Americans’ Views on Adoption August 14, 2006
Posted by Snow Monkey in Adoption.trackback
As someone who is in the process of adopting, I’ve already heard many different opinions about the subject. But what about the bigger picture? I was curious to see what polls tell us about Americans’ views on adoption. So far, I’ve found two major national surveys on the topic that were conducted within the past five years by reputable organizations.
The first of these surveys is the 2002 National Adoption Attitudes Survey, sponsored by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and conducted by Harris Interactive. This was a follow-up to a similar survey conducted in 1997, so I wonder whether another one is in the works for 2007. According to the report on the results (pdf), public opinion seems generally pro-adoption:
The National Adoption Attitudes Survey found that two-thirds of Americans have a favorable opinion about adoption, and two-thirds have a personal experience with adoption. Favorable opinions about adoption are prevalent among all social groups in the United States…Other indicators of strong support for adoption include:
- 78% of Americans think the country should be doing more to encourage adoption.
- 95% think that adoptive parents should receive the same maternity and paternity benefits from employers as biological parents.
- Three-fourths (75%) of Americans believe adoptive parents are very likely to love their adoptive children as much as children born to them.
- Over 80% think that parents get as much or more satisfaction from raising adoptive children as from raising biological children.
- Americans also have very positive opinions about adoptive parents. They are seen as lucky by 94% of Americans.
The survey included two questions about international adoption in particular. Half of the respondents thought that international adoptions were “easier to complete than adoptions of children born in the U.S.,” versus 39% who didn’t think so [Hmm...I wonder how I would answer that question]. At the same time, almost half of the respondents (47%) thought that adopting internationally was “more likely to mean adopting a child with significant medical or emotional problems,” versus 40% who didn’t think so.
The report details all sorts of other interesting findings—far too many to mention here.
The second survey is a 2006 poll sponsored by ABC News and Time magazine. This one focused on adoption within the context of the foster care system. The report (pdf) provides this summary of the findings:
The foster care system is broadly unnoticed in this country, and to the extent they think about it most Americans believe it’s doing an acceptable job. But there’s also substantial concern about the system – and broad support for improving it, even at significant cost.
About one in four respondents said that they would seriously consider becoming a foster parent or adopting a foster child. The poll also found that the public was evenly split on allowing gay or lesbian couples to adopt children. That’s a big shift from the early 1990s, when public opinion was against gay adoption by a 2-to-1 margin.
Looking at these polls, I wish that they had included more questions about international adoption; I would still like to know more about how the public views it.
So, I wonder. I wonder whether people reference adoption only in an abstract way (I approve of someone else doing this) when answering the surveys’ questions and not in a personal way (I could see myself doing this). I wonder this in spite of the statistic that 2/3 have a “personal experience” with adoption, which obviously does not constitute adopting or having been adopted.
Anecdotally speaking: I was on an infertility board for about a year, and there seemed to be an overwhelming attitude that adoption was not only second (or third–after donor) best, but was the-thing-that-is-not-named. Granted, it was a board for women trying to conceive biological children, but when the subject came up, there was an almost rabid negative response.
And I also wonder how the question(s) in the surveys were posed. I wonder what would happen if they asked about whether people would consider adopting in addition to having bio kids versus as an alternative to having bio kids. I just have a hard time believing that the attitude toward adoption is on nearly equal footing with the attitude toward giving birth to bio kids. But, see, the surveys weren’t meant to be comparative. So, I’ll shut up.
It’s late and I need to leave my office. My brain is getting cranky.
I wonder about the abstract/personal distinction, too—specifically, whether some people thought to themselves, “Good for them, but not for me.” I also wonder whether some people said what they thought the “right” thing to say was rather than what they thought in their heart of hearts. And I wonder about the extent to which survey questions can fully capture people’s views about adoption, especially given that those views are probably fairly complex and probably range widely in intensity. Even the long questionnaire in the 2002 survey left me with lots of unanswered questions.
On what counts as “personal experience,” I looked back at the report (it’s pretty good about including the actual question wordings; the ABC report is, too) and saw that the survey asked, “Has anyone in your family or among your close friends ever been adopted OR adopted a child OR placed a child for adoption?” So the 2/3 figure isn’t too surprising. Even before ZGirl and I decided to adopt, I would have said yes to that—my sister-in-law and my paternal grandfather were both adopted.
A final note: I noticed that I left out another interesting finding from the 2002 survey—namely, that public opinion about adoption was a bit more favorable in 2002 than in had been in 1997. I wonder what’s going on there…