A Comment on Bryan’s “Modest Proposal” to Increase Infant Adoption
A guest post by Steven Salop
Steven Salop, professor emeritus at Georgetown, sent me this reaction essay to my recent “Infant Adoption Is Now Tragically Rare.” Reprinted with his kind permission.
In his post entitled, “Infant Adoption is Now Tragically Rare: And What to Do About It,” Bryan proposed that there was an “obvious fix: drastically curtail or abolish the welfare state. Even in the First World, it is very hard for a poor single mother to simultaneously work and support a baby. Without the welfare state, adoption is a natural response to this harsh dilemma. Often sad for the birth mothers, but fantastic for the baby and whoever adopts the baby.”
Bryan goes on to write, “I realize that many people will react in horror to this perspective. But not only do I hold it with all sincerity; I struggle to craft a rational counterargument.”
As an adoptive parent myself, I know that adoption is a wonderful experience. It is great way to have a family and it gives you a deeper and broader perspective on parenthood. I am certainly in favor of supporting adoption. But I think that Bryan’s post left out some important points. And these points lead to a “rational counterargument” to his policy proposal and suggest possible alternative policies to protect the babies of low income single mothers.
First, IVF has led to a substantial reduction in demand for adoption. There are almost 100,000 IVF babies born per year. By comparison, the number of adoptions in the US peaked at about 175,000 in 1970 and this figure may have included adoptions by relatives. This means the current demand may be fairly low, relative to the number of births by unmarried women. In 2023, there were about 1.4 million births by unmarried mothers. The number of births simply by teenagers was about 141,000 in 2023 and about 90% of these were unmarried teenagers.
Second, many white families are unwilling to adopt Black or Hispanic children. This leads to low demand for these infants.
Third, new mothers love their babies and indeed are programmed by hormones to love them. Mothers are more likely to choose adoption when the child is the result of an affair, rape or incest. It is not clear how many more will place children for adoption at birth in response to a reduction in child support by the government. After all, even with the welfare payments, the single mothers in Bryan’s “target group” are still poor and struggling. If welfare is abolished, perhaps these more substantially impoverished mothers will eventually give up and try to find adoptive parents for their beloved children. However, the demand for toddlers and school age children is still lower, leading to the children languishing in foster care after becoming “legally available” for adoption.
Finally, it should also be recognized that while the economic circumstances of adopted children may improve, growing up adopted is a challenge for many adoptees. Feelings of loss and abandonment or simply not fitting in are common and often are not transitory. Those intense feelings are what leads many to search for their birth parents when they become teenagers or adults, as this story illustrates. This is certainly not a reason to reject adoption. Instead, it is a reason why adoptees also need support. In this regard, Bryan’s unvarnished claim that adoption is “fantastic for the baby” is somewhat more complex.
For all these reasons, if Bryan’s proposal to “drastically curtail or abolish” welfare payments for the children born to these single mothers were adopted, only a fraction would be adopted -- perhaps only a small fraction. And those children who were not adopted would be even worse off than they are today. This is a rational counterargument that Bryan failed to ventilate. Nor did Bryan consider alternatives.
Before embracing Bryan’s proposed policy, the cost/benefit tradeoff needs to be analyzed and alternative policies need to be considered. Perhaps the most obvious alternative would be policies to encourage and support women facing unwanted pregnancies to voluntarily choose adoption over abortion. One study found that among women denied access to abortion, only about 10% chose adoption, so simply prohibiting abortion is not the best route to supporting expanded adoption. Adoptions also can be increased by subsidies and positive incentives rather than negative ones. As for the babies themselves, increasing support (not just child support and other welfare payments but also other interventions) would be a less draconian way to improve the outcomes for non-adopted children. Providing easy access to birth control also would be important for these children since a poor single mother might be able to successfully care for one child but not three or four.
“many white families are unwilling to adopt Black or Hispanic children”
More or less unwilling that black or Hispanic families are to adopt white children?
There is merit to the proposal to minimize if not eliminate the welfare state if one assumes that its current beneficiaries will respond rationally to the resultant economic incentives.
Unfortunately, as behavioral economics reflects, that will not universally be the case.
Arguably, the misguided policies of the Great Society incentivized the lower economic strata to bear out-of-wedlock children to maximize welfare payments, which exacerbated the societal ills that bedeviled it to this day. Clinton’s welfare reforms helped ameliorate this tragic policy backfire, but the issue remains unresolved.
I agree with you that the supply of adoption candidates would exceed demand.
The answer to the issue lies in a cultural and moral renaissance that restores traditional sexual values,!recognizing that the purpose of human sexuality is procreation, not recreation, that it should be confined to marriage, and that the traditional two-parent family structure (one male and one female) is the optimal structure for the benefit of our progeny.