Bethany Announces End to International Adoptions

By amazon Wednesday, January 29, 2020 Comment Edit

Agency VP: The future of child welfare is local.

The largest Christian adoption agency in the United States announced that after 15,000 international adoptions over its 37-year history, it will no longer be bringing children into the US and will instead focus on supporting children in their home countries.

Bethany Children’s Services shared in a blog post last week that its international adoption accreditation will expire in 2021. After that, it will no longer accept new applications.

“Our decision to phase out international adoption is not a criticism of the program, but a reflection of our desire to serve children in their own communities,” wrote Kristi Gleason, the vice president for global services at Bethany. “The future of adoption is working with local governments, churches, and social services professionals around the world to recruit and support local families for children and to develop and improve effective, safe in-country child welfare systems. Through these efforts, we served more children around the world in 2019 than we previously served in a single year.”

Bethany, like fellow agencies, has seen the orphan care landscape shift and evolve over the years, particularly in the past two decades. International adoptions to the US dropped from nearly 30,000 children in 2004 to just over 4,000 in 2018, after years of historic lows.

The decline is not due to lack of interest from American families—in fact, funding to orphan care ministries has been on the rise. Instead, places like Russia, Guatemala, and Ethiopia have eliminated international adoption, and others are following suit with tighter restrictions and regulations around the practice.

Another factor is that other countries are growing their capacity to care for children in ...