Adoption Trends – Part III: Growing Interest in US Foster Care

This post is part of a series looking at adoption trends, both here in the United States and in Taiwan.

USA Today recently reported there is growing interest in US domestic and foster care adoptions among US families, which is good news for many American children waiting for their forever families.

“The interest is there in domestic adoptions, but the supply of babies is not,” says Paul Placek, a consultant to the National Council for Adoption, which represents adoption agencies. He says most unmarried pregnant women have an abortion or keep the baby. The percentage who relinquish them is less than 1%.

. . . The limited number of domestic infants, combined with recent restrictions on international adoption, is causing more Americans to consider older children, two or more siblings together, children of other races and those with medical needs, says Mary Ann Curran, director of social services at the World Association for Children and Parents, an adoption agency.

“There’s an increase in openness,” says Curran. She says it was much harder a decade ago to place Hispanic babies. — Read more in USA Today, February 10, 2008

For our adoption, it was important for us to maintain our children’s birth order in our family. We did not feel adopting from the US foster care system at this time would allow us to do that, since our biological children are young. More information on adopting from foster care is available at http://www.adoptuskids.org/.

On a related note, volunteers from our church participated in service projects at a shelter for youth and the local Boys and Girls Home last year. The staff was grateful for the support of our church through these service projects. I would encourage you to consider contacting youth and children’s homes in your community and consider volunteering.

Related posts in this series: Adopting Infants in the US; Domestic Adoption in Taiwan

Adoption Trends – Part II: Domestic Adoption in Taiwan

This post is part of a series looking at adoption trends, both here in the United States and in Taiwan.

Domestic adoption is on the decline in Taiwan, according to reports from the country’s Child Welfare League Foundation in 2005. While the foundation is working to change misperceptions and attitudes about adoption within Taiwan, it has also sought help finding homes for children by looking overseas to countries like the US.

 

The Child Welfare League Foundation reported that approximately five thousand children are abandoned each year, but only about 10 percent of those children will find an adoptive family in Taiwan.

 

“Many unwanted children stay in the custody of the [Child Welfare League Foundation] or in temporary foster care until they are seven or eight years old, and still cannot find adopters. If they fail to find adopting parents overseas, those children will eventually be sent to orphanages, the foundation said.” — Taipei Times, July 4, 2005

 

While there are many different circumstances that may lead a birthmother to choose adoption for her child, I believe there are two aspects of Asian culture which help explain the availability of children for adoption overseas.

 

First, while single-parenting has become more acceptable here in the United States in recent years, children born out-of-wedlock in Asian countries are often placed for adoption because of cultural norms and expectations. Secondly, there continues to be a stigma on adopting an unrelated child in Asian society, despite efforts by some governments to change this way of thinking. This Wikipedia explanation of South Korean society provides more insight on the level of importance placed on bloodlines in Korean families:

 

“Many families would go through excessive and expensive procedures such as surrogacy or in vitro fertilization to ensure that their offspring are at least related than to accept a child of a complete stranger into their family. Indeed, it was the case until recently that Korean citizenship was directly tied to family bloodline. Children not a part of a Korean family (i.e., orphans) were not legal citizens of Korea. Another reason is the stigma of adoption. Ninety-five percent of families who do adopt choose babies less than a month old so that they can pass them off as their natural born offspring, overlooking older adoptable children (Yun, Korea Times, 1997).”

 

China is also trying to change the “taboo” societal view of domestic adoption, as reported in this article from USA Today last November. Does that explain the slowdown of child referrals to Americans seeking to adopt a child from China? I don’t know. I hope and pray, though, that the orphans needing homes will be able to find loving parents, whether in their native country or abroad.

 

Adoption Trends – Part I: Adopting Infants in the US

This is the first post in a series looking at adoption trends, both here in the United States and in Taiwan.

Several people have asked us why we have chosen to adopt internationally – couldn’t we just adopt an infant placed for adoption here in the United States?

Private domestic adoption statistics are difficult to track because not all states report them. The availability of infants for adoption in the United States does appear to be decreasing. The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute reports why this may be the case:

“A variety of factors, including increased access to contraception, the legalization of abortion and changed social attitudes about unmarried parenting, have caused the number of white infants placed for adoption in the U.S. to decline dramatically. Between 1989 and 1995, 1.7 percent of children born to never-married white women were placed for adoption, compared to 19.3 percent before 1973. Among never-married black women, relinquishment rates have ranged from .2 percent to 1.5 percent.”

If we had chosen to adopt an infant domestically, our family’s photograph and information would most likely be on file with an agency. The agency would show birthmothers our information along with other families waiting to adopt. The birthmothers would then have the opportunity to “interview” the adoptive families and choose the family that would adopt her child.

Because we already have two biological children, we felt that may prevent birthmothers from choosing us because they would be concerned about their child’s place in our family. We also were concerned about how long our wait could be for a child if we adopted domestically, since we would be waiting for a birthmom to choose us. In Taiwan, there are a few programs where the birthmother chooses the adoptive family, but the placements for the program we chose are done by the orphanage staff.

Next in this series. . .a look at domestic adoption in Taiwan.