Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

I get regular emails from the Children’s Bureau with a collection of news clips about child welfare across the country. Some are helpful, some random, some totally uninteresting. At the top of the email today is a story out of Florida about the difficulty people have in adopting newborns.  (Full disclosure – I didn’t watch the video.)

FL: Hope and frustration: For families looking to adopt newborns, the journey isn’t easy (Includes video)
Pensacola News Journal – February 15, 2021
The Pentons are one of thousands of U.S. families who have an adoptive child — at least one out of every 25 families with children have an adopted child, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But adoption attorneys and groups say that over the past several years, adoptions — especially of newborns — have been increasingly difficult to facilitate.
https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2021/02/15/why-families-seeking-adoptions-struggling-find-newborns/6705998002/  

They describe lots of anecdotal reasons that might make it harder to adopt a newborn baby. It’s heartbreaking that people who want to be parents and cannot struggle to find children to adopt. While I feel for these families, the world is probably a lot better off if fewer teens become pregnant in an unplanned way. The chart above is one of the incredible good news stories in social services. It shows the teen pregnancy rate from 2007 to 2016. I got it from KIDS COUNT. I can’t get a longer time period from this chart than the ten years you see here, but this is not a new trend – teen pregnancies have been declining since the 80s and the widespread availability of birth control.

The rate of teen pregnancy (24 out of every 1000 girls) is less than half of what it was 10 years before. The article I linked to just goes to show that every silver lining has a cloud.