Adoptions Decline in United States as Abortions Rise Following Roe v. Wade
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 20, 2008
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Roe v. Wade case allowing virtually unlimited abortions, pro-life advocates talked of a slippery slope. They said the decision would lead to a devaluing of human life and that is apparently what has happened as new figures show adoptions decreasing.
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics shows that adoption is a rare event that is becoming less and less frequent.
It found that adoption numbers and the desire to adopt have declined over the last 30 years since Roe In 2000, of the 65.6 million children under 18 years of age, only 2.5 percent were adopted.
And, despite the noted maternal instincts of women, men are much ore likely to have adopted a baby or child compared with women.
The CDC stats found men were more than more than twice as likely as women to have adopted — 3.8 percent compared with 1.4 percent.
According to the federal agency, just one-third of all women 18-44 had ever considered adoption, and of those, only about 14 percent had ever gone through on their adoption idea.
The stats also showed that women who want children and have used infertility services that concern pro-life advocates — like in-vitro fertilization — also had adopted in low numbers.
Just 25 percent of women who had never given birth but tried fertility clinics had every adopted.
Adoption is sometimes painted as a practice prevalent in the Anglo community — with a child coming home to a two-parent family living in a house with a white picket fence. Yet the CDC report shows white men and women less likely to adopt a children than their black and Hispanic counterparts.
There are a number of pro-abortion and pro-life reasons for the figures.
On one hand, Planned Parenthood, which does 25 percent of the abortions nationwide, counsels fewer women about adoption now than ever before.
The number of Planned Parenthood adoption referrals is also miniscule and continues to drop, according to the new annual report it released in April. The previous annual report showed a scant 2,413 referrals and the abortion business made three less in the last fiscal year.
The adoption and prenatal numbers are also surprising given the increase in the total number of clients at Planned Parenthood. The pro-abortion group had 3.14 million customers in 2006-2007, which represented a 2.5 percent increase or almost 80,000 more customers than the year prior.
On the pro-life side, the adoption numbers have dropped, according to the CDC report, because there are fewer teen pregnancies and because, with the expansion of the pregnancy center movement, more of those teens are keeping their baby rather than considering adoption or abortion.
Internal polling has shown pregnant teens and young women are less interested in adoption than parenting and pregnancy centers have become more equipped to help them with medical, scholastic and health needs.
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