Of this group. 50% were male, 50% were female, 38% were White, 35% were Black, and 16% were Hispanic. Adoption statistics are difficult to find because reporting is not as complete as it should be. The government spent $2.6 billion dollars to conduct the 1990 Census, but still it under-represented minorities and categorized children as "natural or by adoption" without differentiating, while special laws were implemented to "protect" and separate adoption affected families. In 1995, a "continuous" census (instead of every ten years) was proposed but has not been implemented. Even the government cannot rely on its most often cited broad official "guesstimate" of "5 to 10 million adoptees in the U.S." Private agency or independent adoptions account for more than 80% of adoptions in a state like California, but these are difficult to track, particularly when they cross state and country borders. In addition, no one knows how many U.S. children leave the country to be adopted abroad (Carangelo, 2007).
Because of the problems with record-keeping, even adoptees and their parents cannot "prove" their biological relatedness nor adoptive status, exacerbated by the withholding of documentation, including relinquishment agreements, true birth records, adoption decrees. The hospital record of birth is treated as "confidential" and withheld from the parties named in them. Medical birth records are often legally destroyed long before an adult adoptee knows where to look for them. Concerns over this provided the impetus for what is now an international Open Records Movement and International Soundex Reunion Registry (ISRR). ISRR maintains a secrecy policy not to reveal a total count on the number of its registrants and claims not to know how many are adopted. The Open Records Movement has also produced a cottage industry of searchers who quietly circumvent state laws to find their own families, to access their own records and to help others do the same. Under the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (PL-96-272), a provision called for statewide tracking systems for children in foster care who received care within the previous twelve months, but the Reagan Administration chose to implement a "voluntary" system that has been inconsistent from state to state. In 1986, Congress passed a law mandating a National Data Collection System for foster care and adoption and included a five-year timetable of steps in the process to insure Federal Regulations in place by the end of 1988 and full implementation by October of 1991, though the implementation date was not met. In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Reporting System (AFCARS), requiring states to collect case-specific data on all children in foster care for whom the State child welfare agency has responsibility for placement, care, or supervision. This would include placements by private agencies under contract with the public child welfare agency. As Carangelo (2007) writes,
Until recently, no state legislated mandatory collection of even non-identifying family background and medical information pre-adoption. Adoption disclosure statutes, agency policies and procedures, which differ from state to state, and even from county to county, may permit summarized identifying information to the parties it concerns, usually for a fee and, in highly populated areas, after a long wait. Agency conditions for identifying disclosure include unsolicited mutual consents or confidentiality waivers of parties who may be deceased or out of state and not know of law changes, "confidential intermediaries" (who may prevent contact indefinitely), psychological counseling, court and agency discretion, non-refundable registry fees, intermediary and search fees -- often pocketed without provision of services.
Clearly, statistics on adoption in the country remain unreliable.
The nature of the adopters has been analyzed, based on the data that has been compiled. A survey in 1988 showed that some 2,000,000 women between the ages of 14 and 44 who had ever sought to adopt a child, and of these 1.3-million did not adopt, 620,000 had adopted one or more children, and 204,000 were currently seeking to adopt.
In 1995, 232,000 married women had taken steps toward adopting; 11-25% of couples with infertility problems had taken steps toward adopting in 1996; 12-25% of adoptions, depending on state law, were by single persons, a figure that would include single lesbian and gay adopters with partners (Carangelo, 2007).
According to Flango and Flango (1994), there were some 120,000 adoptions of children each year in the 1990a, a number that remained fairly constant and that is still relatively proportionate to population size in the U.S.
A by comparison, in 1986 http://images.adoption.com/adlog.php?bannerid=5337&clientid=361&zoneid=530&source=&block=0&capping=0&cb=b8ffa8007a7a314c1ae4f1ee2dfcd4b3
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