Creed isn’t that bad! Brady is better than Manning!
Sorry, after a week of “pure-unadulterated-information”, I was dying to get some opinion in here. Speaking of opinion, how would you like to hear ours?
What I hope for this post is to offer you a little analysis from a firm on the inside of the adoption world. We see the fruit of these stats and have developed our worldview on the issue of adoption because of it.
The facts we posted were as follows:
- Adopted Children make up about 2.6% of children in the households of Arkansas and 2.5% of the households of the USA (2000)
- The adoption percentage of “ever-married” women age 18-44 fluctuated between 1.3 and 2.2 from 1973-2002
- At least half of women in the United States will experience an unplanned pregnancy by age 45
- About 21% of all pregnancies end in abortion
- The Children’s Bureau estimates that there are 400,540 children in the foster care system in the United States (2011)
- 3,732 Children were in foster care in Arkansas on September 30, 2011
Here are a few things we think you should take away from the above:
- Adoption has been and remains to be very rare. The ever-married stat is significant because it shows (imperfectly) the rate of adoption among married women outside of step-parent adoption, which is very common. That rate being between 1.3 and 2.2%.
- Placement for adoption is rarer still, even though half of American women will experience an unplanned pregnancy by age 45.
- There is a great need for families to step up to the foster-to-adopt plate. At any given time, close to half a million children are in the foster care system in our country. That is comparable to the population of Northwest Arkansas.
- 1 out of every 5 pregnancies ends in abortion. Beyond the moral crime of taking a life, abortion attacks the psyche of the women involved. A study conducted by the British Journal of Psychiatry found that women who had an abortion were 81% more likely to suffer mental health problems. Another study conducted by the Eliot Institute found that women who had an abortion were 3.9 times more likely to abuse alcohol or drugs. Simply, women who face unplanned pregnancy have two options that are better than abortion in every way.
Arkansas adopts slightly more than the national average. It’s hard to say why but for speculation’s sake, it might be the family values that drive our culture and/or the pro-adoption laws of our state.
Contact us for more information about the adoption process in Arkansas.