By TAO
USA faces critical adoption shortage
From the title – right through to the highlighted quotes below – the focus is on a critical shortage, versus, isn’t it great that less children are needing adoption.
Adoption is societies method of ensuring a child has a family to grow up in, and it is a good solution. Of course, adoption is also a way for people to become parents and have a family, but that is, and has to be of secondary importance. If not, then the child is a commodity, and we aren’t commodities, we are human beings.
The title set me off, and then obtaining quotes from those, who, without adoption would have no job, seems biased. Go read the short article linked above, and then come back, and combined with the overall tone of the article, look at the language used (bolding mine) and tell me they aren’t seeing children as products.
Even before Russia acted in December, children available for U.S. adoptions have hit record lows, as countries restrict adoptions and fewer kids born in the USA are available.
[…]
Yet even domestic adoptions are a growing challenge, said Jenny Pope of Buckner International, an adoption agency, because as single parenthood becomes more acceptable, “there are just not as many women placing their children for adoption.”
As a result, the number of U.S. infant adoptions (about 90,000 in 1971) has fallen from 22,291 in 2002 to 18,078 in 2007, according to the most recent five-year tally from the private National Council for Adoption. The group’s president, Chuck Johnson, expects the number has remained fairly stable since 2007, citing efforts to promote adoption.
“The options are far fewer for families,” said Jennifer Doane of Wide Horizons for Children, an adoption agency.
The adopted ones blog 
Susan Perry (@SusanPerry17)
January 14, 2013 at 2:45 pm
And it’s the attitude that upsets me, too. Too many agency CEOs are still the spokespeople for adoption, and that’s where a lot of the bias in articles like these comes from, I think. People like to think about difficult issues in black and white terms. Critical thinking seems to be a rare attribute, and that fact certainly doesn’t help the adoption reform movement.
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TAO
January 14, 2013 at 2:48 pm
Thanks Susan…you managed to sum it all up in one short paragraph.
Wish I had the gift of writing and perhaps one day will get there too.
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gypsyqueen1
January 14, 2013 at 2:58 pm
“there are just not as many women placing their children for adoption.”
GOOD. Maybe the message of how adoption is not a win-win for everyone involved (except for the baby brokers and their customers) is getting through. That is all many of could have hoped for, because we will never get back the time we lost with our family members.
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Snarkurchin
January 14, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Infuriating. I commented:
Adoption was intended to find families for children who need them. Therefore, the actual “critical adoption shortage” we face is not a shortage of adoptable children (the US has those in droves), but a shortage of families ready to take in the children who need them. NOT the children they want: the children who need them.
In the 1950s and 60s, you could get a fresh little baby that looked as much like you as possible and pretend you gave birth to it. Those days are long over. If would-be adoptive parents can’t accept available “lesser” (older, special needs, whatever) kids, or don’t want to deal with open adoption, then that’s too damned bad for them. The universe does not owe them then child of their choosing.
If adoption were really concentrated on its original goal, to find families for children who need them, we would celebrate its decline and end, and we would feel only pity and contempt for anyone who felt as entitled to raise someone else’s child as many potential adoptive parents seem to feel today.
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Feit Can Write
January 14, 2013 at 8:27 pm
I saw a similar version of that story in my local newspaper (with the same unfortunate headline).
The cynic in me thinks that the only “critical shortage” is in healthy, caucasian newborns. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but I know my state has a notable “surplus” of adolescents, sibling groups, minorities, and kids who are not lily white
Okay…I’ll stop my rant now, and refocus on the positives (homes for children, an increased pool of waiting parents should mean a better match for birth family and child, etc.)
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TAO
January 14, 2013 at 8:33 pm
Welcome Feit – and you are correct in your cynical view 🙂
I have calmed down a bit since I read it but it still left a bitter taste in my mouth. Babies, children are not commodities and a shortage should be welcomed. sigh…
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Valentine Logar
January 15, 2013 at 1:47 pm
There are plenty of children needing ‘forever’ homes. They simply are ‘imperfect’.
If would be parents truly wanted to form families, truly desired the experience of parenting they would look beyond the ‘newborn just like me’ to the children who need parents and a home. But that isn’t what is happening. So tough.
No one is guaranteed a perfect life, picket fence and 2.5 children. Adoption isn’t terrible, it can be wonderful done for the right reasons and with an open heart. But this, this just shows all that is wrong and why our systems suck the very soul from the process and those involved.
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TAO
January 15, 2013 at 3:07 pm
Too true. I also think that times and attitudes have changed a lot since our days. The “want it now – I deserve it” attitude didn’t exist to the level it does now – mind you the Great Depression clearly taught that life lesson…
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Snarkurchin
January 15, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Speaking of wanting it now, spare me from the PAPs who think a terrible injustice has been dealt them if it takes longer than nine months to get their child. (I’ve never met such people, but I’ve encountered them online.) My parents happily waited eighteen months to get a baby in the 1960s, when it was much more easily done.
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TAO
January 15, 2013 at 3:34 pm
You are absolutely correct – they did the approval work and went home and waited for the call. I have a series of youtube videos in a post that was I think a week long series on TV from the 1960’s that gets a lot of hits. People just accepted that adopting wasn’t the same as giving birth – go figure – nor that they were entitled to be parents but would only be parents if they were the best match for the child (excluding those horrible social workers who didn’t give a damn and placed babies with famiies who should never have been approved).
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Snarkurchin
January 15, 2013 at 4:25 pm
I dunno. I mean, many people back in the BSE *did not* accept that adoption was not giving birth. Some chose to not even tell their children they were adopted. But I agree that the entitlement factor seems much higher now.
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TAO
January 15, 2013 at 4:45 pm
True enough – I likely have my bias based on my experience as well. No blank slate theory in my home. You are right – the mother going away and coming home with the baby etc…
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cb
January 17, 2013 at 2:23 am
I think there was also less of the mystical BS back then – i.e. the “God meant for our baby to come to us via another woman’s uterus” – I don’t know any older AP who felt that was the case.
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