“I thank God and country that when I fell into a bad situation, abortion was there to save me”

It’d be nice to see the right put their money where their mouth is in terms of supporting state orphanages, making them seem like places you’d actually be happy to see your baby or child grow up in. It’d be nice if they would support subsidies for adoptive parents such that it doesn’t cost those who want to adopt between 10 and 20 thousand dollars to go through the process.

libfreeordie on January 26, 2013 at 10:08 AM

lib, you articulate one of the major, and I think most ignored, aspects of the debate on abortion and family, which was essentially driven underground soon after Roe: what should be done with unwanted children who are born rather than aborted?

First, as noted above (Illinidiva on January 26, 2013 at 10:25 AM), the US supports foster care instead of orphanages. However, the reason there are not more orphanages is because the government shut them down.

Following World War II, most orphanages in the U.S. began closing. Take the Windy City as an example. In the early 1970s, almost every orphanage in Chicago was shut down by the Illinois Department of Children and Family. Half of the city’s orphanages had already closed between 1945 and 1960 [ref]. Over the past few decades, orphanages in the U.S. have been largely replaced with smaller institutions that try to provide a group home or boarding school environment. Most children who would have been in orphanages are in these residential treatment centers (RTC) or foster care.

As for the cost of adoption, there are plenty of willing couples who want to adopt, but there are not enough babies available in America, primarily because of abortion: cost follows the supply-demand curve, even in this; but intensive government regulation and the coercive shutting-down of religion-based adoption agencies also plays a part.

The law requires that religious organizations serving the general public must provide services to homosexuals regardless of their religious beliefs. District lawmakers could have granted an exemption to the archdiocese, but they chose to force it to compromise Church teaching on marriage or shut down its programs….Catholic Charities of Boston was forced to shut down unless it agreed to place children with homosexuals. New state licensing laws in 2006 required that Catholic agencies facilitate adoptions for same-sex couples.

Instead of a subsidy on the tax returns (Ted Torgerson on January 26, 2013 at 10:31 AM), how about reducing the initial cost to a reasonable amount with some reductions in unnecessary parts of the regulatory structure?
(PS The cost of adopting should also be compared to the cost of a hospital birth, for perspective; it ranges between 10 and 20 thousand dollars in the US.)

The lack of discussion on how more women could be encouraged to put their unwanted children up for adoption turns on the fact, never acknowledged openly by pro-abortion forces, that the majority of aborted babies are black whereas the majority of potential adoptive parents are white.

Inter-racial adoption was on its way to becoming an accepted cultural norm until it was shut down by Black organizations because it supposedly harmed the children, although they could not produce any credible studies to prove it. (emphasis added)

The debate about transracial adoption changed course in 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a statement that took “a vehement stand against the placements of black children in white homes for any reason,” calling transracial adoption “unnatural,” “artificial,” “unnecessary,” and proof that African-Americans continued to be assigned to “chattel status.” The organization was so committed to the position that black children’s healthy development depended on having black parents that its President, Cenie J. Williams, argued that temporary foster and even institutional placements were preferable to adoption by white families. This opposition slowed black-white adoptions to a trickle.

This article is quite informative, but in the final paragraph on why interracial adoptions declined while international ones increased, it shifts into blatant editorializing that contradicts its own previous statements (emphasis added):

Since 1972, the numbers of black-white adoptions have declined, but this may have as much to do with stubborn private preferences and prejudices among white adopters as with organized opposition or public policies that created new barriers to transracial placements. International adoptions, after all, increased quite dramatically at just the moment when the transracial adoption of African-American children was becoming controversial.

Had inter-racial adoption continued and been supported instead of shut-down, we might well be living in MLK’s “dream” of a color-blind nation by now; instead, the Black leadership placed their own preferences for forced racial cohesion ahead of their children’s welfare.

Whose money and whose mouth?

AesopFan on January 26, 2013 at 12:29 PM