Along with state and national struggles to determine the future of the abortion industry in America has come additional scrutiny of adoption policy and the state foster care systems, which support and provide security for vulnerable children in and outside of the womb.
Do these systems work well? Is adoption a viable answer for women who would otherwise have sought abortions? Is the foster care system prepared to support vulnerable women who chose life for their children only to struggle significantly in parenting?
These questions and the mainstream discussion around child welfare fail to consider what is perhaps the most important question of all: Should the foster care system exist at all? From my perspective of leadership of America’s largest evangelical adoption ministry, I don’t believe that foster care is the correct answer.
Long before the responsibility to care for orphaned and vulnerable children was assumed by the government, God gave the mission to care for the vulnerable in our world to the Church. What’s more, American Christians possess the resources to end the need for the foster care system. But before we can reimagine child welfare, we need to rethink our approach.
In the first century, Christians cared for orphaned children, the sick, and the outcast. They “adopted” babies left to die by their parents. Long before governments bothered themselves with caring for vulnerable people, it was Christians who established hospitals and homes for orphaned and poor children.
Like everywhere, the church in America was given this same mission to steward, but somewhere along the way, we fumbled it, and the state stepped in. The problem is that the government is not designed or equipped to meet the needs of vulnerable children and families.
Now we, and every other citizen who hopes to help build a truly post-Roe America, must look at the child welfare system with a new perspective of radical humility and commitment.
From the outside, it’s easy to see the problems in the system. We may even feel like we could come in and easily solve the problems we perceive. But, if we truly want to help foster children — if we truly want to reform the child welfare system — we must be willing to come to the table without an agenda, asking only, “How can I help?”
That said, I would like to offer a couple of thoughts about where we can begin to advocate for changes in the foster care system that will have the most impact.
I want to start with the needs of children living in foster care right now. There are enough churches in America that Christians could provide a loving home for every single one of the 440,000 children in foster care. By raising up one or two foster homes per congregation, we could eliminate the need for a government-run foster care system. State Child Welfare agencies would be freed once again to work at providing the necessary structures to monitor child safety.
This is far easier said than done. American Christians — and Americans as a whole — overwhelmingly tend to default to providing tangible assets as a way to support foster children or orphans. It is much easier to organize drives to provide children in foster care with backpacks or back-to-school supplies than to give them a stable, loving home.
True reform will require a dramatic, church- and culture-wide paradigm shift to prompt hundreds of thousands of families to foster children, but I think that paradigm shift is possible, and morally essential.
In order to build a truly pro-life nation, we must radically embrace our obligation to support vulnerable children and families. We must start with back-to-school drives, then continue to legislation and policy reform. However, we must all do something tangible to ultimately provide a home, family, and security to the vulnerable children in our nation. When we take these steps, we begin to disrupt the current child welfare system for the good.
After all, “ending foster care” is just another way of saying we have finally built communities that truly, thoroughly, and lovingly support those who need help. As truly pro-life Americans, this is our task — we must be more present for vulnerable children outside of the womb as we have been for those inside of the womb.
This brings me to the next universal need of child welfare: Support for the families whose children enter foster care. If we truly want to end foster care in America, we need to think past the current generation of foster children.
Strong families are good for everyone. In strong families, parents are independent and competent; children are happier; communities thrive; and the desperate, tragic unhappiness of separating child from parent is never inflicted.
As a Christian father, I long for a day when every family knows the joy, love, and harmony God intends for them. However, we live in an imperfect world, and not all families know such happiness. Many families are tragically broken, in need of community support that simply doesn’t exist for them right now.
That’s why so much of our work at Lifeline focuses specifically on strengthening families who are currently suffering a crisis and whose children may have entered foster care. A family in crisis can become a strong family — but they need help to get there. We’ve mobilized churches to coach over 1,000 parents for nearly 7,000 hours because we know that foster and adoptive care is no replacement for a well-supported, stable, intact and reunified family.
What we’ve seen as a result of churches engaging parents whose families have been separated in foster care is nothing short of miraculous. Men and women are coming to understand that they are created in the image of God, which ultimately informs their God-given role as parents. Families are being restored and staying together while finding community in the local church and congregations of Christians.
It’s important to understand that the purpose of the foster care system isn’t just to remove children from dangerous, neglectful, or potentially harmful situations. Foster care exists to support the process of reunification and restoration of the biological family as well. Reunification, not adoption, is the best possible outcome of any foster care entry.
I think it’s important to aim at ending foster care, even if it seems like an impossible task. If we end foster care, we’ve succeeded in building a nation of strong families, happy children, and support-rich communities within which they can thrive.
And I do think Christians could end foster care. We have the resources. We have the numbers. We have the mission.
The important question isn’t “Can we?” but “Will we?”
Take the first step today; call Lifeline or visit our website at www.lifelinechild.org to become a simple part of a complex solution.
Herbie Newell is the president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services, the largest Evangelical Christian adoption agency in America, host of The Defender Podcast and author of “Image Bearers: Shifting From Pro-Birth to Pro-Life.”
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