Part of the reason for the international collapse (from 25K in 2006 to about 1,200 in 2023) is that countries from where a lot of children were adopted (South Korea in particular and East Asia generally) now have collapse-level birthrates. No amount of deregulation can change the fact that there are very few unwanted children in these countries anymore.
I was there when the debate over corruption in international adoptions heated up. We adopted from Ethiopia, and hired investigators on two separate occasions to verify the facts. But corruption was definitely a problem, both with some US agencies and some foreign orphanages. Most of the problems, aside from typical bribery, involved women who didn't realize that adoption was permanent, as adoption is not well understood or common in many foreign countries. And the agencies didn't always go out of their way to educate them. However, a few agencies were intentionally deceiving women and/or "buying babies", and set up "virtual orphanages" to funnel babies to foreigners. The women were sometimes complicit - having a child out of wedlock in that country is no bueno, so they would exert effort to hide, deny, and avoid detection, including "abandoning" a child where they were sure it would be found, or using relatives to do the relinquishment. False paperwork, deception, and bribes are common in many poor countries, such that often nothing can get done without it. It was not always clear what constituted "normal" corruption and what constituted trafficking, and most Americans wouldn't know the difference if it hit them over the head. The US State Department was trying to help, but ended up making matters worse. At the time, they lacked the resources, experience and skills to evaluate cases. The case workers were very young and lacked any training in social work or child and family development, much less investigative training.
Unfortunately, the political reaction was to point a lot of fingers, add multiple layers of bureaucracy, and essentially strangle it. The 1st Trump admin appointed a left wing activist committed to ending international adoption to oversee the process.
Our daughter is doing quite well - kind, smart, beautiful, and athletic.
How do you write an article like this and not talk about ABORTION. The kind of kids that used to get adopted now get aborted. DUH.
It's also changed the nature of adoption. My Dad was born in 1947 and got adopted. Standard thing where some teenage girl got knocked up and the father didn't want a shotgun marriage. That doesn't happen anymore, the kid just gets aborted.
What that means is that the very few kids not getting aborted are usually to poor underclass women, usually of color. My Dad was a white kid that ended up bright and athletic. There are a lot of well off people that want to adopt white kids from good stock. There are not a lot of people looking to adopt crack babies from the ghetto.
"International adoption" used to mean poor East Asians back when East Asia was really poor. Again, you're getting a kid of good genetic stock. There are not a lot of smart East Asian kids to adopt anymore
I'll be blunt, people who adopt care about the quality of the kids they are adopting. And that quality has dropped because the fertility rate of the good gene demographics have fallen and they get abortions if they happen to have an oops baby.
i really dont like the framing here, it feels very ahistorical.
the horrible abuses (literally stealing babies from mothers who wanted them) are way more recent, widespread, and extensive than this article seems to portray.
Also! a lot of the reforms werent just put in place by governments, many catholic adoption agencies reformed themselves after seeing the horrors firsthand.
Yes abortion is a big factor here but it varies culturally. I’m guessing much less likely to happen in the Hispanic population for religious cultural reasons and adoption less likely to happen for the same
But there’s no dancing around the reality that a single non working woman can get by on welfare so there’s no disincentive. There’s an incentive to keep having kids for an economy of scale. If you intend to not work
Adoption abuses are real. I actually just read article in my local paper about a woman who was reunited with her biological mom from chile. During the Pinochet era babies from poor moms were literally stolen and sold. This mother was told her baby died and was cremated.
Adoption is a wonderful good deed but biological bonds are strong and exist for a reason.
That’s a different story. As far as I know most people don’t have surrogates carry their own biological children to give away. That’s not a good idea for so many reasons the most obvious being that said surrogate could easily change her mind and that would be that no matter what contract you have.
Going through pregnancy involves bonding hormones so I don’t imagine it’s a cakewalk for the surrogate. I think ideally they can cope but I’m not here to speak for them. It’s not for everyone obviously. I think it makes far more sense for someone who already has kids.
I wouldn’t make it illegal because it’s someone’s choice to do this. I do think someone might be transactional just wanting the money and others seeing this as bestowing the greatest gift
I don’t understand people who do this just bc they don’t want to carry a baby. One kardashian sister did this bc she just didn’t feel like carrying another baby. Another did it bc she was told it was too dangerous to carry another baby. One could argue in latter case well she already has kids what’s the need for this but I’m pretty pro natal so that doesn’t disturb me ethically. I can see how any surrogacy might disturb someone I’m just pointing out it’s more ethically challenged in certain cases. In situations where it’s unhealthy for mother or child to be carried by that mother i support surrogacy from an ethical standpoint provided there’s zero coercion.
Yes people are selfish and the world isn’t ideal. Almost all ivf is saddled with moral issues no one challenges. I support the legality and restrictions like not implanting more than two embryos at once but there are people devoutly against any abortion who use ivf. The process is not some exact mimicry of natural conception. Chances are the process is damaging some embryos and people are fine with that. Because it’s going to the cause of childbirth.
Like I said I think adoption is a Marvelous good deed but I also think kids belong with their biological parents if that’s viable. You can argue what society should and shouldn’t do to support the indigent who have kids but it’s a dark road imo deciding where the better family is. I’m not an idiot I know objectively a child will likely have a better life in certain situations over others but nature is the first arbiter for me.
"Adoption is a wonderful good deed but biological bonds are strong and exist for a reason." Exactly. I remember listening to a debate over contractual surrogacy, and the woman arguing the pro side had been a surrogate. She openly admitted that when the nurse came to take the baby after birth, "I could've killed her."
To be clear, I'm not making a value judgment regarding surrogacy or adoption; I'm just reiterating that those are primal bonds that cannot and should not be treated as de minimis.
If we're doing economic social engineering, why not just offer tax breaks for wealthy families to have extra kids? Per your own views on genetics, this would seem to be the better option.
You might object you’re only talking about welfare of kids who exist anyway. But even if you saw an increase in kids given up for adoption, cutting the welfare state will mean more kids growing up in absolute destitution, which you haven't put in your argument.
And not just tax breaks, although that's a great first step. My preferred trio is:
1. Tax breaks per kid for either parent (so "working dad, SAHM" couples get it), such that if you have 6+ kids it nets out to zero. Don't want to discourage women working? Have the tax breaks flip - they apply to dad's income for the first 10 or 15 years, then the mom's after 15 years.
2. "Baby bonuses" for biological kids from graduate degree holders - $50k for 2 Masters holders, $100k for 2 Phd holders (and $75k for mixed parents). These also apply if one or both are currently in a grad program.
3. State / city subsidized au pairs for dual income couples in HCOL areas. Au pairs come in on the J-1 visa, which can be arbitrarily increased at the federal level. You both have six figure jobs and just had a kid? Congrats, have a free au pair! And we'll pass out more for each additional kid you have!
Sounds expensive? Zvi calculated that the break even subsidization point for *average* people having kids is something like $350k+. As in, an average person will pay that much into various state and federal coffers over a lifetime. Now imagine filtering by grad degrees and high income people - these subsidies pay themselves back.
And that's without mentioning that the overwhelming majority of technological progress, new business foundings, and innovations come from people in the top quintile.
I can’t get on board with even encouraging mothers to give up their kids. If they want to that’s fine. But you could always conceivably find kids a better home.
I find it weird that birth control for a young woman isn’t a condition of welfare esp when there are shots. You could make exceptions at a later age bc of the biological clock but society has made a choice to sponsor childbearing for people who can’t afford it for better or for worse. In a society that’s not even replacing humans maybe it isn’t a bad thing but probably would make more sense to subsidize working families though that doesn’t seem to have the pro natal result
Hi, I agree with abolishing , or at least markedly curtailing, regulations that interfere with adoption. I agree that the fall in adoption rates is tragic. My question is, how much do you think the overall decrease in poverty in the third world has contributed to the lower adoption rates? Maybe parents in those countries are richer now and are not giving up kids for adoption as often? Thanks.
That's a huge part of it. When my friends were adopted from South Korea (early 1980s), GDP per capita was 80% lower than it is now. Even more extreme in Vietnam, China, you name it.
The increased prosperity has gone hand in hand with urbanization, contraception, and much more intentional family planning (not making value judgment). The result? Far fewer children being raised by far more affluent parents who either (a) wanted them, or (b) have resources to raise an oops. That so many have done so in scenario (b) suggests they never wanted to give them up in the first place.
I have been mulling thi over and I have the sneaking suspicion this was written tongue in cheek as a modern omage to Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal. I read your bio and being born the same year I want to be on your side this has to be an essay intended as irony. The problem is that every government in the world has a financial interest in promoting adoption of welfare dependent or potentially welfare dependent children in the ‘war on poverty’. Social safety nets for unemployed or under employed adults are funded by the working prosperous population. Governments need the prosperous population to have a 1 to 1 replacement rate or within a generation the country can slip to third world status. The fastest way to increase the size of the prosperous population while decreasing the number of citizens living in poverty is to put sons and daughters of poor people to work playing the rollbof son or daughter to a more prosperous family. Doing this achieves the desired replacement rate for the working population decreases the welfare dependent population and effectively spats and neuters the poor parents ending an inter generational legacy of poverty. A dollar spent promoting adoption is said to have $3 in savings and benefits to societvaccording to another often quoted conservative economist. Sons and daughters of the poor are getting food and clothing and shelter in exchange for playing the roll of others people children but the government wants to compell the adopted people to stay in character pretending to be the children of the people they were assigned to not just as children but for the rest of their lives…the government moved them to the other side of the chess board and wants them to stay their. The government does not want adopted people leaving those assigned positions going back to their original parents original identities so the only way to keep adopted people in that kind of subserviant position is to withhold their identifying documents which forces them to remain in character when they want to leave and have their original identity and kinship rights reinstated. Withholding identifying sicuments to compel service is a fourteenth amendment indicate of slavery but courts have found that while the constitutional right to equal treatment has merit the governments interest in promoting adoption for the greater good of society trumps citizens right to equal treatment. The US is not just an importer of adopted people it exports foster kids out of the us to anyone who will take them. Depending on where they get adopted those people might not retain American citizenship. We think nothing of stripping adopted foreign people of citizenship in the countries of their birth. I recently helped a woman born in florida in 1968 that was sent to Columbia for adoption because her mother was white and her father was Cuban. She lost her citizenship. Realize that the only time governments take away a persons citizenship is treason or adoption. I see the economic logic of your argument but it requires forced servitude and stripping people of their constitutional right to equal treatment by the law. Policies that allow for governments to violate the fourteenth amendment ‘for the benefit of society’ are much like your suggestion that it’s ok to loosen safeguards against child trafficking and kidnapping because the few that are kidnapped and trafficked will be collateral damage in an effort that will put a chicken in every pot. Majority rule minority rights. If we need to end social welfare need fine go ahead and do it but we should change policies so that the sons and daughters cannot be put into service in the wor on poverty their identities and kinship rights should not be altered. If the government needs a smarter way to balance the budget they should put their educated brains to work and find a way to solve the problem that does not involve creating a slave class with falsified birth records stripped of kinship rights.
My cousin's children are orphans and seem pretty troubled, and my parents have been helping them through the foster care system for several years now.
The kids have been between different homes, including a government run kids home, and several foster homes. None of the homes have been good, worse of all was the government run home. Seems like many foster homes are trying to adopt as many kids as possible maximize the money they get from the government, and otherwise neglect the kids.
One of my cousins kids, a young boy, was taken in by a family of foreign religious extremists who do farm work and have antagonistic views about the United States. They also have adopted many kids, in apparent money grab. But he is clearly happiest there, so my parents are cautiously supportive of the decision given that he doesn't have better options.
"Child raised by greedy spiteful bigoted extremists" is a bad story, but it's also sadly often a better outcome than many others.
Another consideration is IVF. Well-to-do couples that previously would have invested time and money into adoption, due to fertility issues, are now putting that time in money into IVF.
Mothers who give up their babies for adoption forego welfare benefits that they receive for keeping the baby. This does NOT benefit said baby. It benefits the mother's drug dealer (and/or pimp).
Part of the reason for the international collapse (from 25K in 2006 to about 1,200 in 2023) is that countries from where a lot of children were adopted (South Korea in particular and East Asia generally) now have collapse-level birthrates. No amount of deregulation can change the fact that there are very few unwanted children in these countries anymore.
I was there when the debate over corruption in international adoptions heated up. We adopted from Ethiopia, and hired investigators on two separate occasions to verify the facts. But corruption was definitely a problem, both with some US agencies and some foreign orphanages. Most of the problems, aside from typical bribery, involved women who didn't realize that adoption was permanent, as adoption is not well understood or common in many foreign countries. And the agencies didn't always go out of their way to educate them. However, a few agencies were intentionally deceiving women and/or "buying babies", and set up "virtual orphanages" to funnel babies to foreigners. The women were sometimes complicit - having a child out of wedlock in that country is no bueno, so they would exert effort to hide, deny, and avoid detection, including "abandoning" a child where they were sure it would be found, or using relatives to do the relinquishment. False paperwork, deception, and bribes are common in many poor countries, such that often nothing can get done without it. It was not always clear what constituted "normal" corruption and what constituted trafficking, and most Americans wouldn't know the difference if it hit them over the head. The US State Department was trying to help, but ended up making matters worse. At the time, they lacked the resources, experience and skills to evaluate cases. The case workers were very young and lacked any training in social work or child and family development, much less investigative training.
Unfortunately, the political reaction was to point a lot of fingers, add multiple layers of bureaucracy, and essentially strangle it. The 1st Trump admin appointed a left wing activist committed to ending international adoption to oversee the process.
Our daughter is doing quite well - kind, smart, beautiful, and athletic.
How do you write an article like this and not talk about ABORTION. The kind of kids that used to get adopted now get aborted. DUH.
It's also changed the nature of adoption. My Dad was born in 1947 and got adopted. Standard thing where some teenage girl got knocked up and the father didn't want a shotgun marriage. That doesn't happen anymore, the kid just gets aborted.
What that means is that the very few kids not getting aborted are usually to poor underclass women, usually of color. My Dad was a white kid that ended up bright and athletic. There are a lot of well off people that want to adopt white kids from good stock. There are not a lot of people looking to adopt crack babies from the ghetto.
"International adoption" used to mean poor East Asians back when East Asia was really poor. Again, you're getting a kid of good genetic stock. There are not a lot of smart East Asian kids to adopt anymore
I'll be blunt, people who adopt care about the quality of the kids they are adopting. And that quality has dropped because the fertility rate of the good gene demographics have fallen and they get abortions if they happen to have an oops baby.
i really dont like the framing here, it feels very ahistorical.
the horrible abuses (literally stealing babies from mothers who wanted them) are way more recent, widespread, and extensive than this article seems to portray.
Also! a lot of the reforms werent just put in place by governments, many catholic adoption agencies reformed themselves after seeing the horrors firsthand.
Yes abortion is a big factor here but it varies culturally. I’m guessing much less likely to happen in the Hispanic population for religious cultural reasons and adoption less likely to happen for the same
But there’s no dancing around the reality that a single non working woman can get by on welfare so there’s no disincentive. There’s an incentive to keep having kids for an economy of scale. If you intend to not work
Adoption abuses are real. I actually just read article in my local paper about a woman who was reunited with her biological mom from chile. During the Pinochet era babies from poor moms were literally stolen and sold. This mother was told her baby died and was cremated.
Adoption is a wonderful good deed but biological bonds are strong and exist for a reason.
That’s a different story. As far as I know most people don’t have surrogates carry their own biological children to give away. That’s not a good idea for so many reasons the most obvious being that said surrogate could easily change her mind and that would be that no matter what contract you have.
Going through pregnancy involves bonding hormones so I don’t imagine it’s a cakewalk for the surrogate. I think ideally they can cope but I’m not here to speak for them. It’s not for everyone obviously. I think it makes far more sense for someone who already has kids.
I wouldn’t make it illegal because it’s someone’s choice to do this. I do think someone might be transactional just wanting the money and others seeing this as bestowing the greatest gift
I don’t understand people who do this just bc they don’t want to carry a baby. One kardashian sister did this bc she just didn’t feel like carrying another baby. Another did it bc she was told it was too dangerous to carry another baby. One could argue in latter case well she already has kids what’s the need for this but I’m pretty pro natal so that doesn’t disturb me ethically. I can see how any surrogacy might disturb someone I’m just pointing out it’s more ethically challenged in certain cases. In situations where it’s unhealthy for mother or child to be carried by that mother i support surrogacy from an ethical standpoint provided there’s zero coercion.
Yes people are selfish and the world isn’t ideal. Almost all ivf is saddled with moral issues no one challenges. I support the legality and restrictions like not implanting more than two embryos at once but there are people devoutly against any abortion who use ivf. The process is not some exact mimicry of natural conception. Chances are the process is damaging some embryos and people are fine with that. Because it’s going to the cause of childbirth.
Like I said I think adoption is a Marvelous good deed but I also think kids belong with their biological parents if that’s viable. You can argue what society should and shouldn’t do to support the indigent who have kids but it’s a dark road imo deciding where the better family is. I’m not an idiot I know objectively a child will likely have a better life in certain situations over others but nature is the first arbiter for me.
"Adoption is a wonderful good deed but biological bonds are strong and exist for a reason." Exactly. I remember listening to a debate over contractual surrogacy, and the woman arguing the pro side had been a surrogate. She openly admitted that when the nurse came to take the baby after birth, "I could've killed her."
To be clear, I'm not making a value judgment regarding surrogacy or adoption; I'm just reiterating that those are primal bonds that cannot and should not be treated as de minimis.
If we're doing economic social engineering, why not just offer tax breaks for wealthy families to have extra kids? Per your own views on genetics, this would seem to be the better option.
You might object you’re only talking about welfare of kids who exist anyway. But even if you saw an increase in kids given up for adoption, cutting the welfare state will mean more kids growing up in absolute destitution, which you haven't put in your argument.
Yes, this.
And not just tax breaks, although that's a great first step. My preferred trio is:
1. Tax breaks per kid for either parent (so "working dad, SAHM" couples get it), such that if you have 6+ kids it nets out to zero. Don't want to discourage women working? Have the tax breaks flip - they apply to dad's income for the first 10 or 15 years, then the mom's after 15 years.
2. "Baby bonuses" for biological kids from graduate degree holders - $50k for 2 Masters holders, $100k for 2 Phd holders (and $75k for mixed parents). These also apply if one or both are currently in a grad program.
3. State / city subsidized au pairs for dual income couples in HCOL areas. Au pairs come in on the J-1 visa, which can be arbitrarily increased at the federal level. You both have six figure jobs and just had a kid? Congrats, have a free au pair! And we'll pass out more for each additional kid you have!
Sounds expensive? Zvi calculated that the break even subsidization point for *average* people having kids is something like $350k+. As in, an average person will pay that much into various state and federal coffers over a lifetime. Now imagine filtering by grad degrees and high income people - these subsidies pay themselves back.
And that's without mentioning that the overwhelming majority of technological progress, new business foundings, and innovations come from people in the top quintile.
Makes you wonder where the baby farms are. Works for chickens, pig, even elephants.
I can’t get on board with even encouraging mothers to give up their kids. If they want to that’s fine. But you could always conceivably find kids a better home.
I find it weird that birth control for a young woman isn’t a condition of welfare esp when there are shots. You could make exceptions at a later age bc of the biological clock but society has made a choice to sponsor childbearing for people who can’t afford it for better or for worse. In a society that’s not even replacing humans maybe it isn’t a bad thing but probably would make more sense to subsidize working families though that doesn’t seem to have the pro natal result
Hi, I agree with abolishing , or at least markedly curtailing, regulations that interfere with adoption. I agree that the fall in adoption rates is tragic. My question is, how much do you think the overall decrease in poverty in the third world has contributed to the lower adoption rates? Maybe parents in those countries are richer now and are not giving up kids for adoption as often? Thanks.
That's a huge part of it. When my friends were adopted from South Korea (early 1980s), GDP per capita was 80% lower than it is now. Even more extreme in Vietnam, China, you name it.
The increased prosperity has gone hand in hand with urbanization, contraception, and much more intentional family planning (not making value judgment). The result? Far fewer children being raised by far more affluent parents who either (a) wanted them, or (b) have resources to raise an oops. That so many have done so in scenario (b) suggests they never wanted to give them up in the first place.
Its probably politically very expensive to deregulate the adoption standards because of the amounts of stories and News bad cases of adoption created
I have been mulling thi over and I have the sneaking suspicion this was written tongue in cheek as a modern omage to Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal. I read your bio and being born the same year I want to be on your side this has to be an essay intended as irony. The problem is that every government in the world has a financial interest in promoting adoption of welfare dependent or potentially welfare dependent children in the ‘war on poverty’. Social safety nets for unemployed or under employed adults are funded by the working prosperous population. Governments need the prosperous population to have a 1 to 1 replacement rate or within a generation the country can slip to third world status. The fastest way to increase the size of the prosperous population while decreasing the number of citizens living in poverty is to put sons and daughters of poor people to work playing the rollbof son or daughter to a more prosperous family. Doing this achieves the desired replacement rate for the working population decreases the welfare dependent population and effectively spats and neuters the poor parents ending an inter generational legacy of poverty. A dollar spent promoting adoption is said to have $3 in savings and benefits to societvaccording to another often quoted conservative economist. Sons and daughters of the poor are getting food and clothing and shelter in exchange for playing the roll of others people children but the government wants to compell the adopted people to stay in character pretending to be the children of the people they were assigned to not just as children but for the rest of their lives…the government moved them to the other side of the chess board and wants them to stay their. The government does not want adopted people leaving those assigned positions going back to their original parents original identities so the only way to keep adopted people in that kind of subserviant position is to withhold their identifying documents which forces them to remain in character when they want to leave and have their original identity and kinship rights reinstated. Withholding identifying sicuments to compel service is a fourteenth amendment indicate of slavery but courts have found that while the constitutional right to equal treatment has merit the governments interest in promoting adoption for the greater good of society trumps citizens right to equal treatment. The US is not just an importer of adopted people it exports foster kids out of the us to anyone who will take them. Depending on where they get adopted those people might not retain American citizenship. We think nothing of stripping adopted foreign people of citizenship in the countries of their birth. I recently helped a woman born in florida in 1968 that was sent to Columbia for adoption because her mother was white and her father was Cuban. She lost her citizenship. Realize that the only time governments take away a persons citizenship is treason or adoption. I see the economic logic of your argument but it requires forced servitude and stripping people of their constitutional right to equal treatment by the law. Policies that allow for governments to violate the fourteenth amendment ‘for the benefit of society’ are much like your suggestion that it’s ok to loosen safeguards against child trafficking and kidnapping because the few that are kidnapped and trafficked will be collateral damage in an effort that will put a chicken in every pot. Majority rule minority rights. If we need to end social welfare need fine go ahead and do it but we should change policies so that the sons and daughters cannot be put into service in the wor on poverty their identities and kinship rights should not be altered. If the government needs a smarter way to balance the budget they should put their educated brains to work and find a way to solve the problem that does not involve creating a slave class with falsified birth records stripped of kinship rights.
My cousin's children are orphans and seem pretty troubled, and my parents have been helping them through the foster care system for several years now.
The kids have been between different homes, including a government run kids home, and several foster homes. None of the homes have been good, worse of all was the government run home. Seems like many foster homes are trying to adopt as many kids as possible maximize the money they get from the government, and otherwise neglect the kids.
One of my cousins kids, a young boy, was taken in by a family of foreign religious extremists who do farm work and have antagonistic views about the United States. They also have adopted many kids, in apparent money grab. But he is clearly happiest there, so my parents are cautiously supportive of the decision given that he doesn't have better options.
"Child raised by greedy spiteful bigoted extremists" is a bad story, but it's also sadly often a better outcome than many others.
Another consideration is IVF. Well-to-do couples that previously would have invested time and money into adoption, due to fertility issues, are now putting that time in money into IVF.
And the price of IVF has fallen while the price of adoption has risen.
Mothers who give up their babies for adoption forego welfare benefits that they receive for keeping the baby. This does NOT benefit said baby. It benefits the mother's drug dealer (and/or pimp).
ABOLISH the welfare state, like Caplan says.