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Here’s a statistic for you today …
An orphan is created in the world by an AIDS death every 14 seconds; that’s more than 4 per minute, 240 per hour, 5,760 per day, and these figures only count AIDS orphans. There are hundreds of thousands orphaned every year by malaria and other diseases, starvation, war, and any number of other causes of death.
This stat comes from an article calling Christians to adoption as part of some call to duty, not an idea I’m particularly comfortable with, but one that nonetheless illustrates the monstrous gap between the number of children in the world for whom parents are even less than a dream and families who would add a child to their family.
There is nowhere on our planet that 5,670 families a day, every day, take the first committed and determined step toward the adoption of a child. Even at the height of adoptions from China in 2005 there were only a total of 7906 children adopted by US couples in the entire year.
In fact, adding up the children adopted in ‘05 from top birth countries — China, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Russia — I get 16,768 kids finding families … not quite three days-worth of new AIDS orphans alone.
So, where does the idea come from that a “market” in adopted children comes from some plethora of hopeful adoptive parents clamoring for children?
These days, the Internet may have something to do with the perpetuation of the myth that there are more families wanting children than there are children without parents on the planet. Families either contemplating or in the process of adoption set up blogs by the hundreds as vehicles for keeping friends and relations up to date on the steps in their adoption journeys, and often the sheer numbers of those awaiting referral or travel dates give the impression that legions of families are hoping for one or two of a dwindling number of available children.
Disgruntled adult adoptees pitch their take as widely as possible, and although the “It’s better to be dead than adopted!” message comes across as a malcontent minority view, the fact that adoptive parents are the prime target of frantic finger-wagging may tend to have some thinking that there must be a lot of them out there.
Governments play games with numbers, as well, often falsely claiming that children in their countries are cared for when they are most certainly not, apparently more than willing to sacrifice kids on the alter of image and propaganda, or using them as political leverage. Of course, these being considered issues of sovereignty and all, other countries and the useless organization that should be caring and doing, don’t and don’t, leaving the leverage in the lurch.
