What a blessing that would be.

With the Supreme Court seemingly poised to overturn Roe v. Wade this year, adoption agencies around the country are now strategizing their next steps — including securing additional funding and hiring staff — should the reversal lead to higher demand for adoption services. At the same time, some experts are warning that the highly unregulated industry also should guard against a rise in “coercive adoptions” and improper vetting of adoption workers.

 

In the decades since Roe, the percentage of children who have been put up for adoption has declined. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about nine percent of children born to never-married women under 45 were put up for adoption before abortion was legalized in 1973. That number dropped to 2 percent in the 1980s and fell even further — to 1 percent — in 2002, the last year for which data is available.

 

Private domestic adoptions are estimated to be about 0.5 percent of the annual number of births, or about 18,300 to 20,000 adoptions per year, according to a study by Gretchen Sisson, who used data from the National Council for Adoption, CDC and Guttmacher Institute to analyze patterns from 2002 to 2014. The share of adoptions could jump up significantly in a post-Roe world, perhaps even reaching pre-Roe levels, said Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California San Francisco whose research focus includes pregnancy decision-making.

 

Sisson said such a jump, a 20-fold increase from the current rate, would be “astronomical.”