Adoption Waiting Lists

Let's Pick Up the Pace

We are not sure of what the situation is like in New Zealand, but today we came across a post in the US that explodes the canard that babies-for-adoption are in short supply.

Adoption Waiting Lists in the United States?

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.

From (limited) personal experience we suspect the same would hold true in New Zealand. A couple from our extended whanau have been able to adopt three children in fairly short order. Two are Maori, the third a Samoan.

Once there was considerable institutional resistance to inter-race adoptions on the grounds that a child deserved (needed, required, had a right to?) nurturing in its culture of provenance. This was nothing other than institutionalised racism. However, it would appear that either under the weight of need, or due to public adulation of interracial celebrity adoptions (Brangelina, Madonna) that ante-diluvian reticence no longer applies.

Adoption is a wonderful ministry to which Jerusalem needs to recapture. After all, adoption is at the very centre of the Gospel and redemption. All Believers are adopted. Our Lord Himself was adopted. He takes up the single and the orphan and He puts them in families. (Psalm 68:6) That means our families. Don't resist or neglect this great redemptive work of God Himself! Russell Moore has written a great treatise on this subject. He writes from his own experience.