Critics of the pro-life movement often point to the foster care system and claim that we should not fight abortion when the foster care system is already full of children in need of parents. Here’s an example of that attack from Feminist News (a Facebook post with about 20,000 positive reactions): “I’ve never seen long lines of pro-lifers waiting to be foster parents,” suggesting that it is hypocritical for someone who isn’t a foster parent to oppose abortion (and suggesting that pro-lifers are not disproportionately foster parents – a false claim, as we will show).   

Accusing pro-lifers of not doing enough for children in foster care is meant to stump and silence those who speak out against abortion. But the accusation is built on a misunderstanding of what foster care is. It’s also hypocritical.  

The reality is that: 

• The primary goal of foster care is not adoption; it is family re-unification. 

• Not all children in foster care are doomed to lives of misery. 

• Not all children in foster care can be adopted. 

• Pro-lifers are more likely to foster and adopt than other Americans. 

The Purpose of Foster Care 

Foster care exists to provide children with a safe environment while their families work toward stability. The central goal of foster care is re-unification of children with their natural parents.  

Foster care is meant to be a temporary intervention to protect children until their parents are stable enough to parent well. The ideal outcome of foster care is to give broken families time to heal, not to place children with adoptive parents. 

Foster care is meant to be a temporary intervention to protect children until their parents are stable enough to parent well. The ideal outcome of foster care is to give broken families time to heal, not to place children with adoptive parents.

Families in crisis need support and accountability so that children can return home safely. When this occurs, foster care has done its job. 

When Foster Care Can Lead to Adoption 

Sometimes, a foster child cannot be reunified with his or her natural parents. In this case, the foster care system will seek to find a permanent adoptive family to love and care for the child. The Dave Thomas Foundation explains:  

Children are placed in foster care after enduring abuse, neglect, parental drug use or other issues, and many have experienced significant trauma, grief and loss in their lives. 

The priority of the foster care system is to keep families together. But when a judge has ruled that it is unsafe for a child to return to their family of origin, they need someone to step forward to adopt them. 

For a variety of reasons, natural parents may be unable or unwilling to provide the security their children need and deserve. Only in these cases does foster care aim to end in adoption rather than in re-unification with the natural parents. Some sources estimate that about one in four children in foster care are eligible for adoption. For these children, adoption provides permanency and stability.  

When we talk about these situations, it is important to use language that reflects the dignity of the child. Children are not “put up” for adoption like a puppy is “put up” for sale. This is demeaning language that we need to be careful to avoid. Instead, children are placed with adoptive families.  

Our focus should always be on the rights of the child. Adoptive families exist to meet a need in the child’s life – not the other way around. When speaking about foster care or adoption, our language should be child-centered and conscious of the suffering that leads to the need for foster care or adoption in a child’s life. Fostering or adopting a child is a beautiful act of love. At the same time, fostering and adoption only occur when a rupture has happened in the child’s family of origin, rendering his or her natural parents unable or unwilling to adequately care for their child.   

Who Steps In to Adopt and Foster 

When it comes to adoption and foster care, practicing Christians have consistently shown up for the children most in need.  

Research from Barna found that “US Christians were engaging in foster care and adoption at higher levels than the general population… 5% of surveyed Christians had adopted, double rate of the general population (2%).” The study found that Christians were three to five times (depending on denomination) to adopt as the average adult, and that Christians were more likely to have been foster parents. Barna found that 77% of practicing Christians hold that people of faith “have a moral responsibility to adopt.” 

Research by the Bipartisan Policy Center and Harris Poll found that 65% of foster parents attend church weekly, compared to only 40% of the general population. And regular church attendance is strongly correlated with pro-life identification. According to findings from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Lifeway Research, “American Christians who attend church weekly are more than twice as likely to be generally pro-life (53% vs. 19%).” 

Far from ignoring the needs of foster children, Christian and pro-life Americans have long led the way and set the example on adoption and foster care for the rest of the nation. These facts upend the notion that pro-lifers ignore the children in foster care.  

The real hypocrisy in this debate comes from the pro-abortion community, which rallies for the killing of children in the womb while at the same time expressing concern for children in foster care. 

Rejecting the False Choice 

When abortion advocates point to an overwhelmed foster care system as a reason to keep abortion legal, they reveal a deeply troubling belief: that it would be better for a child to be killed before birth than to face the challenges of life, which may include time in foster care. This is morally corrupt. The suggestion is that a person who may suffer is better off dead. But better for whom? Not the child. 

The truth is that many children in foster care reunify with their families. Others are placed with loving adoptive families, and many grow up to lead meaningful, fulfilling lives. And no matter the problem society seeks to solve, killing an innocent child is never, ever the solution. 

There are religious and nonprofit groups playing a leading role to bring wholeness to the lives of children in foster care without conflating the issue with abortion. The Dave Thomas Foundation is dedicated to helping find adoptive families for older children in foster care so that they do not “age out” of the system without a family to call their own, and says it has helped more than 15,000 children find “forever” homes.  

Christian organizations often step in to help ensure children receive care. One Christian nonprofit in Arkansas, “The Call,” fulfills nearly half of the state’s foster care needs. According to one source, The CALL “recruits potential foster parents, trains them, guides them through the state’s certification process and provides ongoing assistance once the kids begin arriving… and ‘CALL families’ have also adopted hundreds of children in the DCFS system.” And many may be familiar with the incredible story of Possum Trot, a small, rural community in East Texas that banded together to adopt dozens of children from foster care. 

Pro-lifers reject the notion that a child’s worth is determined by their circumstances. We affirm that children matter inside the womb and outside of it, and we act on those convictions.