Adoption Biases

A new paper finds that adoptive parents exhibit significant racial and gender biases in child preferences. Adoptive parents prefer girls and, by a large margin, non-African-American babies: “the increase in desirability of a non-African- American baby with respect to an African-American baby (both of unknown gender) is equivalent to a decrease of at least $38, 000 in adoption finalization cost.” Desirability is also very sensitive to timing: it peaks right before birth, and drops immediately afterward. The study’s authors point out that removing restrictions on adoption by same-sex and foreign couples would increase adoption matching.[%comments]