Via JT's blog...
A reader writes to Andrew Sullivan:
I’m flabbergasted by your quote of Ross [Douthat] stating that “would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.” They do not. I’ve adopted two children, and the waiting list is not long. It doesn’t even exist: there are 500,000 children in foster care in the US, and 100,000 of those are available for adoption today.
Well, ok, but you want an infant? No problem: less than a month after we adopted our first child, our agency called us asking if we knew anyone at all with a completed home study. They had a healthy baby boy in a hospital and nobody willing to adopt him. (Agency rules didn’t allow us to take him before our first was completed) For our second, the agency tried for days to contact us around Christmas since we were the only people on the list who were willing to take him.
Why was it so hard to place them? Simple: the adoption market is built around healthy white infants. If you’re willing to remove even *one* of those conditions, the waiting list is short to non-existent.
There’s no shortage of children to adopt; the waiting list exists solely because adoptive parents want to wait for the “right” kind of child. Please don’t perpetuate the myth.
3 comments:
(cross-posted over at JTs blog)
We were discussing this issue at our small group last night. After having two biological children, my wife and I sought out specifically to adopt a child with Down Syndrome. We found an Ethiopian child with probable DS, adopted her, and low and behold, she does not have DS.
We are now in the process of adopting again and are having the painful, personal discussion about the details of the adoption. (For those uninitiated, potential adoptive parents will be asked to decide what you can “handle”–i.e., fetal alcohol syndrome, blindness, attachment disorders, etc.). I am ardently pro-life and I believe strongly in adoption. Yet, I am also aware of my sinful tendency to want a “good” child.
As a Christian, I think this is one of the dark marks we face. Is our idea of adoption a fat cheeked African American baby with no health problems or does God call us also to love the blind autistic child from Romania who spends 90% of his waking hours biting himself or hitting himself in the head? Can we really, truly claim to be pro-life if we are not willing to sacrifice our time, money, and our personal comfort for loving the truly least of these?
As we dive into the adoption waters again, I wrestle with this question every day.
Wow. Great post Jason.
Our four international adoptions (Russia and Ethiopia) took 6, 9, and 12 months from the time we signed the contract. In the adoption community, rarely a couple months go by without a plea for adoptive family...and you're right, many of them have beautiful brown skin.
We are now talking about a special needs adoption. I really appreciated your comments Jason. I have a friend (truly inspirational) that is in the process of adopting five beautiful Down Syndrome boys (in two adoptive processes). It makes me painfully aware of the "limits" I set and makes me reevaluate them.
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