I saw a documentary on the religious movement “The Shakers.” I found this quote from the Wikipedia.
It tells how the shakers practiced strict celibacy so they had to rely on converts and adoptions of orphans.
Then at the end of the article it says…
My guess would be the recommendation, in 1958, by the Child Welfare League of America that
and that within two to four years most (all?) states had passed legislation based on that recommendation. (This was also the period in which most (all?) states passed legislation sealing the birth records of adopted children, making it extremely difficult to discover information about birth families. I doubt that the record sealing had anything to do with the single parent issue, but it would appear that there was a “wave” of adoption legislation between 1959 and 1962 and I suspect that the CWLoA recommendations triggered them.)
Since Shakers never married, they would have been excluded (de jure and de facto) from adopting.
- From Single Parent Adoptions on The Adoption History Project web site.
My family has a farm about a mile from a large Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH. My guess is the reason that they can’t adopt orphans is that it would be considered unethical by most standards. They had a very extreme, and pretty unique lifestyle that was very religious. Orphan children may not have much choice if the Shakers adopted them and their upbringing would be unconventional and maybe coercive. The Shakers were very communal almost like a religious based commune and most people would consider that abusive if children were forced into that odd and strict environment even if they were well cared for.
The closest similarities I can think of would be if monasteries or Amish people could adopt children from the outside. Is that allowed?
Amish adopt from the outside. They do not do it as often as Mennonites do, (often participating in foreign adoptions), but it happens.
I doubt that a child would ever be adopted into Christian monastery in the 20th or 21st centuries, although a few individual Catholic priests have adopted children. (I am not aware of any priest belonging to a religious order who has adopted, although there may be some.)
Well according to this documentary the Shakers allowed any child to leave at 18. They were also well known for taking in homless people for the winter. Year after year homeless men would show up in November and profess to want to be Shakers. Then when spring came they up and left.
And the Shakers knew this and didn’t care. In fact they coined the name “Winter Shakers” for them.
I’m not sure what standards those would be. My great grandfather was an orphan raised by Shakers. He likely had a better childhood than he would have had living in poverty with his single father after his mother died.
The Shakers were known for giving high quality education and vocational training to the children they adopted. My great grandfather left at age 18 and had the skills to become the superintendent and head gardener at a wealthy estate.
It should be noted that the Shakers were highly advanced for their time. They were considered among the best farmers in the country. Their seeds were highly sought after by other farmers. And they were amazing inventors of new technology.
They were far from being a backwards cult. During hard times, they were a refuge that welcomed many Americans into their fold, sometimes permanently but often temporarily. A child raised by the Shakers wasn’t likely to be abused, although it would have been strict.
Then the law would have to explicitly exclude “extreme religious Lifestyle” and “religious communes” which would open a can of Problems, because who gets to define what’s extreme and what’s not? (Given not only the strong influence of religious extremists on laws passed in the past decades in the US, but also that the US has not managed to define church in such a way that excludes Scientology from the tax-benefits of it.)
There’s also a lot of Adoption to very extreme religious couples still going on in the US, so that’s not likely the reason.
I do remember a documentary where they said that originally, Shakers adopted huge numbers because the state could save Money on orphanages, (and the children were cared and fed much better at the Shakers than at the orphanages) but when orphanages changed, Shakers were no longer attractive compared to conventional couples.