Catholic Charities still has an adoptions program even though leaving foster care eliminated a consistent source of placements. Recent trends have sharpened our focus within the adoptions mission.
For instance, when Illinois created the Illinois Adoption Registry in 2010 to allow limited access to medical information, we implemented best practice protocols with birth parents, adoptive parents and the adopted child (or adult) firmly in mind.
Our Adoption Search services help adoptees and birth parents exchange medical information and facilitate direct communications — if all parties agree. Our professionals work with other agencies during interstate and international adoptions and reflect a personal concern for everyone in the process.
As qualifying couples consider adoption, Catholic Charities experts meet with the placing and adopting parents before birth, and define expectations with them after the child’s birth, placement and adoption.
Experience indicates that children born and placed within such a system develop well and without many of the later-in-life uncertainties that otherwise occur.
To state the obvious, before children can come to know Jesus, they must first be born. Before they can be adopted, they must first be born. Before a family can provide a permanent home of love and caring, a child must first be born.
Abortion prevents all of those.
Thus, adoptions provide the viable — literally — alternative to abortion. To those critics of the Church’s teaching on abortion, we say: give adoption a chance.
For those who would choose to end a life to avoid raising an unwanted child, we say: give adoption a chance. That child is wanted.
We provide guidance to those who agree that adoption is their best option, whether as birth parents or adopting parents. We also provide guidance to expectant mothers, whether or not accompanied by expectant fathers, who are struggling with the decisions facing them: should I choose life over abortion for my child; should I parent; should I choose adoption for my unborn child?
The number of families adopting children in the United States has declined as has the number of children available for placement in this country. In 2015–16, for example, the Archdiocese of Chicago completed one adoption. For 2013–15, the Rockford Diocese completed two. In essence, fewer adoptions are occurring as society more easily accepts abortion, contraception and single parenthood.
Catholic Charities focuses on the best interests of the child, giving the added depth of faith to the experience, above and beyond compliance with legal requirements.
Adoptions provide the unique opportunity to be morally both pro-life and pro-choice. By choosing life for the developing or recently born child, all involved are pro-life. Biological parents can still choose to not parent while knowing no one was killed in the process and guilt will not rack them in the future. As adoptive parents choose to welcome a new life into their homes, everyone helps another child receive the Lord’s invitation to come to Him.