According to the Adoption and Foster Care Reporting and Analysis System there were 510,000 children in foster care in 2006. 127,000 of those children in public foster care were waiting to be adopted, and that same year only 51,000 of those children were successfully adopted. Waiting? There are nearly 130,000 kids just waiting to be adopted? That doesn’t seem fair. With so many willing parents and so many willing children, it just didn’t add up. While there are overcrowded orphanages and while that is a part of the problem, it is the other end of the spectrum that we need to be analyzing. The adoption process has become outrageously timely, costly, and emotionally draining.
Domestic adoption takes between 1-18 months and can cost between $18,000 and $40,000. For many adoptive parents this is too long to wait and too expensive to pay for. A study conducted by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in 2005 found that 90% of potential parents who express interest in adopting children from foster care do not wind up doing so because of frustrations within the system.
In creating this petition, my hope is to get the message out to not only the government officials who are in power of making proactive changes, but prospective adoptive parents who feel overwhelmed by the current adoption process.
By signing this petition, you are helping all participants of the adoption process know that they are not alone in their hope for change.
