I'm adopted. And so, at one point in our lives, my wife and I decided to "pay it forward" and adopt a child. We are Christians so we went to a child services agency operated by our denomination, thinking that they would be interested in streamlining the process in order to avoid at least some abortions. Boy, were we wrong.
They charged a service fee, $7,500, up front. That was just their fee. All that I could see that this covered was the social worker who conducted exactly three interviews with us, and a home study, a total of perhaps four or five hours plus her time to write it up. Now this is a denominational agency which receives a monthly budget allocation from the churches in the denomination for its operational expenses. In addition to their service fee, we would have to pay the attorney fees and court costs, and a partial reimbursement for pre-natal care and medical expenses for the delivery. It came to somewhere around $25,000. They offered no financial assistance, though they did have a bank from which the balance could be borrowed if we qualified.
When I ventured to suggest that they might be able to find a lot more families willing to adopt, and thus, help to lower the abortion numbers, if they used some of their denominational contribution to help lower the cost, so it would be affordable to more than just people who could either pay the amount or take on $25,000 in debt, I just got frowns and dirty looks. Looking at their annual report to the denomination, they made money on adoptions, which went to cover costs of other services they provided, like their residential care center and foster care program. So they weren't really as interested in lowering abortion numbers as it might seem.
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