Tag Archives: Intercountry Adoption

Counting adoptions and not counting adoptions: a tale of two countries

Adoptions in Finland since 1987; source: Statistics Finland

Finland’s national agency tracking the country’s health and other data, called Statistics Finland, provides complete, accurate data on all adoptions in Finland. The Nordic country had less than 300 in 2020.

So here we have, again, another country that has mandated the counting of all adoptions–the way public health systems should work in modern countries, when those countries have functional national health systems.

The United States, by comparison, does not have such a system. In fact, it has a fractured national and state and local health public health systems in terms of coordination and funding and in addressing population health issues.

In addition, adoptions outside of intercountry adoption are not tracked in the United States as an explicitly desired outcome by the U.S. adoption system to hide its massive impact on our country, our residents, and even our collective population health.

We are lousy, and the way to fail at every step to be a functional nation is glaringly obvious again through adoption data and a simple country-to-country comparison.

Oh, by the way, Finland barely has any adoptions, and the numbers are actually dropping in recent years. Kudos, Finland, for a job well done!

Finland also has a robust national health system, and they are healthier and live longer than we do in the USA. I could go on, but I’ll stop there. I’m exhausted already.