After the January earthquake in Haiti, 10 American missionaries, all white, were jailed after attempting to take 33 Haitian children to the United States for adoption. "The American mind has been shaped by the positive vision of families saving bereft orphans from a grim life in a Dickens-esque institution or from death on the streets," David Smolin, an Alabama law school professor who has studied adoption, wrote in The New York Times. As shocking as the allegations were, the appeal of international adoption is real -- according to the Child Welfare League of America, international adoptions increased by 180 percent between 1989 and 2005.
The politics of domestic adoption are more complex. About half a million children are in the U.S. foster-care system, and a disproportionate number of them are African American. Despite rising rates of American adoption, even interracial adoption, why do so many black children need homes?
At the heart of the problem is the racial gap between adoptive parents and adoptees. While African American children make up only 15 percent of the population as a whole, they represent 45 percent of the children in the foster-care system. For years, domestic groups, including the National Association of Black Social Workers, encouraged same-race placement. While the association no longer calls it "cultural genocide," it still says transracial adoption should be a last resort.
The cultural benefits of being placed with same-race parents are outweighed by the detriment of staying in the foster-care system. The outcomes of children in foster care are dire, though it's difficult to distinguish between the effects of the foster-care system and the conditions that precede placement in foster care. (Most of the data on adoptions come from state, and not private, agencies.)
All of that leads Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Daniel Pollack, economists at American University who have studied adoption markets, to conclude in their recent book, Baby Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families, that we should incentivize transracial adoptions. It would reduce the wait time African American children in foster care face before being placed with a family. "The psychic cost of delaying or denying a waiting child placement in a permanent family is inestimable," they write.
Hansen and Pollack don't lay out specifics for how they believe we should encourage transracial adoption. But a different study suggests the answer is money. The cost of adoption is around $15,000 to $25,000. The Center for Economic Policy Research found that non- Front Page Title: Incentivizing Adoption Subtitle: Black children in the United States face longer stays in foster care than white children. Is money the way to change this? African American children are seven times as likely to draw the attention of an adoptive parent than are non-African American children. And girls are preferred over boys in general. Those two preferences combine to mean that, in order to entice couples into adopting a black boy, the actual cost of adopting that baby needs to be heavily discounted. According to the CEPR, "The increase in desirability of a non-African-American baby with respect to an African-American baby (both of unknown gender) is equivalent to a decrease of at least $38,000 in adoption finalization cost."
But what kind of families will those children be placed with if it takes so much money for them to want to adopt? Those against transracial adoption have always argued that it is a question of cultural sensitivity. It can be especially painful for non-white kids adopted into racially or ethnically isolated communities. Programs exist to help adoptive white families navigate America's racial landscape, but, so far, those programs are voluntary.
Plenty of loving, white families want to provide homes to children no matter their race. (The number of transracial adoptions of black children has increased to 26 percent, almost double the 1998 percentage.) It's also possible those discounts might help less wealthy families attain parenthood, which might bring in more black adoptive families. But it still seems like we're explicitly saying that African American babies are worth less.
Ultimately, incentivizing the adoption of black children misses the larger problem of why so many African American children end up in foster care. If we concentrated on making the outcomes better for African American families in the U.S., as opposed to promoting child-by-child outcomes, then we'd all be better off. As Shani O. Hilton noted in the Prospect last month, 69 percent of pregnancies among black women are unplanned. While abortion rates are higher among black women, the rates of women putting their children up for adoption are not. (A higher percentage of unmarried white women put their children up for adoption than do unmarried black women.) Most black children in foster care are not there because parental rights were relinquished voluntarily. Something happens after black women decide to keep their children, but the Federal Administration for Children and Families has noted a lack of research into what that something is, exactly.
The disproportionate numbers could reflect gaps of a social safety net among the black community, but they could also indicate racial biases among social workers, who decide when black children end up in foster care. No doubt, some of the discrepancy has to do with the correlation between race and poverty, and the increased likelihood that poorer children will suffer some form of maltreatment.
Those overall problems would be better tackled by helping women, especially poor women who might not be able to afford children, avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, or by helping poor mothers who already have children. We tend to see the issues surrounding adoption as a baby problem, but, at its base, it's a parenthood problem. It's not just the inability of some parents to care for their children, for many reasons, but the limited way in which we think of parenthood overall -- cultural norms that dictate women go to great lengths to have biological children and, when they can't, to have children that look like them. We need to do more than encourage transracial adoption. We need to broaden the definition of parenthood, increase access to family planning, and give more care to families with children.
