Considering Adoption or Foster Care?
November is National Adoption and Foster Care Awareness month, and we want to recognize the amazing people and organizations who help make adoptions and foster care placements possible. Few things in this world are more admirable and uplifting than the families who open their hearts and homes to provide a stable life for a child in desperate need of one, and the organizations that facilitate those placements.
The Family Foundation’s Director of Government Relations, Dr. Todd Gathje, shares about making the decision for he and his wife to become foster care and adoptive parents in his new blog: “The Call of a Lifetime”.
Among the child-placing agencies in Virginia that provide homes for these children are those that maintain deeply held moral or religious convictions regarding the institution of marriage, the family unit, and human sexuality. These organizations play a critical role in finding stable, loving homes for so many children in need. Virginia’s foster care and adoption system simply could not handle the demand without the work of these private non-profit ministries.
In 2012, The Family Foundation helped successfully push for legislation that provides strong, explicit conscience protections for adoption and foster care agencies to ensure they cannot be forced to violate their religious or moral convictions, nor be punished for following them when placing a child in care – for example, where a ministry prefers homes with a married mom and dad. These conscience protections are extremely important for these agencies in order to retain prospective adoptive parents who wish to partner with foster care and adoption agencies that share their beliefs and values.
Despite the dedication and great work of these agencies, there’s a major effort in Virginia and around the country to deny them the ability to partner with the state to provide loving homes to foster children. Earlier this year, The Family Foundation, along with the Virginia Catholic Conference and several adoption agencies, fended off legislation brought by Delegate Mark Levine (D-Alexandria) that would have repealed statutory conscience protections for faith-based adoption and foster care agencies. And as recently as November 4, the U.S. Supreme Court – which now includes Justice Amy Coney Barrett, an adoptive parent herself – heard oral arguments in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a case challenging the city’s policy that would force child-placement organizations to violate their deeply held beliefs and place children with same-sex couples.
According to the Department of Social Services, there are nearly 5,400 children in Virginia's foster care system, more than 700 of whom are ready for adoption right now! Since so many of the child-placements in Virginia are facilitated by faith-based agencies, forcing them to abandon their core beliefs central to their mission would significantly reduce the number of loving homes needed for hundreds of children.
Now more than ever, Virginia needs families and faith-based organizations who wish to provide children hope in a world where hope can sometimes feel unattainable.
Be sure to THANK those you know who are foster or adoptive parents, and prayerfully consider becoming one for a child in need or supporting the agencies who are doing this incredible work.
