For years, anti-abortion activists argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would, instead of increasing illegal abortions, lead to more women with unwanted pregnancies turning to adoption.
“Adoption! Not abortion!” they cried.
Now more than a year after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the nationwide ripple of that case on the adoption landscape is proving complicated. Some adoption agencies are seeing an increase in the number of infants placed in adoptive care, and sometimes huge ones, while others say it’s still too early to tell what the new normal will be.
Kristen Hamilton, the director of communications at the nonprofit National Council for Adoption, one of the nation’s largest networks of adoption professionals, said they have seen “a lot of variances” among adoption agencies in states with stricter abortion laws or outright bans.
“In some cases, they are seeing an uptick in the number of babies that are being placed for adoption, while in other cases, things have remained relatively similar to what they were before the Dobbs decision,” Hamilton said.
Mark Melson, the president and CEO of the Texas-based Gladney Center for Adoption, which facilitates adoptions across the country, said the center has seen a 30% jump in infant domestic adoptions in the past year. Inquiries from pregnant women who call to learn about their options to give their to-be-born children up for abortion, meanwhile, are up 55%.
Robert Lamarche, the director of ACF Adoptions, an agency based in Florida, said that women are now calling about adoptions at stages in their pregnancy that were previously unheard of, though since the state’s abortion ban is tied up in court, the frequency of calls has not risen like in other states.
“We used to typically get calls from women in their second trimester,” Lamarche said. “Now we get calls from women when they’re four weeks pregnant, five weeks pregnant, calling to figure out their options.”
A primary challenge in assessing new national adoption trends is that states don’t have to report infant domestic adoptions. There’s no requirement for any data since adoptions can either occur inside or outside of the foster system,
Past research suggests, though, that unwanted pregnancies are usually slated for adoption as opposed to reluctant parents. A 2017 study found that women were more likely to parent or have abortions than to place infants for adoption, regardless of any compounding factor (race, education socioeconomic status, etc.).
What is clear is that women are now giving adoption a harder look than before, but the intensity of that look remains inconsistent and novel.
