Can You Foster Children Ethically? Yeah, but It's Complicated

Last week we discussed the adoption industry, so it’s time to dive into the foster care system. Nothing but levity in this series.

The modern foster care system was inspired by Dickensian workhouses in England but with an American™ twist. Olivia takes a different approach to examining the child welfare system. Instead of organizing the narrative chronologically, she uses historical events and data to establish a pattern of behavior. 

As early as the 1600s, when America was just developing an economy dependent on chattel slavery, children were used as means of punishment. Black children were regularly taken from enslaved families to be sold. Frequently, this would be done to punish enslaved people, and the ensuing fallout would instill instability in black homes. In the last episode, we discussed how a similar practice was done to Native Americans, particularly during the 1950s, when native children were sent to boarding schools and foster homes en masse. 

Time and time again, white institutions would use their power to remove children for arbitrary reasons and place them in well-to-do white homes. This practice was aided by a series of neoliberal policies passed from the 1970s to the 2000s. Specifically, the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, and the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act worked hand in hand to target and incarcerate people of color. Additionally, as the welfare system gradually eroded, the quality of life of the poor worsened. These phenomena are closely tied to the carceral nature of the child welfare system. 

As of 2020, 64% of children in the foster care system were removed due to neglect. Neglect, legally, comes in four forms: physical, emotional, medical, and educational. Physical neglect includes ignoring safety measures or putting the child in physical harm. However, emotional, medical, and educational neglect are descriptively vague. Emotional neglect includes giving adequate encouragement and being affectionate, things that are subjective to gauge. Medical neglect can include not bringing a child to the doctor (or dentist), not following medical advice, or allowing obesity. This is where the first red flag is raised. The American healthcare system is needlessly Sisyphean; basic treatment and medication costs are exorbitant. Thus, there is an apparent overlap between child neglect and experiencing the American healthcare system while in poverty. Educational neglect can include truancy and non-compliance. Many external reasons can explain truancy. Poor parents often work long hours and are lucky to have reliable transportation, which could make taking their child to school difficult. In brief, the diagnostic criteria for child neglect include many factors that are symptoms of being poor in the US. 

So what does that have to do with racism? Black parents are reported to CPS at least twice as frequently as white parents and are more likely to have children removed from their homes. This fact is manifested in foster care demographic statistics. Although only 12.1% of the US is black and 57.8% is white, 23% of foster children are black, while 43% are white. Furthermore, 51% of children adopted out of foster care are white, while only 17% are black. While Americans lament over years-long waiting lists to adopt healthy, white babies, over 117,000 children in foster care are waiting to be adopted.

While the situation seems and is dire, we discuss the problems and solutions in the episode. To learn more about eliminating surveillance and penalization in the child welfare system, be sure to listen in. As we face a country post-Roe, it’s crucial now (more than ever) that children grow up in loving homes and that families are supported. 

Many thanks to upEND for their work writing Help is NOT on the Way: How Family Policing Perpetuates State Directed Terror, as this episode would not exist without it.