They adopted because they did want another child, but didn’t want to further contribute to the population (in addition to us), and also wanted help out someone less fortunate.
A slow one, evidently.
If you want to see something that will break your heart, most places have their adoptable children on a website now. This isn’t a very big city and there were four or five kids with severe shaken baby syndrome whose profiles said things like “___ can distinguish a few voices” or “___ does sometimes respond to human touch” or whatever. Let alone the perfectly healthy black male teenagers who aren’t going anywhere but to another foster home, when all they want is to stay with their siblings somewhere. And then there’s the fact that almost every single one of these kids is described as having behavioral problems and trouble in school, or “mild learning disabilities” which I wouldn’t be surprised is just “freaking depressed and been in six schools in the past three years”. I spent an evening on the site a few months ago for some crazy reason I can’t remember, and it was like a bad car wreck - I couldn’t stop looking until I’d gone through all of them. I have the highest respect and admiration for those rare people who go out looking for special needs kids to adopt.
There are more people, singles and couples, adopting children who don’t fit into the “ideal” category. I did get this info mostly from tv and reading.
I wanted to how big the difference between the different countries is and looked up a few numbers. I was really surprised.
According to this site there were over 127 000 adoptions in the US in 1992.
In Germany (a bit below a third of the US population) there were 5330 adoptions in 2003, ca 62% of those by relatives or stepparents. 801 children were available for adoption at the end of the year. (cite, german)
I had no idea the difference is so big.
Well, the premise stands up better, if you are considering only white people. Black women have a significatly higher abortion rate than white women (34% of abortions in the US are by black women, IIRC); a couple in the UK might have more luck find a white child to adopt in the US, since the abortion rate of white women in the US would be a bit lower than in the UK.
WAG for the huge difference - perhaps Germany (and other countries) make far greater use of fostering?