Adoptive mother shares common misconceptions about fostering and adoption

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Adoptive mother shares how people can combat the misconceptions about adoption

Live Action News correspondent Christina Bennett discusses National Adoption Month and efforts to support mothers choosing to adopt with Fox News Digital.

November is National Adoption Month and multiple organizations are hoping to combat negative narratives or misconceptions surrounding the process.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, there has been a greater focus on adoption as states enacted further restrictions against abortion. So far, however, there has been no clear indication of increased adoption rates. 

One adoptive mother suggested it could be from lingering assumptions on the adoption process.

"I have found in my experience that some of the biggest hindrances to people adopting is just the mindset, that they have the wrong ideas that they have about adoption," Live Action News correspondent Christina Bennett told Fox News Digital.

Pro-life advocates are attempting to combat negative mindsets surrounding adoption. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo)

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During the original Supreme Court oral arguments of the case in 2021, Justice Amy Coney Barrett highlighted safe haven laws that allow women to relinquish parental rights as opposed to taking part in "forced motherhood." At the time, Democratic strategist Elizabeth Spiers blasted this suggestion, calling adoption "infinitely" more difficult and potentially traumatic than abortion.

"She may not realize it, but what she is suggesting is that women don’t need access to abortion because they can simply go do a thing that is infinitely more difficult, expensive, dangerous and potentially traumatic than terminating a pregnancy during its early stages," Spiers wrote for the New York Times.

Kathryn Barnhill, an adoptee and pregnancy counselor at Lifeline Children's Services, pushed back against the claim that adoption should be considered "traumatic."

"People don't understand. Adoption is not giving your child away. It's literally looking at your circumstances and loving your child so much that you're willing to place them, the chance for them to have to let go and carry them in your heart, but not your hands," Barnhill told Fox News Digital.

"You can’t change your mind on abortion," she added.

Tracie Shellhouse, vice president of Ministry Services for Heartbeat International, also spoke with Fox News Digital and criticized assertions that abortion could be more compassionate for children.

"Promoting abortion over adoption to lessen the number of children in foster care to me doesn't seem like a sensible argument. What we are saying is it would be better for them to not be alive than to be in foster care. And that doesn't seem simple to me," Shellhouse said.

Shellhouse added that there need to be efforts to better communicate with mothers on the process, which can be lengthy and expensive for some.

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Bennett suggested that one of the best efforts to push back against concerns is to promote positive adoption stories to better demystify concerns.

"I really think the best way to combat those narratives is just to allow people to hear stories like what we're talking about right now, allowing people to see faces, hear voices, hear stories of adoptive parents, because that normalizes things and that demystifies things and that helps people to see, okay, I can do it," Bennett said.

She added, "One of the phrases that I held on to which I got from the adoptive community at large is love does hard things. And so, it's not the easiest thing to just have a doorbell ring and then there's the child at the door, and it's like, ‘okay, this is my child now.’ But love does hard things. You work through those things."

Barnhill remarked that women are more often surprised with the support and peace they feel in the adoption process. 

"One of the things I hear over and over again with the women I work with is how surprised they are and how loved and accepted [they are]. They're just so surprised at just that peace that comes with it. And they know they're doing a great thing," Barnhill said.

There are so far no clear statistics on adoption rates following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022. (ER Productions Limited via Getty Images)

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The National Council for Adoption found that 2021 marked the fewest number of public sector adoptions since 2015. As of now, there are no conclusive statistics regarding adoption rates post-Roe.

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