments) is correct in stating that less than 1% of pregnant unmarried women will place their babies for adoption. The article goes on to state, “The percentage is higher for White never-married women (1.7 percent) than for Black never-married women (near 0 percent).”
The article points out that placement rates are dropping for all women, meaning that more women are keeping their babies than in year’s past. So keeping this topic on supply and demand, yes, there does seem to be a dearth of babies available for domestic, infant adoption.
Next part of the equation: How many people are seeking to adopt? We’ll look at this article to see: Persons Seeking to Adopt: Numbers and Trends. This is harder to judge since the article starts with how many people have considered adoption (about 1/3 of our adult population) but as many of you know, considering adoption and actually taking steps to adopt are two hugely different things. Do people who consider it give up because it looks too hard? Or were they not very serious in the first place?
In any case, the article also looks at the number of people who have taken steps to pursue an adoption: “About 16 percent of those who had considered adoption (4 percent of the total of ever-married women), or 1.6 million women, had ever taken concrete steps toward adoption; [emphasis theirs] this percentage may represent those seeking to adopt.”
Let’s go along with this. So basically there are more than four times as many women seeking to adopt than there are women placing their babies for adoption. (I know, I’m messing with the numbers here but I’m using the 4% number against the >1%, which I got by roughly averaging the Black/White stats).
Here’s another bit from the article: “Only 31 percent of those who had taken concrete steps (1.3 percent of the total of ever-married women), or 487,000 women, had ever completed an adoption.” This includes step-parent adoption and kinship adoption as well as international and foster care adoption. We’ll try to break those numbers down a bit.
This is going to be very rough. The article, which I’m sure you’re going to read, has a lot more detail about these numbers. I need everyone to understand that I’m futzing with them and simplifying them a lot. But I think we can still have a discussion.
Next article: How Many Children Were Adopted in 2000 and 2001? — Highlights. I’m going to copy and paste the most important chunk for you.
In 2000 and 2001, about 127,000 children were adopted annually in the United States. Since 1987, the number of adoptions annually has remained relatively constant, ranging from 118,000 to 127,000. The source of adoptions is no longer dominated by kinship adoptions and private agency adoptions. Public agency and intercountry adoptions now account for more than half of all adoptions. Adoptions through publicly funded child welfare agencies accounted for two-fifths of all adoptions. More than 50,000 public agency adoptions in each year (2000 and 2001) accounted for about 40 percent of adoptions, up from 18 percent in 1992 for those 36 States that reported public agency adoptions in 1992 (Flango & Flango, 1995). Intercountry adoptions accounted for more than 15 percent of all adoptions. Intercountry adoptions increased from 5 percent to 15 percent of adoptions in the United States between 1992 and 2001 (U.S. Department of State, n.d.). The other two-fifths of adoptions are primarily private agency, kinship, or tribal adoptions. With the available data, it is not possible to separate figures within this group, although the percentages of all adoptions in that group as a whole have decreased. In 1992, for example, stepparent adoptions (a form of kinship adoption) alone accounted for two-fifths (42 percent) of all adoptions.
This is a lot of info and it’s hard to make sense of it within the particular context of our question: Are there enough babies available to people who want them?
Well, there are four times as many women seeking to adopt but we’re seeing that half of all adoptions are through foster care and international agencies. So (remember, we’re simplifying all of this ridiculously a lot) let’s say that there are now two times as many women seeking to adopt as there are women placing their babies for adoption. I can’t tell where the kinship adoptions fall in the “people who took concrete steps to complete an adoption” number we first talked about (the 4%) but the numbers just above say that about half the people who who fall into the “kinship, tribal, private agency” category are stepparents who adopt their stepchildren.
Looking at this big, enormous, messy entry I’d say that it does look like there are enough babies available for adoption. So why does it seem otherwise? Here’s what I think (and I could be totally wrong):
1. A woman making an adoption plan is, of course, not a birth mother. Depending on when a woman approaches an adoption worker, she may or may not have actually committed to her plan. Then of course, she has to meet her baby. All of this can make it feel very treacherous for a waiting adoptive parent. I think most of us who have adopted have matched and unmatched in some way. Either we had a tenative meeting with a potential birth parent, had our profile chosen, or even met the baby only to have the woman choose to parent. It is difficult to understand that we potential adoptive parents are ironically somewhat extraneous (or should be) and that it’s really about that woman and that baby first and foremost. Especially for infertile folks, this can be very very painful and can contribute to the “scarcity of resources” feeling.
2. The media doesn’t help matters with all their “snatch the baby back” Lifetime movies. That makes things feel even more precarious.
3. Potential adoptive parents do generally have some limits on what they will consider in an adoption. Be it race, age, health risk, health history, openness, etc. most of us are not open to every single baby available. And even if we are, considering all of these little factors also makes it feel like we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.
4. Depending on your agency, attorney, facilitator and state laws, your wait may be longer. You may find yourself in situations that aren’t good adopton risks. You may spend money and time on a situation that isn’t going to pan out. In my opinion, a lot of hurting hopeful adoptive parents are stuck with bad adoption professionals who neither counsel them properly nor do they present them with appropriate situations. For example, if you tell your lawyer that under no circumstances do you want to parent a drug-affected child and they present you with a scenario involving a drug-addicted potential birth mother, it may leave you feeling like there is a “shortage” of babies that would actually meet your criteria. In fact, that lawyer may be trying to get paid for a situation that isn’t ideal for anyone. That’s bad lawyering but says nothing about the actual state of adoption.
Listen, the road to adoption — whichever one you take — is certainly not for the faint of heart. BUT there are children to adopt. Some people will feel so frustrated with their domestic adoption journey that they will switch out to international adoption. They may leave saying, “There are no babies to adopt,” when in actuality, they may have just had really bad situational luck.
From a practical standpoint, it doesn’t look to me like fertile people should acquiesce to infertile people and step to the back of the line. As I commented in Karen’s blog, too, potential birth parents should have a diverse pool of people from which to choose should they continue their adoption plans.
I’ll talk about the emotional part of this later.
The first article you referenced extrapolated that about 14,000 children were voluntarily relinquished in a year. But that’s not a fourth of 1.6 million (the number seeking to adopt from the second article).
I’m not saying this would necessarily change your conclusions, just want to be able to follow your line of thought.
Much more fun than working….I’m reading what you wrote about adoption statistics. And I have to agree with them–I agree literally and emotionally. If someone asked whether they should adopt, I would say, yes–but be careful. There ARE babies/children to adopt, but you may not ultimately adopt in the way you imagined when you first start out.
The most important thing we did was hook up with an ethical and experienced attorney who was an adoptive parent, himself. He told us that if we were patient, we would have a child. He never encouraged us to get into any unethical situations. He never counseled us to lie to a birth parent. He never counseled us to promise everything, either. He said promise what you can follow thru with–this is for the birth parent and the child you are adopting.
I will always be grateful for his wise counsel. He is also the person who told me some very valuable advice that I think about often.
He said that when he adopted his first child 25 years ago, he thought it was all about nurture but after having a bio kid and adopting a third child, he realized that his adopted kids came hardwired as complete people in so many ways. He said that as adoptive parents, we don’t influence much about our adopted kids– not whether they will like to read, whether they will be good at math or like sports. We are there to influence moral and ethical upbringing and to guide our kids.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to project yourself onto your child–whether bio or adopted–but I really don’t do it with my adopted kids. They are who they are–all the wonderful pieces that make them who they are. I have the wonderful privilege to be their mother and to honor who they are.
Keep on getting thru the layers about adoption. It is a complex and wonderful thing.
HMBalison
I experienced something of this on Wednesday night.
For the first time, I was in a room full of people that wanted to adopt, for many of whom it seemed adoption was the only way they were going to have kids.
I feel, a little guilty, that I already have kids.
I feel a little selfish that I still want more.
It was weird.
Because most of the time, I, um, figure that the type of adoption I have chosen, domestic/older child/public is not a route that the majority of families looking to grow their families through adoption will pick.
So I have never felt like I was competing with people who can’t have kids before.
There is more than enough to go around - except of course it doesn’t work like that and
I think I have lost the thread of whatever it is I was trying to say or,
I’m really muddled about it all.
Looking forward to the next post.
Thanks! This is the sort of thing I’m interested in … peeling the layers of the very confusing adoption onion. I appreciate the info. Keep up the good work!
Thanks, Dawn! What you have outlined above is about what I expected. I think the bottom line is that there are so many paths to adoption that to make statements like “there’s a shortage of babies” is too grossly oversimplify matters. Looking forward to your next installment.
I don’t want to sound like I’m judging anyone’s emotions about this, but my own emotions are pretty tugged at the idea that someone would tell me that because I’m possibly fertile I should “step back” from adoption.
How can one woman essentially tell another woman that she must carry a pregnancy against her will?
For us, in particular, our choice was ART or adoption. I wouldn’t dare tell someone to “just adopt” instead of using ART, so why would anyone tell me I should “just get pregnant?” Or anyway, try–since we didn’t and who knows if I’m fertile?
I don’t feel guilty for getting in the way of an infertile couple in my adoption. There are plenty of babies to go around. As I overheard someone at our agency tell a prospective parent on the phone, “everyone gets a baby, it’s just a matter of time.” That may not be true at all agancies, but at ours, it is.
see, i am writing from india. i belong to a state in india called kerala. i don’t know how many of you have heard of it. though india is a developing country kerala is proud of its 100% LITERECY!in the capital of kerala, trivandrum we have a public cradle called Mother Cradle. those who do not want their children can put their kids in it without seen by anyone and can go away. if somebody wants to adopt they can come and choose from the abadoned children! how is it? i would like to know the opinion of all of you.