Tag: Stimulus Checks

Not In Touch With The Reality

The incoming stimulus checks are on a lot of people’s mind these days. Included in this contingent are hopeful adoptive parents who plan to increase their adoption fund with the check. At the same time, there will be a lot of struggling families including single moms who be putting their stimulus towards keeping their own children so that they aren’t taken away by social services due to poverty. And poverty issues are huge now as we begin to see some glimmers of hope at the end of the long dark COVID tunnel.

Saying things to hopeful adoptive parents like “if hopeful adopters got all their money back, when an unwed mother changed her mind, then we really WOULD be buying and selling babies…” must be repressed to avoid hot tempers.

My heart would love to say – “I would love to give beyond imagined generosity in support of vulnerable women in crisis.” Yeah, I wish that was in my own financial power. No one on social media would react to that one but in adoption focused groups, every comment about how amazing adoption is gets tons of love. BTW adoption is more honestly filled with trauma and wounds of abandonment and rejection but no hopeful adoptive parent wants to perceive that part.

Take a woman who could NEVER do foster care because her biological daughter would be traumatized if they had to send her “sibling” back to be reunified…and yet, that is precisely the official goal of foster care – to give parents some breathing space to address serious issues that interfere with their ability to parent well.

Just today, I learned about a man named Dave Ramsey – he has a blog post, How To Adopt Without Debt. Every other post in adoption related threads is about how he supports families but then, the members of such groups use that advice to encourage hopeful adoptive parents to spend money that will tear someone else’s family apart. Why are they so myopic? BTW, a caution that he does not have a very good reputation regarding his own behaviors, so be aware the advice might not be good advice.

Is it because hopeful adoptive parents simply don’t see their desire to adopt as tearing someone else’s family apart? Are they that blinded by their side of a desire to have a child? Is it that the narrative in adoption support communities is erroneously that these children are always unwanted? Are they judging unwed mothers, or mothers in poverty, from a superiority stance?

The only hope for reform is speaking plainly and honestly about all of these related issues.

Surprising Pandemic Effect

Domestic Infant Adoption and Foster 2 Adopt websites are full of complaints about a shortage of newborn infants put up for adoption this year.

Why might that be?

Simple to explain considering the governments willingness to actually financially support struggling citizens thanks to a pandemic. Extended unemployment that can be claimed by parents without daycare. Extra Electronic Benefit Transfers (EBT), small stimulus checks, the availability of food banks and free school breakfast/ lunch meals delivered and extended to homes with school age children and the stopping of evictions….

A truly ‘small amount’ of help can make all the difference to a mom in an overwhelming situation….

Most domestic infant adoptions are poverty driven. Single mom’s and two parent families facing joblessness, homelessness, poverty, lack of daycare, depression and helplessness will sometimes give up a child that they would otherwise LOVE to parent.

Many of these struggling families, with just a fraction of the ‘Go Fund Me’ money that hopeful adoptive parents frequently raise to fund their adoption expenses …. would be enough to allow these mom’s or parents to continue to parent their own natural children.

Clearly society can do better than we have been doing in the past. We’ve proven it. Now as a society, we need to prove we can continue to do as much to help families succeed. It is in the interest of stable citizens raised well that we should.