Short on time today but this post by someone else (not me) makes a lot of very good arguments in response to an article in The Atlantic – LINK>Adoption Is Not A Fairy Tale Ending regarding the book Somewhere Sisters published in 2016.

Ever since I entered what can generously be called my “mid-30s,” doctors have asked about my pregnancy plans at every appointment. Because I’m career-minded and generally indecisive, I’ve always had a way of punting on this question, both in the doctor’s office and elsewhere. Well, we can always adopt, I’ll think, or say out loud to my similarly childless and wishy-washy friends. Adoption, after all, doesn’t depend on your oocyte quality. And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.

But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent.

In 2010, Bethany Christian Services, the largest Protestant adoption agency in the U.S., placed more than 700 infants in private adoptions. Last year, it placed fewer than 300. International adoptions have not closed the gap. The number of children American parents adopt each year from abroad has declined rapidly too, from 23,000 in 2004 (an all-time high) to about 3,000 in 2019.

Plenty of children who aren’t babies need families, of course. More than 100,000 children are available for adoption from foster care. But adoptive parents tend to prefer children who are what some in the adoption world call “AYAP”—as young as possible. When I recently searched AdoptUSKids, the nationwide, government-funded website for foster-care adoptions, only about 40 kids under age 5, out of the 4,000 registered, appeared in my search. Many of those 40 had extensive medical needs or were part of a sibling group—a sign that the child is in even greater need of a stable family, but also a more challenging experience for their adoptive parents.

At a glance, this shortage of adoptable babies may seem like a problem, and certainly for people who desperately want to adopt a baby, it feels like one. But this trend reflects a number of changing social and geopolitical attitudes that have combined to shrink the number of babies or very young children available for adoption. Over the past few decades, many people—including those with strong commitments to the idea of infant adoption—have reconsidered its value to children. Though in the short term this may be painful for parents who wish to adopt infants, in the long term, it might be better for some children and their birth families. Many babies in the developing world who once would have been brought to America will now be raised in their home country instead. And Americans who were planning to adopt may have to refocus their energies on older, vulnerable foster children—or change their plans entirely. Infant adoption was once seen as a heartwarming win-win for children and their adoptive parents. It’s not that simple.

For much of American history, placing a child for adoption was an obligation, not a choice, for poor, single women. In the decades after World War II, more than 3 million young pregnant women were “funneled into an often-coercive system they could neither understand nor resist,” Gabrielle Glaser wrote in her recent book, American Baby. They lived with strangers as servants or were hidden away in maternity homes until they gave birth, at which time they were pressured into closed adoptions, in which birth mothers and their babies have no contact.

Data on adoption are and have always been fuzzy and incomplete; for decades, no one tracked many of the adoptions that were happening in the U.S., and not all states reported their adoption figures. “There are no valid numbers from the ’40s and ’50s” because “just about all of these transfers existed in a realm of secrecy and shame, all around,” the historian Rickie Solinger told me. Still, adoption researchers generally agree that adoptions of children by people who aren’t their relatives increased gradually from about 34,000 in 1951 to their peak of 89,000 in 1970, before declining to about 69,000 in 2014—a number that includes international adoptions and foster-care adoptions. Given population growth, the decline from 1970 indicates a 50 percent per capita decrease.

What happened? Starting in the ’70s, single white women became much less likely to relinquish their babies at birth: Nearly a fifth of them did so before 1973; by 1988, just 3 percent did. (Single Black women were always very unlikely to place their children for adoption, because many maternity homes excluded Black women.) In 1986, an adoption director at the New York Foundling Hospital told The New York Times that though “there was a time, about 20 years ago, when New York Foundling had many, many white infants,” the number of white infants had “been very scarce for a number of years.”

Still, throughout this era, American families adopted thousands of infants and toddlers from foreign countries. In the ’50s, a mission to rescue Korean War orphans sparked a trend of international adoptions by Americans. Over the years, international adoptions increased, and Americans went on to adopt more than 100,000 kids from South Korea, Romania, and elsewhere from 1953 to 1991. In 1992, China opened its orphanages to Americans and allowed them to take in thousands of girls abandoned because of the country’s one-child policy.

But to many American evangelical Christians, these numbers were still too low to combat what they considered to be a global orphan crisis. During the ’90s, evangelicals in particular kindled a new foreign- and domestic-adoption boom, as the journalist Kathryn Joyce detailed in her 2013 book, The Child Catchers, which was critical of the trend. In the late 1990s, Joyce reported, representatives from Bethany Christian Services and other adoption agencies occasionally pressured single women to relinquish their babies, gave them false impressions about the nature of adoption, and threatened them when they changed their mind. (Bethany cannot verify the negative accounts of its practices that appear in Joyce’s book, Nathan Bult, the group’s senior vice president of public and government affairs, told me. In an interview, Joyce stood by her reporting.) A major 2007 meeting of Christian groups led to a “campaign to enroll more Christians as adoptive and foster parents,” the Los Angeles Times’ Stephanie Simon reported that year. The practice of adoption was seen as parallel to evangelical Christians’ “adoption by God” when they are born again. American Christians went on to adopt tens of thousands of children from other countries. “Early on, there was a strong belief that adoption could often be the best outcome for a child whose mom may have felt unable to parent,” Kris Faasse, who ran several of Bethany’s programs from 2000 to 2019, told me.