Reregulating the Baby Market: A Call for a Ban on Payment of Birth-Mother Living Expenses

Abstract

About the laudability of a general scheme of domestic adoption, few would disagree. Adoption provides a means of building families, hope for children in need, and a stabilizing influence for a society searching for aid in caring for its most helpless citizens. Still, one need not look far to find that the domestic adoption system in the United States is broken. Evidence pointing toward such a conclusion abounds. About half a million children find themselves in the American foster care system on any given day, many with little chance of being either reunified with their birth families or placed in a permanent adoptive home. Even outside the sphere of state-run care, this country’s domestic adoption scheme fails many of the players involved. Adoptive parents, in particular, often become victims of the flawed scheme of private and agency adoption. And though it may seem at first blush as though