Here’s an article from National Review that argues that there is far more demand for children to adopt than there is supply of children to adopt for certain specific reasons.
The article mentions how legalized abortion and pro-eugenic attitudes contribute to diminishing the supply of children via abortion, but then it discusses another reason for reduced supply which I found horrifying. Apparently leftist social workers think that it is a bad idea for white parents to adopt black children, and would prefer those black children grow up in foster care.
Look:
Most of the parents waiting to adopt are white; most of the children awaiting adoption are not. Parents’ attitudes toward transracial adoption have become much more liberal since the 1970s, but the racial attitudes of social workers, those sometimes pitiless gatekeepers on the adoption pilgrimage, have hardened. A study published by the academic journal Child Welfare found that 43 percent of the caseworkers responsible for the longest-waiting black children in New York State expressed hostility toward transracial adoption. Federal law prohibits the use of racial criteria in adoption placement, but ethnic considerations have seeped into the system: The number of transracial adoptions executed each year remains tiny despite the willingness of the majority of couples to adopt a child of a different race. About 8 percent of all adoptions are transracial or cross-cultural — and that number includes international adoptions, commonly from Asia and South America. Professor Judy Fenster of Adelphi University finds that black social workers are particularly inimical to the prospect of cross-racial adoption. It seems that the matchmakers at the heart of the adoption system are part of the problem.
Transracial adoption is a volcanically touchy issue — the National Association of Black Social Workers has deployed weapons-grade rhetoric characterizing the practice as “cultural genocide.” That ideology has had predictable consequences: Black children spend more time in foster care than others, and in general have less luck in finding permanent adoptive homes. The Multi-Ethnic Placement Act of 1994, a legacy of the late senator Howard Metzenbaum, forbade the use of race as the decisive factor in making adoption-placement decisions, but the language of the statute left those politically opposed to transracial adoptions with room for much mischievous maneuvering. Would-be adoptive parents were disqualified for expressing political opinions at odds with social workers’ preferences.
[…]In one case, a white couple who had hoped to adopt a severely disabled black girl in 1994 were disqualified on political grounds — specifically that they expressed a desire to raise their children to be “colorblind” — and on racial grounds, specifically that they lived in Alaska, which was judged to be superabundantly Caucasian. The couple had raised other severely disabled children of various ethnic backgrounds but they were rejected in favor of a single woman who expressed the “correct” racial attitudes — and who ended up declining to adopt the child, precisely because of her disabilities. The girl in question suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and from Russell-Silver Syndrome, a form of dwarfism associated with, among other things, gastrointestinal difficulties, a triangular face, and asymmetrical body growth. It is difficult to imagine that her most pressing challenge in life was going to be the relative scarcity of black neighbors in Fairbanks.
So, it’s very important to think about the rhetoric of the left on children’s rights and welfare. On the one hand, they talk about wanting to help children. On the other hand, the policies they embrace seem to promote child murder, child abuse, child neglect and child poverty. On the one hand, the secular left is very much in favor of killing children with abortion, or depriving them of fathers with single mother welfare, or depriving them of bio-moms or bio-dads with gay marriage. On the other hand, they are actually working against letting these children be adopted, so much that American parents have to go to other countries to find children to adopt. And even that process is very difficult.
When will we get to the point where we can look at leftists and just flat out say that although they might have good intentions, their policies don’t achieve good results. Maybe a little more compassion for children is needed.
We have similar problems in Canada. Many children in the foster system or are available for adoption are First Nations. In an effort to make up for past abuses (forcibly removing Native children from their families to be adopted into white families), social services have gone the other extreme. Now, they basically refuse to adopt FN children into non-FN families, opting instead to place them with FN foster families. The huge problem with that is, there are few FN families available to adopt or foster. These children sometimes end up with distant relatives or whoever is available. With rampant drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment and multi-generational welfare abuse on the reserves, these children are being put into sometimes dangerous situations.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/special/failingourchildren/challenges/In-child-welfare-no-one-dares-say-R-word-.html
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/07/christie-blatchford-phoenix-just-one-victim-of-intergenerational-disfunction-in-sinclair-family/
A man I grew up with had fostered a couple of children, together with his late wife. They were the only parents these children really knew. When they tried to adopt the children permamently, they were turned down, because they were white and the children were FN. With fostering, it doesn’t matter how long a child has been with the family, or how good of a situation is; if the child is FN, social services can take the child at any time to be placed a FN family. Another friend, a rare foster parent with medical training, able to take on children that required special care, had a FN boy with her for years. He was damaged with Fetal Alcohol Disorder, or whatever they call it now. She had been able to help him a lot, especially since she was on a farm, and helped him cope with the problems he had to deal with. Social services suddenly returned him to his parents, both of whom were also FAD and were living in the city. The reason? She was white. He was FN. Some time after, when he came for a visit with her, he had lost all ability to self-moderate and tried to lure her biological daughter into a compromising situation.
That is only one layer of problems. Individual social workers have their own biases as well. A family I know that wanted to adopt through the foster system had to deal with several different social workers, each one telling them something different about who they would or wouldn’t allow a child to be adopted to. One said she would never let a child go to homeschoolers (they were a home schooling family); another would allow a child to go only to “Christian” families (the family went to a United Church, which I wouldn’t consider Christian, really, but who knows what the social worker thought). They were eventually able to adopt a brother and sister, but had to deal with a lot of major idiots along the way.
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I no longer give Leftists credit for good intentions, God help me. When all the data goes against them, they are in such darkness that they still cling to their false ideology that borders on blind-faith religion.
“ObamaCare is going great!” “Global Warming is science.” “Darwinism has been proven.” “The economy has recovered.” “Abortion is compassionate.” “Socialism works.” The delusions of a liberal never end. (from a former deluded liberal)
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