New Book on Adoption

At ETS in November last year I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Russell Moore who is a colourful character in the SBC and he is never dull or boring. He has recently written a book called Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches, due out from Crossway at the end of May (HT: Justin Taylor).

I've learned that adoption opportunities in the UK and Australia are very different. In Australia there is a ten year waiting list to adopt a child from within the country and a three year waiting list to adopt a child internationally. In my home state of Queensland there was a recent and most tragic case of a family adopting a child from India only to discover that the child had been kidnapped and sold to the adoption agency (or something like that). My wife used to work with a crisis pregnancy help line and she learned that would-be mothers who approached social services to give their child up for adoption were often referred to "clinics" for abortions instead (no wonder there's a freaking 10 year wait!). Probably a further factor in Australia is that the Govt. gives a baby bonus of $5000 to families who have a child, thus making it quite lucrative to have children. While this does help struggling working class families (I have benefitted from it in the past), a pastor friend told me a story of a lady in his church who has a daughter with a heroin addiction and she pays for her habit by having baby after baby. She abandons the babies after getting the bonus and it is the grandmother who then has to raise the children and deal with babies born with a heroin addiction. Very sad. As for the UK, I saw in a documentary two years ago that there are not enough people available to adopt all the children in social care and in many cases not enough foster families to house children in the interim either. Truly sad.