ADOPTION is an unexpectedly rare phenomenon in the United States, and that’s a supply-side problem. The U.S. is the third-most-populous country in the world, and each year more than a third of our country’s 4 million births are to unmarried women, but it is estimated that in a typical year the total number of mothers who voluntarily relinquish their children for adoption is fewer than 14,000-barely enough to make a statistical radar blip on the demographic Doppler. Would-be parents trek to the Far East and mount expeditions to South America because there are so few infants available for adoption in the United States.
At the same time, a half million children languish in foster care, awaiting permanent adoptive homes. There are would-be parents who want to adopt them, too, but this situation is more complex: Older children are less eagerly sought after, and the longer a child is in foster care the less likely he is to find a permanent home. The lot of these foster children has been made worse by years of bad public policy discouraging transracial adoptions-a significant barrier, since most of the couples looking to adopt are white and the children in foster care are disproportionately non-white. Supply and demand are wildly out of sync: If we were talking about consumer goods instead of children, we’d call this a market failure. And some of the most incisive critics of U.S. adoption policy are calling for reforms that would make adoption policies look a lot more like a market-that is, a system characterized by free and open cooperation-and a lot less like a welfare bureaucracy.
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