Source: Bet On It
by Elizabeth Kirk & Ryan Hanlon
“Bryan Caplan is right about one big thing: the collapse of intercountry adoption is tragic, given that there remain hundreds of thousands of children in need of families – and there are plenty of families open to adopting them. The demographics of who is being placed for intercountry adoption have changed in recent years (trending older, most have medically complex special needs) as infants are no longer available, but as Caplan’s post made clear, the big change has been the 95+% decline in the overall number of adoptions. That is not a rounding error — it is a policy failure that has left children waiting and families in limbo. … He proposes we ‘drastically curtail or abolish the welfare state’ so that more women would place infants for adoption. Against the backdrop of our research, it’s not clear that this would have such an effect.” (10/27/25)