November is National Adoption Month!
*Of the more than one million pregnant teens each year, 500,000 will choose to parent their babies, 450,000 will abort and fewer than 100,000 will place their babies for adoption. (U.S. Census Bureau)
* There are 510,000 children in the U.S. foster care system; 129,000 of these children are available for adoption.
*More children become available for adoption each year than are adopted. In 2006, 79,000 children had parental rights terminated by the courts, yet only 51,000 were adopted
*Each year, one in five children (26,517 in 2006) who are available for adoption turn 18 and leave the foster care system without a family.
*Nearly 40 percent of American adults, or 81.5 million people, have considered adopting a child, according to the National Adoption Attitudes Survey. If just one in 500 of these adults adopted, every waiting child in foster care would have a permanent family.
Statistical source: Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System; Department of Health & Human Services (January 2008) via Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, unless otherwise stipulated.
1/3 of my siblings have joined our family through adoption.
Would you have guessed?
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It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
~Johann Schiller
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
~Erma Bombeck
What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
~George Eliot
