Tag: Adoption Tax Credits

Racially Determined Adoptions

I spent most of last summer educating myself about racial inequality and reform issues. Now I see this advertisement. First of all, $13,000 tax credit for adopters??? Think if poor mothers got $13,000 to keep and raise their own babies. The newborn adoption industry would totally collapse.  In Canada, they pay single parents so that they are not burdened with having to find a job and child care. There are no losers in that scenario. This program lasts until the child is 18. The amount per month decreases as the child gets older.

Note that African American babies are less valuable at Everlasting Adoptions. One could ask – Doesn’t this somehow directly violate anti-discrimination laws? Besides the smell of human trafficking in this brochure. No one regulates this business. It’s truly the wild west at this time in human history as regards adoption. This one isn’t even an adoption agency, its like a “travel agent” for people who want to pay someone to find a birth mom for them. If found, the parties then go to an adoption agency to draw up the paperwork but on Everlasting Adoptions website, they proudly take credit for successfully completed matches.

NPR did a story back in 2013 titled Six Words: ‘Black Babies Cost Less To Adopt’. The title for this one came from a Louisiana woman. Other contributors have also addressed the skin-color based fee structure for many adoptions, NPR noted – The intersection of race and adoption has prompted many people to submit their six words to The Race Card Project. Americans adopt thousands of children each year. And as the nation has become increasingly diverse, and with the growth of international adoption in recent decades, many of those children don’t look like their adoptive parents.

One adoptive parent, remembers a phone call with an adoption agency social worker. “And [she] was telling us about these different fee structures that they had based on the ethnic background of the child. And … they also had, sort of a different track for adoptive parents.” Moving through the process would be quicker, if the family was open to adopting an African-American (not biracial) child, the social worker explained to her. “And that is because they have children of color waiting,” but adopting biracial, Latino, Asian or Caucasian children could be a slower process because there were more parents waiting for them. “And I remember hearing this and just sort of being dumbfounded that they would sort of segregate — to use a loaded term — segregate these children by ethnic background before they were even in this world,”

It is a profit-motivated, supply and demand business. Thankfully, NPR also found that some states and agencies are using a different formula to make adoption more affordable for families, with a sliding scale based on income rather than skin color. In that system, lower-income families pay less to adopt. Some agencies are also moving toward a uniform cost system where all adoptive parents would pay the same fees. (Though I am still not in favor of adoption in most cases.) Still, back in 2013, the cost to adopt the Caucasian child was approximately $35,000, plus some legal expenses. I see upward of $40,000 in Go Fund Me efforts set up by hopeful adoptive parents today in 2021.

Skewing The Narrative

It is a fact that many adoptees will actually say they wish their natural, genetic, biological mother had aborted them.  It is also a fact that the government does NOT fund abortions, contrary to the messaging that comes out of evangelical, pro-Life and conservative interests with the hidden agenda of triggering people’s emotions in order to get their vote.  It is also true that the government is already funding some adoptions through a huge tax credit for the single adoptive person or couple.  The government also funds adoptions from foster care paying court expenses.  Many of these adoptions also receive an adoption subsidy, Medicaid and free tuition for the child.

And finally, I do speak from experience on this issue.  I am grateful for access to a safe, legal abortion back in the early 1970s.  That is a blessing that is increasingly hard to get access to.  This planet actually already has enough people and truth be told, more than is sustainable.

I do believe in letting nature take it’s course.  I believe that purging events such as the COVID 19 pandemic is an activity of this Earth.  I believe that predators cull out the weak.  Not that I wish to be a victim of either.  I believe in the kind of God that always knows what each of that God’s individual expressions will do in any given situation.  I believe in a life that is meant to teach our soul important lessons, make us more empathetic and give us a more tolerant perspective on human behavior.  I also believe there is never anything wrong going on, even if we are unable to truly comprehend what we are seeing.  And I do believe that humanity evolves and progresses and that includes what medical science advances including safe abortions and reproductive assistance.  Finally, I believe that death is only an experience in our human lives but personally, I believe in eternal souls living more than one incarnation.  We cannot kill a soul though we can kill the body that the soul moves about the planet with.

An image like the one above is offensive. Abortion and adoption have nothing to do with each other.  Speaking of government funding – why not help families stay together, fund the help that struggling families actually need and support them through a financial crisis ? What if government funded birth control ? What if society supported struggling mothers ? What if society held fathers to higher standards ?

While I’m at it – what about free health care ? Mental health intervention ? How about the government starts caring about drug addicts and puts more funding into rehabs and counseling ?

Some of these people who think like the image above should have to spend at least 9 months forced to serve as a walking incubator for someone they’ll never be allowed to meet again, and then have all proof that they gave birth to a child erased by changed birth certificates and sealed adoption records.  Yes, think about all of those mothers who have had that very experience.  One can get over a conception and abortion quickly.  One lives with the pain of having been separated from their child for a lifetime.