New Adoption Truth.
Adoption– complex topic gets even more complicated in a post–Roe v. Wade America.
Adoption has gone through multiple transformations in the United States.
See a more in-depth account by Michael J. Mooney in a DeseretNews, Jan 3, 2023 feature.
Society has often used adoptions to “solve” social issues. Consider the following:
- Mid-1800, a Children’s Aid Society was created in New York City. The group sent orphans on trains, stopping at small towns and dropping off the children to be “adopted” and work on the farms. The potential adoptees were placed on a stage or platform —put up for adoption — where families would poke and prod them, assessing their health and ability to perform manual labor. This solution for parentless kids continued for over 80 years.
- After World War II was the “Baby Scoop Era,” where social workers believed unwed mothers were best sent to a maternity home and then completely separated from their children, resuming their previous lives as if nothing had happened.
- Presently, the push within adoption is to have the birth family involved in some way with the child they placed for adoption.
Adoption has received a lot of attention recently as abortion laws change. Overturning Roe v Wade forced individuals, lawmakers, and pregnant women to focus on what should happen with unborn babies.
Many individuals had told women that adoption was an option pregnant women should consider.
Supreme Court Just Samuel Alito justified overturning the abortion law by saying, “A woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home,”
A U.S. Republican Representative, Dan Crenshaw, tweeted: “Less abortion, more adoption. Why is that controversial?”
Once again, the logic suggests that social issues can be solved—no need for an abortion because we have families who want to adopt.
The actuality isn’t quite as straightforward. There doesn’t appear to be a strong relationship between limiting abortion and increasing adoption.
One study found that one week after being denied an abortion because of a late-term pregnancy, only 9 percent of the 161 study participants who went on to give birth — 15 women — placed their newborns for adoption.
“What we’re going to see, I think, is many more people parenting children that they did not intend to have,” Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist and researcher on abortion and adoption in the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program at UCSF, told The Washington Post after the Supreme Court’s decision.
Logic may suggest that children who are not wanted are more likely to end up in foster care. Many children in foster care are not adopted. Hopefully, those looking to grow their family will consider not only foreign adoption, infant adoption, and foster adopt.
