Nation States: Adoption and the American Idea of Belonging

0:00Welcome to the nation's states with yates. The world comes at you fast whether you're in the White House or at your house. We aim to help you navigate the wild and woolly world out there, hopefully making some good common sense of it all and empowering you to engage in the meaningful conversations about the issues that affect the fate of our nation. Today we've got another special episode but it's going to be one. It's not on the usual list of national security or international issues you'd typically think of but it's one that actually was relevant during an important part of my tenure in the White House and also an important part of my own life. So we're going to get into it. It is about adoption and the American idea that we're bound together as a nation and families in some cases not by blood alone. So if you think about it you walk into any American and elementary school and look around. In a lot of those rooms you're going to find a kid who did not arrive in the family the usual way.

1:00Different hair, different eyes, same last name, same team, nobody treats it as a scandal. That's not how most of the world works. In some ways people might not appreciate fully and appropriately how exceptional America is in terms of the culture of adoption. We spent a lot of time on this show talking about how countries hold together or fall apart. Borders, armies, treaties, supply chains. Today I want to talk about something quieter that tells you as much about a nation as any summit. How people decide who counts as a family. America is unusual here. We adopt at a scale and with an openness that most other rich countries do not come close to matching. Not just relatives, not just kids who look like the parents, strangers, foster kids, kids from the other side of the world and then we treat them as ours. We love them as ours. They are ours. Now this is not a theory I picked up in a book. I grew up with friends who were adopted.

2:02It never seemed strange. Later my wife and I adopted both our children. That blessing changed how I see the concept of identity, my own, my families, and this countries. My argument is simple. America's comfort with adoption is not just kindness or a big foster system. It comes from how Americans define identity. We do not, at our best, say you belong because of blood, ethnicity, class, or an old family name. We say you belong because you are claimed. You take the name. You live the life. Adoption is that idea practiced at the kitchen table. In our deep dive today, we're going to look into what the numbers actually show, how we compare with Europe and East Asia, why the difference in culture is as much as it is cultural as much as it is legal. And what that means for us as a nation state, then I'll close with what I think we should

3:03protect. These are the important and essential things. With that, I thank you for coming along for these conversations. Please continue to download, like, subscribe, and share all the good things. At the end of the program, we'll share some ways to interact with the show, but we're going to take a deep, a brief break and we'll come back with our deep dive on adoption and the American idea. Stick with us. More to come. Welcome back to Nation States with Yates. Thank you for coming along for today's deep dive on adoption and the American idea. Not what you usually think of as the fate of the nation state, but it says something about the character of our nation state and how exceptional it is. And I think it's important for us to understand that and it has an impact on our relations with other countries. And it's something that I think we should be appropriately proud of, but also something we need to actively nurture just the same. Sort of begin with a basic concept. What normal looks like here?

4:04Take a picture of a class of 25 kids. Nationally a little over 2% of American children live in adoptive families. It's not two adopted kids in every single room, but add foster care, open talk about adoption, families that do not all look alike and it's familiar. Teachers don't freeze. Neighbors don't whisper like something is off. That's everyday ease. And that is the point. In a recent year, United States finalized about 80,000 adoptions that were not stepped in parent cases. That's roughly two thirds coming out of foster care about a third were private domestic, international adoption, which used to be huge is now a little bit smaller around 1,200 per year. At its peak in 2004, we brought in nearly 23,000 children from abroad. That channel collapsed everywhere, not just here.

5:06China, Russia, South Korea, Guatemala, Ethiopia, all slammed the door or slammed it most of the way. Numbers went way down. Even with international adoption minimized some, we still move far more children into permanent legal families than any of our peers. United Nations data from the last serious global snapshot put American domestic adoption of young children at several times the rate and Britain, many times Germany, and an order of magnitude above France or Japan. More recently, country studies of kids already in state care show the same tilt. In a given year, the United States adopted much larger share of children in care than England and England adopted a much larger share than Germany or the Nordic systems. We don't just foster. We finish the job often. We make the children legally ours. That was not because Americans are nicer necessarily.

6:06That's because we're built different rules. We carry a different idea of what a family is allowed to be and what a nation is. Most of Western Europe has stronger family support, easier access to contraception and abortion, less stigma on single mothers keeping their baby. So there are fewer infants to place in some cases. When a child does enter does enter care, many systems prefer long term foster care or kinship care. They're slower to cut the legal tie to the birth family. Germany's yearly adoption totals are small for a country of 80 million plus and a large share of step parent cases, not our step parent cases, not strangers becoming parents. Nordic countries are especially cautious about full legal severance. Some European countries, Spain, Italy, France and Sweden used to take large numbers of children from abroad that looked like openness. Then the sending countries stopped sending and those numbers in those countries felt like

7:10a cliff. Domestic, stranger adoptions did not rise to replace it. Now I'm using the term domestic, stranger. I feel a little awkward about those are those are adoptive parents, but it's sort of the technical jargon used in research about adoption across cultures and across countries. So hopefully if there are others like me that are adoptive parents out there, not bristling thinking about stranger adoptions, we aren't actually strangers to these kids, we're the only parents many of them have ever known. And we basically feel like any other family. We'll pivot from Europe to East Asia, Japan and South Korea are a clean contrast. Bloodline still matters a great deal in those cultures. And Korea's survey still find that we are a blood family as the top reason people hesitate to adopt. For decades Korea sent children overseas in part because unmarried mothers of an unrelated child did not fit the family story.

8:12Japan adopts plenty of adults, often for a family name, a business or inheritance, adopting an unrelated child is another matter. Much of the Islamic world, the model of guardianship, not full parenthood is followed. In a lot of the world, care of a child who is not yours stays inside the clan, formal adoption of a stranger with new birth certificate, new last name is the American style move. Other rich countries love children, they are not necessarily cruel. They are simply less willing to say the child is now mine in law and in public, even if we do not share blood. American adoption at its core ends one parent child relationship and creates another. The child is not a wardier watching the child as your son or daughter. That legal completeness is the American model and a lot of the world copied pieces of it pieces of it in the 20th century. On the public side in the 1990s the system was pushed more towards permanency.

9:19If a child cannot go home safely, the clock starts. Adoption is the goal, not endless temporary care. Multiethnic placement act also made it harder for agencies to block a home because the parents and the child do not match by race. That is contested in some cases. It is also why transracial families are common enough to be ordinary in a lot of towns now. Now in full transparency mine is one of those transracial families. My daughter was mixed race, Native American, Black and Irish, my son. All we know is Black and White. We do not know a lot more. My son and daughter did not look exactly alike. My daughter had a little bit of red in her hair which she absolutely hated. But I thought it was beautiful. Most of the world thought it was beautiful. My son just basically looks like a light skin African American. When we would walk places, if the child is walking with mom, people probably make presumptions

10:23about what dad looks like. If the kids are walking with dad, they make presumptions about what mom looks like. It is natural people's minds go there to fill in the blanks. But it is legal. It is now in this day and age pretty widely accepted in the United States while there is still some murmurings. And I think that is one of the beauties of the American ideal and American culture. We have a large foster care system. It is not necessarily a compliment with too many kids that are born in circumstances that require foster care. But they do enter care. Too many stay too long. But once they are there, American policy is more willing to give them a new permanent family. In fact, the current administration has a major initiative advocating a home for every child. The Health and Human Services Department has done amazing things with all 50 states and the territories to try to get new initiatives and new standards in place to show the love

11:25and acceptance for these children that they deserve. Find a home, find a family for every child. Europe often tries hard to keep the original family intact. And to support that family with the state. Different bet, different results. No doubt there is also a private infant adoption path that still exists here, imperfect and expensive and a religious culture that treats adopting a child as a calling, not a last result. Hollywood made it visible. Churches made it normal in places Hollywood never goes. All of that is machinery. Machinery does not explain why the neighbors accept it. So that you need the idea of country. That's kind of where we get into the identity argument about the United States, what makes us different, a little bit exceptional, maybe a lot exceptional. America's open embrace of adoption comes from a distinctive way we define our own identity. In a lot of nations, you, who you are, starts with dissent.

12:25Ethnicity, reddit, villages, class, the family name that has been on the land for 300 years. You can be a good person in those societies and still feel that a child who does not share that line is not quite yours in the deepest sense. The American idea at its best runs the other way. You become an American. You take an oath. You take the name. You take the responsibilities. Blood helps explain a person. It does not exhaust the person. That does not settle the question of membership in a family. You become a family by an act together. Adoption is that same logic inside a household. Child is claimed. The law writes a new fact. The community is asked to treat the fact is real, not almost a son, a son, not the girl they took in, their daughter. That is why a classroom where kids do not all resemble the parents does not break the

13:26American picture of a family. The picture was never only blood photograph. It was a household bound by law, loyalty, and daily life, and eternal love. This show is called Nation States for a reason. The nation state has to answer who is in and on what terms. Ethnic nation's answer with ancestry. Civic nation's answer with a belonging plus obligation. America has always been a messy mix, but adoption is one place. Civic answer still wins in ordinary life. You can see the opposite when a culture cannot imagine their full heir who is not born in the line. You can see our version when a kid with a different story sits at a Thanksgiving table and nobody is performing. They just pass the plate. This is the ideal. We fail at sometimes. Adopties can get dumb questions who are your real parents. As racial families can still catch some stairs, the foster system is rough.

14:31International adoption has some ugly chapters, coercion, sloppy paperwork, countries that treated children as an export. Exceptional is not the same as innocent. I'm saying the standard we publicly hold is unusual, and it's worth defending. I did not come to this as a researcher first. I came to it as a kid who had friends who were adopted. In my world, it was not a plot twist. It was a fact like who plays shortstop. My very best friend growing up in rural Maryland was adopted. It was something we talked about from time to time, but we considered it sort of interesting. A reality didn't make it good or bad. It was just different. It was part of the stories we were writing of ourselves as we were growing up together. Years later, my wife and I adopted both of our children. I'm not going to turn all of their lives into content, but I'll say nothing teaches you faster that identity is made as well as given than bringing in two wild and woolly kids,

15:38loving them as your own. You learn it in the pediatrician's office, at the school pickup line, in the quiet of a house at night. You also learn that a country around you, for all its fault, has a language for what you're doing. Our kids, not a footnote. That is the richness that I talk about in America. Once you have lived it, you hear political talk about who we are differently, a nation that can look at a child with no shared blood and say, this one is ours. It's practicing the same muscle it needs to remain at people instead of a collection of bloodlines sharing a market. So this is a small social issue in some ways, but it's a window into the American nation state. The family is the building block of our civilization. The nation state is the building block of our international system. It's why we're talking about these two things in a way.

16:38I think that it says a lot about our country that we can have this idea of taking people into our family and they are fully ours, a full-fledged member of our family, legally in love and in reality. That's the same way when people immigrate, legally, the right way, and they come in and they achieve citizenship and they swear an oath, then they are given the same rights, privileges and responsibilities of other citizens. They are our national family when they come the right way and assimilate and join the family, the way a child joins an adoptive family. Now there are some joys of going through the adoption process that could be made smoother, just like there are some joys of going through the immigration process that could be made smoother. There are some joys about the American experiment that could be made smoother.

17:40When it comes to the adoption side of things, I think it's super important that as a society we value it enough that we make sure that those young couples who are in a position to be able to take children in and to nurture them, protect them and care for them the way children need at an appropriate age. Those are often people who are not at the stage of, say, employment success to have unending resources to be able to do it. It's not just for those who are of means to be able to do it, but good people who have good families and homes to be able to open and share, they need to be empowered. We really need to be looking at how do we make sure that these processes are not too onerous, not too expensive, and that what funds are spent are spent to the benefit of the child, not to the fueling of a legal system of bureaucracy and sort of a nanny state

18:41trying to micromanage the social work of this process. Need to make sure that we continue in our own culture, in your conversations that you have with your neighbors and your churches and your public squares, so to speak. Make sure that you're speaking of ideas of adoption, realities of adoption of families who are put together out of love and circumstances, maybe not necessarily the old fashioned way, doesn't make anybody better or worse just different. And how special it is that we have American families and American communities who are big and strong enough to define our identity in a way that allows for this, that welcomes it, makes it home. I think ultimately is the greatest blessing in all of this. Ultimately, that's what America at its best is. It's home. It's home for those who take an allegiance to the Constitution, the flag, want to support

19:42our nation, those who want to make a contribution to help the country grow and to take care of others in some ways to take care of the rest of the world because we're big and powerful enough to make that kind of a difference. That's what these families coming together with adoption are doing, too. Well, I think also we might do some good if we advocate in our public policy, while we respect other countries and other cultures. We're not telling them what they must do. We should not be bashful about what they can do. And with this, I want to share one story from my time in the White House 20-something years ago. It was one of those days that the Vice President wasn't available to attend a leader meeting that the President was having the Oval Office. So it was my turn to be as representative. It was with the leader of Romania. It was at a time when the Romanian government had put a pause on all international adoptions.

20:42There were a lot of American families who had been out thousands of dollars months, if not years of time. In some cases, partially way through the process of adopting a child, a child who is in need of being placed in a home and wants to be placed in a home, and those were frozen. And the leader of Romania was coming to the Oval Office. This was in the post 9-11 environment. When you have a meeting in the Oval Office, the top leaders around the President meet, they call it a pre-brief, could be the National Security Advisor, the press secretary sometimes, could be the Secretary of State, could be the Vice President, the Chief of Staff, other senior staff could be there. But the Oval Office is smaller than people think. You usually have only about 16 people for a meeting. So that's half Americans, half the other side. So I was there with the President. I was representing the Vice President, the Secretary of State, National Security Advisor,

21:43Chief of Staff, series of others were there too. In the pre-brief, they're talking through things and they're basically saying to the President, just be mindful that we have large strategic equities at stake with the government of Romania. We're in the global war on terrorism. There are concerns about things related to Russia. There are concerns related to some other matters. But there was still a contingent of us that were talking about the importance of the adoption issue. The President took notes as he did characteristically with a fat marker on three by five cards to kind of cue himself to remember some things he wanted in the conversation. He took it in. He began the meeting with the usual business of welcome leader, talking hard policy. He got to the part of the agenda that some of those senior members of the cabinet had recommended he may be deemphasized so that we don't ruffle the feathers of our guests by criticizing them for stopping their international adoptions. It was in that moment that George W. Bush, the President, really became George W. Bush

22:44the human being. It's something the rest of the world didn't really get to see often enough. I'm not saying he was a perfect man or a perfect President, but I do think this was a beautiful example of what a President can do when he's the right person in the right circumstance. He paused the meeting at a certain point there. He looked the visitor in the eye and he said, you know, as leaders of nations, we have a special responsibility to our people. And most of all, to the most vulnerable among our people, especially children. I want to talk to you about this. And he talked as a brother in a family that had an adopted sibling. He talked about the miracle of adoption, the beauty of the American family that has put together with adoption. The love of that family, but how important it is for those children and that the children deserve to be loved and accepted and given the opportunity and that we as leaders of nations, the President is saying, not me, Steve Yates, President was speaking, we need

23:46to take that responsibility for making sure that what we're doing is being honorable servants for the most vulnerable among us. Now I don't remember everything he said. I remember that it was the most articulate passage I ever heard George W. Bush utter, that it was moving borderline spiritual. And I don't know that it had an effect on the counterpart. I think it did, but it definitely had an effect on the rest of us in that room. And in my five years of serving in the White House, I had many, many times I went into the Oval Office where my job was to basically shut up and take notes and report back to the Vice President. And I did that in many of those meetings. This was one of those that after the meeting, I made a point as everyone else went out. I stopped and shook the President's hand. And I said, thank you, Mr. President, for speaking up for adoption, for adoption adopted

24:46families, for going against the advice of your senior staff who said to minimize this issue. It said as a father of two young children who don't look like me. This was the most meaningful time I had had the honor and privilege of spending in the Oval Office. President just looked me back, shook my hands, sort of padded me on the shoulder, sent me on my way out the Oval, we went about our day. But that, to me, was an exceptional experience in an exceptional country we should be proud of, adoption and the American experiment. Two things that are great about our nation's state. So with that, I want to thank you for coming along for today's conversation. We're going to take a brief break and come back for some parting thoughts. In the meantime, always remember to like, share and subscribe, downloading the episodes and telling others to do so helps us carry the program, build the audience and build out the show. We'll come back in the parting slot section. I'll share with you some ways to be in touch with us, to build out the program's ideas

25:49and things we might be launching in the not too distant future. So stay with us right after this brief break. Welcome back to nation's states with yates. A special thank you for sticking with us through this conversation on nation's state and adoption and the American ideal. It's a topic near and dear to my heart. Hopefully it makes sense to you why it fits in with the broader conversation about nation's states. As you get a little bit of perspective about how America compares to some of our peers in the world when it comes to this interesting concept of how families are formed and what our cultures and our countries do under these circumstances. It happens to be an area where America, at least in my estimation, compares very favorably to other countries. We don't have to talk down about it, but we should have appropriate pride for this and a commitment to sustain this admiral part of our nation's culture and encourage

26:49others to come along with us. America adopts more children into permanent families than any other wealthy country, especially from foster care, and treats those families as ordinary. This is not an accident of wealth, other rich countries have money. They do not have the same habit. The habit tracks a civic idea of identity. Everything can be created by law, love, and loyalty, not only by inheritance. I have seen that idea in friends I grew up with and in my own home. It made me a more careful student of what a nation is. If we start telling ourselves that only blood is real, only ethnicity, only heritage, only the original line, we will not just change adoption. We will change the country. The same instinct that says a child cannot really be yours unless the DNA matches will eventually say a citizen cannot really be ours unless the story matches.

27:52So let's do the hard parts out loud. Let's fix foster care so fewer children need a new family in the first place. Tell the truth about international adoptions abuses and how it's cut way down in recent years. Listen to adult adoptees when they say the story was tight here in the brochure than in the chest. Exceptionalism that cannot stand a flaw is just advertising. But with that reality check, it's a beautiful part of who we are in our system. It's something to make sure that we invest in and make sure it thrives. A nation state that is more than a flag or a tax code. It's a story about who may sit at a table and call it home. On that score, the American practice of adoption is one of the better things that we have done. It is not the whole of American exceptionalism, but it is a clean example of it. Visible in the school cafeteria, enforced in a courthouse, and proven for some of us at

28:58the dinner table. I'm Steve Yates. This is nation states with Yates. Thank you for listening. I want to have some show ideas come our way or give any kind of feedback. The tricky formula is feedback at nationstatesyates.com or follow us on x at ns with Yates. We have a show website coming soon. We've got a substack page coming soon in the meantime. You can search for nation states with Yates on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, other places. Content will be coming in slowly. We're still a new show building things out. The invite you to join us in the growth. Invite you to join us in the conversation. Please stay with us. Until next time, I'm Steve Yates. Here at nation states with Yates. Be strong America.