This is one of the anti-abortion people’s biggest claims: That pregnant woman who don’t want a baby should give it to a woman who can’t have a baby (okay, a straight, married couple). But what proof is there that this would actually happen, in this day of respect for single motherhood.
There are plenty of children in the United States just waiting to be adopted out of foster care right now. They just don’t happen to be infants, which is what the vast majority of adopting parents want and will accept.
When you have people going to Romania to adopt children out of orphanages there, I think it’s safe to say that they would adopt a child in the US, if one was available. But there are something like 1M abortions every year in the US, and I doubt, although I don’t know, that there is a dearth of 1M adoptable babies here-- especially when one factors race into it.
Who knows, though. Maybe we’re close to the point where the Chinese will be coming here to adopt babies. 
My understanding is that is often more difficult and expensive to adopt a domestic baby than an international one. And it can be more complicated legally as well to terminate the rights of the birth mother, which most adoptive couples want.
I am anti-abortion, and although I don’t favor making it illegal I strongly favor making domestic adoption easier and less costly for both the mother and the adopting parent. I believe a natural side effect of such a policy would be a reduction in abortion rates. Doing it the other way (outlawing abortions to increase adoption) seems backwards to me.
Of course it would make more available. That’s trivially obvious, because it would be the only legal way to get rid of a baby you didn’t want. That alone, however, isn’t a good argument for outlawing abortion. It’s just an inevitable side effect of doing so, and solves few of the problems the people presently getting abortions are doing it for. Another inevitable side effect is more deaths and other complications from the inevitable increase in dangerous illegal abortions.
I intended to point out more or less the same thing. A woman’s choice of what to do with an unwanted pregnancy will depend on the costs of her various options, and making abortions illegal could only increase the cost of obtaining one (monetarily, but not only that). So a pregnant woman would be more likely to shift to substitutes such as adoption. It’d be very surprising to find otherwise.
The extent to which this shift occurs will depend on the availability and safety of black markets for abortion, the tenacity of enforcement, the severity of punishments, not to mention the level of demand for adopted children relative to the number of abortions. You’d also likely see more children born and then abandoned, especially if too many children are born than can be adopted or if the adoption process is too burdensome for the biological mother.
Whatever would happen, I don’t see how it’d argue for or against the practice of abortion. Someone who believes in the wrongness of abortion would unlikely to change her mind, I think, just because some of the children “saved” from being aborted would end up with parents who didn’t want them (or homeless, or in orphanages, or whatever).
Having more babies available for adoption does not necessarily mean that there will be more adoptions, y’all realize.
Of course. That’s why I neglected to mention the adoption rate.
I don’t think it follows as “trivially obviously” as you think. I think many women would keep the unwanted infant and resent the hell out of it, and rates of post partum depression and psychosis would skyrocket, along with abuse of infants and older children. I think others would, literally, throw the newborns out in the trash or abandon them in unsafe places where they might die before someone could find them and begin the adoption process.
And, of course, some women would keep the unwanted infant and eventually fall in love with it and be excellent mothers, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not going to increase babies available for adoption, either.
True. But right now, adoption is quite difficult: the waiting times for domestic adoptions are quite long, and overseas adoptions are costly. It goes without saying that the number of adoptions would go up if more babies were available.
The problem, as others have suggested, is that 1.3 million additional babies each year would surely swamp the demand for adoptions. If the number of adoptions were to increase by, say, 100,000 per year over the current rate (which is probably somewhere in the 100,000-200,000 range), a fat lot of good that would do the remaining 1.2 million unwanted kids that were born each year.
I don’t know much about how the adoption process works, but I’d assume that some kind of matching has to take place. Greater child availability would improve the likelihood of finding a good fit for any set of would-be parents (e.g. in geographical location, specific timing of birth, special needs status, whatever). I also suspect that a sudden glut of available children may lead to lower standards and attempts to increase awareness, both of which would tend to stimulate the adoption rate.
I admit that’s armchair conjecture, although I doubt the adoption rate would decrease and there’re only two other ways it could go.
As far as I understand, making abortion illegal doesn’t greatly impact the abortion rate, it just makes it less safe. (I’m willing to be corrected on this by someone who has the facts.) So there’s an unexamined assumption in the premise that outlawing abortion will lead to more pregnancies carried to term.
–Cliffy
Yes, you are correct. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/world/12abortion.html?_r=0
I’ll advise some caution, because the areas of the world with restrictive abortion laws tend to be poorest. Eyeballing this list, the only developed nations I see with restrictive abortion laws — defined as abortion being illegal or only legal to protect the woman’s health — are Ireland and Poland. If the incidence of abortion is influenced by socioeconomic characteristics, then conclusions drawn from behavior under restrictive laws in (say) Gabon might not reflect what would occur in the US.
Looking at the report referred to in the linked NYT article (here), this seems corroborated by the fact that abortion rates remain very high in eastern Europe and eastern Asia despite permissive abortion laws.
Have you considered the fact that a certain proportion are pretty much not what anyone is looking for, and an increase of babies given up for adoption will increase those numbers?
Don’t forget to add the newly motherless children who can be adopted when women who already have a few kids die from botched abortions. Plus all those babies with severe congenital birth defects. They’ll be super easy to adopt out.
90% + of all abortions are performed in the first 2 months, so the vast majority of the kids who would be born would be perfectly normal.
At any rate, just like I don’t like it when my side, pro-choice, makes up bogus arguments in favor of legalized abortion, I’m not buying the idea that all these kids will be adopted out. If you’re pro-life because you think abortion is murder, that’s the end of the argument. Adoption rates don’t matter because we don’t put down kids in foster homes like unclaimed puppies if they are not adopted out.
Maybe it’s super-naive of me, but I’d like to think that a not insignificant percentage of people would be more careful about sleeping only with people who cared about adequate birth control in the first place if not using it would lead to a likelihood of having a baby you don’t want.
Yes, I do think it’s super naive of you.
Not to mention, the same people who are fighting to restrict abortion rights are also pushing those fetal-personhood laws which would outlaw hormonal contraceptives in addition to abortions.