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Maybe that ought to be the policy toward drug use as well. |
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Written By:
Aldo
URL:
http://
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I doubt think that is an explicit policy or attitude towards adoption, it is just a consequence of other aspects of adoption.
If American parents adopt a child from another American family, it opens hard questions about when to tell the child they are adopted, how to handle visits with the birth parent, and more.
If American parents adopt (for example) a Chinese girl, those concerns are significantly reduced and the parents get warm fuzzy feelings from thinking — possibly correctly — that they saved, or at least greatly improved, the life of a child who was already born. It’s harder to get as many warm fuzzies when adopting an American child.
There’s also a difference in the supply and demand situation between abortion and adoption, although I haven’t quite figured out how to phrase the difference (especially without inadvertently sounding callous). When someone adopts a child, they are undertaking a major effort; compared with raising one’s own child, there is relatively limited demand for adoptions. Abortions are quite different.
Partly because of that, even though more adoptions would be an elegant way to curtail some abortions, adoptions could not replace all abortions, and the usual arguments apply to government-encouraged adoption about how reducing the cost of an action (namely, unplanned pregnancy) tends to increase its frequency. |
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Written By:
Michael
URL:
http://
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There’s risk in allowing an adoption. The American culture has become risk-adverse. |
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Written By:
Ryan
URL:
http://
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And of course children are no longer simply children. Now they’re exemplars of diversity or multiculturalism or the patriarchy or something. The "good of the child" can’t be allowed to get in the way of ideological purity. |
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Written By:
JorgXMcKie
URL:
http://
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Partly because of that, even though more adoptions would be an elegant way to curtail some abortions, adoptions could not replace all abortions, .... That’s not my experience, and I’ve been involved in the adoption process a few times. In fact, if you look at the number of adoptions of foreign children in addition to those of American kids, I think that you’ll find that there are more than enough people willing to adopt for every child that is aborted.
One of the biggest problems with adoption that I found was that state agencies responsible for the process are often unwilling to allow parents of one ethnicity to adopt children of a different ethnicity. In addition, there are still a large number of states that will not allow gays or single parents to adopt. The result is that the number of "qualified" parents is artificially reduced. It’s also why you see a lot of foreign adoptions. |
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Written By:
MichaelW
URL:
http://asecondhandconjecture.com
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I second the statement that there are plenty of potential adoptive parents out there. An adoption takes a whole cartload of cash, enough to make a good down payment on a house. So the only people who can afford to do it are people who could afford two houses— one to live in, and the equivalent of one to go through the adoption process.
Maybe we could take inspiration from the system they had in the Azores in the 18th and 19th centuries. They had an opaque revolving door called the "roda" (wheel) and anyone could drop off a baby there at any time, no questions asked. At the time, this was a horrible tragedy because they had no way to feed the babies without farming them out to government-paid wet nurses, which were in short supply. These babies often starved for days and, even if placed with a wet nurse, rarely made it to their first birthday. (One of my ancestors was a wet nurse and took in about 10 such babies one after the other.) But nowadays, we have baby formula and bottles that would solve that problem. |
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Written By:
Wacky Hermit
URL:
http://organicbabyfarm.blogspot.com
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