Over the past year, I have learned a lot about adoption and the worldwide orphan problem. I have read articles where people claim that there is no orphan problem. They use the statistic that there are more than 2 waiting families for every child eligible for adoption in the US and that the average wait time to be matched with a child is over two years. Everything that I have read confirms this statistic. Yet, I claim that there is still a problem.
In a future post I will get into some statistics when I have a chance to cite my sources. In the meantime, I want to break out the types of adoption that are available. Before I began this journey, I was unaware of the significant distinctions. The first distinction is between foreign and domestic adoptions. The second distinction is between domestic private and domestic public. So, who ends up in each category? Foreign should be obvious. However, it is not so obvious who falls into each of the two domestic categories.
Let’s start with the domestic public system. How does a child end up in the system? A child ends up here because the child has no relatives that can take the child and the parents either have been deemed unable to provide a safe home for the child or are no longer around. If a woman is pregnant and has decided not to parent, she will be directed to the private system.
Those children that end up in the private system are, generally speaking, healthy infants that come from a variety of mothers that have decided, for whatever reason, not to parent their child.
So, why are there so many waiting parents? The vast majority want healthy Caucasian infants. This process can be very expensive for waiting couples. There is no problem getting healthy newborn Caucasian infants adopted.
What I realized after writing my last post regarding the Adoption tax credit is that I did not draw a distinction among these types of adoption. In my next post, Part II, I will expound upon the domestic public and foreign adoption problems. In Part III, I will lay out numerous statistics that blew my mind regarding the extent of the problem.