Adoption has been getting a lot of attention in the media lately and the general public hears a lot about “the many” children that are getting adopted. However, we rarely hear any legitimate statistics on international adoption or domestic adoption. Today I am going to share a great article that takes a hard look at the statistics of international and domestic adoptions and the number of orphans worldwide.
The article is titled “How Many Kids Get Adopted?” and it was published by the Chronicle Herald out of Halifax, Nova Scotia and then featured in this week’s edition of the Adoption.com Adoption Week e-magazine. (If you don’t receive the Adoption Week e-magazine and would like to, you can visit Adoptionweek.com and sign up for the great free service of Adoption.com).
The article poses the question, how many children do you think are adopted annually, worldwide?
Then the article goes into lots of numbers, some of which are pretty overwhelming.
The total number of children (under age 18 years) worldwide is approximately 2.2 billion. Out of that 2.2 billion children, 16 million children are estimated to be orphans. That was sixteen million orphaned children. How do you even wrap your brain around that many parent-less children?
Out of those 16 million orphans, 7.7 million, almost half, are in Africa, and sixty percent of those 7.7 million have been orphaned by AIDS. Sort of gives you a real idea of how big of a crisis the AIDS crisis really is, doesn’t it? There are an additional 7.9 million orphans in Asia, and many there have also bee orphaned by AIDS.
The total number of children adopted worldwide each year, out of those 16 million orphans, is a mere 250,000.
About 85% of those 250,000 worldwide adoptions are domestic, meaning parents adopting children in the same country that they live in. That means only 15% of all adoptions are international, which is far from the overwhelming phenomenon international adoption is often made out to be.
An estimated 125,000 of the 250,000 annual worldwide adoptions are completed by United States citizens, with only an estimated 20,000 of those 125,000 adoptions by Americans being international adoptions.
The bottom line is that out of the 16 million orphans worldwide, each year only 1.5% of them get adopted. On the flip side, that means 98.5% of all orphans do not get adopted.
When I read statistics like those, it reconfirms to me why I support adoption, why I believe that adoption is necessary at this point in the world and why we must strive to make adoptions as ethical as possible, so that as many children as possible can find homes and families. These children, all 16 million of them, matter as individuals, and they need and deserve better than to grow up a lone.
It also reaffirms how important it is that us privileged people on this earth (and if you have a computer, or even access to a computer to be reading this, then you are indeed privileged compared to most) join together to fight against poverty, famine, preventable and treatable illnesses, social stigmas and the other tragedies that are causing there to be 16 million orphans in the first place. We need to find ways to help families stay together, so that less orphans are being created.
After all, these statistics are not just numbers. They represent real children.
Transracial Adoption- About the Kids
Good info, thanks!
Amazing. It’s so easy for the numbers to overwhelm us, but thank you for reminding us to think of them as 16 million individual children, and not just a number.
As always, so thought-provoking, Erin.
Erin, excellent post. Indeed, adoption is barely scratching the surface of the number of children who desperately need stable, loving homes.
Wow, eye-opening statistics, Erin.
Truly harrowing…
As you said, we need to act now, united as a decent human race, to bring an end to this preventable suffering. I only wish I knew how to make this happen. . .
~Stefanie
Math problem. 7.7 mil in Africa, and 7.9 mil in Asia. Start with 16 mil, minus 15.6 mil (africa an asia) and you have only 400,000 for all of non africa and non asia. Yet we know that there are 875,000 in Russia alone, plus at least another 300,000 in the US. That is about 800,000 kids too many to fit in the 16 mil. This means that there are no orphaned children in Central or South America, or anywhere in Europe or Canada. What is not being counted? Was the person doing the counting math impaired?
We do the best job of adopting children here in the US, and yet, a great percentage of the kids in foster care will never have the opportunity to be adopted and get out of the system. The odds of escaping the system for a child in any other country must be dismal.
Thank for pointing out that each child is important all by himself. It is easy to get numbed by really large numbers. John