"The United States is one of the major baby-receiving countries in the world. Relatively little research has focused on why there is such a high demand for intercountry adoption. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with adoptive parents, the authors explored the reasons why Americans prefer to adopt foreign-born children instead of adopting minority children domestically. Other than infertility reasons, concerns about domestic adoption, and the uneven domestic supply and demand of “desirable” children, the authors’ findings suggested that there was a perception that American children available for adoption presented difficult problems whereas foreign children presented interesting challenges. The “problems” inherent in children from American foster care were confounded with race differences. Studying adoption motivations will not only help us better understand the domestic adoption situation, especially why so many Black children are left behind in foster care, it may also reveal important insights into current race relations and distances between groups in the United States."The above is an abstract from a 2010 study that appeared in The Journal of Family Issues.
I am waiting for my library to send me the full text article so that I can read it.
Hmmm! Very interesting.I dare say 'uneven domestic supply' is being addressed by the adoption industry.
ReplyDeleteThis report was also listed with Donaldson Adoption Institute. It will be interesting to read how they set-up this research and their findings. For our family, we didn't ever really consider domestic infant adoption and DH was not open to adopting from Foster Care, which led us to International Adoption.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I suspect that adoptive parents realize rather quickly AFTER adoption that the program they adopt from doesn't really change any challenges they might possibly face. By this I mean that an FAD, RAD and even a sensory processing disorder diagnosis is the same whether you adopt from Russia or foster care or China or domestically.
ReplyDeleteWe chose to adopt internationally from Asia because four of our cousins were adopted internationally from Asia.
This'll be a must-read, thanks for the heads up.
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