Adoption, not abortion.

This idea has become a conservative slogan used by pro-life protesters, at crisis pregnancy centers, and by elected officials who push the notion that placing a child for adoption solves the problems faced by an unwanted pregnancy.

“Adoption, not abortion. With Roe overturned, we should find ways to make the adoption process in our country easier and safer,” tweeted former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo, two days after Roe was overturned.

Even during oral arguments of the Dobbs decision Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that safe haven laws, laws that allow a parent to relinquish custody of a child without facing criminal prosecution, may ease the burden of forced parenthood, asking “Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?”

There isn’t much evidence to support the idea that pregnant people want to place the child for adoption, even if the pregnancy is unwanted.

“American women are not interested in giving their children away if they don’t have to, and we’ve seen over and over again, women who are able to get the abortions that they want report virtually no interest in adoption,” said Gretchen Sisson, PhD, researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, part of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California San Francisco.

There are several types of adoption in the U.S., including international adoption, domestic adoption and foster care adoption, and the Madonnas and Angelina Jolies of the world are far fewer than you might think. According to a 2023 Deseret News article, there were less than 3,000 international adoptions by American parents in each of the last three years.

Most American adoptions happen on American soil, but the numbers are shifting. The National Council for Adoption (NCFA) aggregates data to provide information on the number of private adoptions in the U.S., which is not reported by the government, in their Adoption by the Numbers report. The latest numbers available are reflective of adoptions that occurred in 2019 and 2020, before Roe fell. In 2019, an estimated 115,353 children were adopted in the U.S., dropping to 95,306 in 2020.

According to the report, NCFA believes that the pandemic was a potential contributor to the 17% decrease, though they also state that the effects may vary for different types of adoption. For example, some public child welfare adoptions may have been delayed in 2020 due to the pandemic, though this probably isn’t the case for private domestic adoptions. The reality is that there just aren’t enough babies to go around.

“They [people considering adoption] need to be prepared for longer wait times, and increasing costs, because the reality is that there are far more hopeful adoptive parents than there are infants being placed for adoption each year,” said NCFA’s acting CEO and president Ryan Hanlon in a press release. “As the report shows, that is a trend we’ve seen continue over the last several years and accelerate during the pandemic.”

Sisson says that one of the biggest misconceptions about private domestic adoption is that there are tons of babies and children awaiting adopted families. In reality, the number of prospective parents far outweighs the number of children available.

“The numbers are not especially well tracked, but there’s estimates that are up to 45 waiting families for every infant relinquished for domestic private adoption. So this is a system where we have really, really, really high demand for children and very, very comparably low supply of babies,” said Sisson.

In a perspective piece published by Washington Post, Sisson points out the supply and demand of adoption, with a demand from those in power for infants and the supply coming from those with less – has a dark history dating back to slavery and forced removal of Indigenous children.

Even before the fall of Roe, people weren’t necessarily considering adoption. A 2017 study showed that of parents who were denied an abortion, 91% chose parenting over any other option.

“And it’s not that they don’t know about it, knowledge of adoption is high, they know that adoption exists, but they just are not interested in doing that,” said Sisson.

In 2015, researchers at Guttmacher Institute interviewed 29 abortion patients in New Mexico and Michigan on where abortion weighed into their pregnancy decisions, concluding that the patients did not view adoption as an equal alternative to abortion.

“For them, adoption was a decision that represented taking on, and then abdicating, the role of parent. This made adoption a particularly unsuitable choice for their pregnancy,” says the study.