The upcoming 2020 Census will ask a question about some adoptees, who are younger and in a household with parents/guardians, and not count those who are older and are heads of households.
The national debate over President Donald Trump’s failed efforts to include a citizenship status question in the upcoming 2020 Census has overshadowed all other discussions of issues with the decennial headcount required by the U.S. Constitution.
Amid this debate, few are discussing how the U.S. federal government will again fail to record with accuracy how many adopted persons, young and old, reside in the United States.
The U.S. Census Bureau will repeat a question about the adoption status of adoptee family members in its 2020 headcount [1]. This limited counting of some younger U.S. adoptees that started in the 2000 and 2010 census counts [2] will focus on only family members in households, not persons who are older and are themselves heads of households.
This matters because any group that is not counted will not count in policymaking at the state and national levels. As the adage goes, if you are not counted, you do not count.
Adoption history researchers and demographers have estimated the number of adoptees in the United States to be 5 million or more, but without certainty [3]. That’s because adoption in the United States has no state or federal requirements to count the number infants who are relinquished domestically from one parent to other guardians or parents.
Starting in 2000, the census began asking questions in its survey of American households if children in the household were biological, stepchildren, or adopted [4]. In 2010, the bureau recorded more than 1.5 million adopted children under 18 years of age living with an adopted parent. All told, the 2010 census found the total adoptee population still living at home to be more than 2.1 million persons—more than 500,000 of those were adoptees 18 and older [5].
The 2010 tally did not count the millions of much older adult adoptees who no longer live with their adoptive parents. The question by its design missed the large number of post–World War II born adoptees who are still living. The best guess we have of domestic adoptees born between 1944 and 1975 is 2.7 million [6]. These three decades were boom years of adoption, when it was promoted as the preferred option for single women to avoid the shame and stain of single motherhood and illegitimacy.
The failure to count all adoptees represents one of the least recognized shortcomings of U.S. state and U.S. national public health and vital records systems.
In 1975, the U.S. federal government stopped collecting adoption statistics, which were then only voluntary [7]. The gap in how demographers have counted U.S. adoptees prevents anyone from knowing adoptees’ true numbers, nationally or by state.
This also hides how many adopted persons have been impacted by U.S. state adoption secrecy laws that deny adult adoptees equal rights and unfettered access to their birth records in most U.S. states, like all non-adopted persons.
Not counting adoptees also prevents health researchers from understanding long-term chronic health issues unique to adoptees that have been studied with rigor in countries like Denmark [8].
Today, with the exception with data on international adoptees brought to United States and tracked because of Hague Treaty requirements, U.S. state and federal vital records systems still do not count the number of adoptees [9].
The U.S. Department of Health does track young persons adopted through the foster care system — young persons who legally have access to their original records unlike domestic adopted infants.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. national vital records agency, still ignores adoptees in its research or tracking system [10], and it has not advocated to change how the country registers all live births that may include subsequent adoptions to those records. The CDC remains oddly silent on U.S. adoptee statistics and U.S. adoptee population health in general.
State vital records systems in the United States also have failed. State agencies have been the most involved in promoting adoption records secrecy from the 1940s on, by creating the dual system that creates original birth records and subsequent legally accepted identity and post-adoption birth documents given to adoptees and their guardians that are not an adoptee’s true and original vital records [11]. States do not force themselves to publicly report on adoption numbers.
These collective systems failures are linked to larger policy efforts and adoption privacy laws in most U.S. states that still hide the history of the U.S. adoption system that thrived for decades, separating millions of American family members by denying adoptees access to their original vital records and knowledge of their biological kin [12].
Sadly, many of the now-aging U.S. adoptees may die without knowing their biological kin. The United States may never really know how many adoptees there are because the methods that should have been used to track and tally adopted Americans will have failed to count them again in the best system available to do that—the national census.
[Author note: A shorter and slightly different version of my essay, without citations, appears in the Aug. 17, 2019, edition of the Register-Guard newspaper: “Guest view: A hidden class of American.”
References:
1. U.S. Census Bureau. Questions planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey. March 2018. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/operations/planned-questions-2020-acs.pdf. Accessed July 28, 2019.
2. Kreider RM, Lofquist DA. Adopted children and stepchildren: 2010, population characteristics. U.S. Census Bureau. April 2014. https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-572.pdf. Accessed July 28, 2019.
3. Adoption History Project. Adoption Statistics. 2012. http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm. Accessed July 28, 2019.
4. U.S. Census Bureau. Adopted children and stepchildren: 2000. October 2003. https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/Census2000AC.pdf. Accessed July 28, 2019.
5. Kreider RM, Lofquist DA. Adopted children and stepchildren: 2010, population characteristics. U.S. Census Bureau. April 2014. https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-572.pdf. Accessed July 28, 2019.
6. Maza PL. Adoption trends: 1944–1975. Child Welfare Research Notes, no. 9, U.S. Children’s Bureau, August 1984. Child Welfare League of America. https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/MazaAT.htm. Accessed July 28, 2019.
7. Adoption History Project. Adoption Statistics. 2012. http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm. Accessed July 28, 2019.
8. Petersen L, Sørensen TIA, Mortensen EL, Andersen PK. Excess mortality rate during adulthood among Danish adoptees. PLOS ONE 5(12): e14365. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0014365. Accessed July 28, 2019.
9. U.S. Department of State. Adoption statistics. 2019. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/Intercountry-Adoption/adopt_ref/adoption-statistics.html/. Accessed July 28, 2019.
10. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Vital Statistics System. 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/births.htm. Accessed July 28, 2019.
11. Carp EW. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1998.
12. Owens R. You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey through the American Adoption Experience. Portland, OR: BFD Press; 2018.
(Published Aug. 17, 2019)