New Adoption Rule

 Amid the chaos that erupted on Capitol Hill last week, the Trump administration quietly approved a rule that will allow foster care and adoption agencies to deny LGBTQ families the ability to adopt children on faith based grounds. 

By approving the new rule, federal grantees with the Department of Health & Human Services can now deny same-sex and prospective parents the ability to adopt a child based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. 

I had a chance to interview Nicole Witt, an adoption expert and executive director for The Adoption Consultancy, about the impact this will have on the LGBTQ community and those who want to adopt children.

What impact does the rule have on foster children?

When the anti-discrimination rule was put into place under the Obama administration, several faith-based agencies refused to place any children rather than being forced to include LGBTQ families in their placement list. The thinking behind the idea that the rule rollback would help children in foster care is that there would be more agencies willing to place children that are in foster care with permanent families. However, the backlog of placing children out of foster care into permanent families has never been due to a lack of willing agencies, it’s been due to a lack of willing families. Given that LGBTQ families are almost 7 times more likely to want to adopt than heterosexual couples, logic dictates that making it easier for LGBTQ families to adopt from foster care would help more children get placed into families. 

Why should this rule concern every family, regardless of parent orientation?

Research shows that children placed into LGBTQ families do just as well across all measures as children placed into traditional families so keeping children away from a loving LGBTQ family and in foster care is unnecessarily harmful to them. This harm caused to innocent children should be of concern to everyone. Furthermore, setting a precedent of government-supported discrimination by denying access to government-funded services to specific groups is a slippery slope for all citizens.

What should be the qualities that agencies look for in approving families?

The criterion should simply be that a family can provide a safe and loving home to a child.