If you had told me as a girl that I would go on to adopt five seriously hurting children from the foster care system, I would have raised an eyebrow. If you had told me that my adoption story would be part of a Supreme Court battle over whether my faith-based adoption agency should be closed because of its religious practices, I would have said you’d gone crazy.
Instead, it’s the world that has seemingly gone crazy. My husband and I did, after a painful struggle with infertility, adopt five beautiful children. And while healing their broken bodies and broken hearts was not how I had planned to become a mother, it has brought my husband and me profound joy. And yet, the amazing faith-based adoption agency that walked with us every step of the difficult journey, St. Vincent Catholic Charities, now faces an uncertain future.
Culture warriors threaten to claim faith-based foster care agencies as their latest victim. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have successfully pushed cities and states around the country to cut ties with religious agencies because of their traditional religious beliefs about marriage. Some say they should be shuttered altogether. But, either way, when a religious ministry is no longer authorized by the government to place children in loving homes, it faces a de facto closure. This only results in more children waiting in limbo and more loving homes sitting empty.
This is not a reality this country can afford. Even our president acknowledged America’s foster care crisis, whose severity has only swelled in the wake of the opioid crisis followed by a pandemic. This spring, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation dedicating an entire month to foster care awareness, emphasizing the way the crisis disproportionately affects impoverished, minority, and disabled children. “Every child,” he said, “deserves to grow up in a supportive, loving home where they can thrive and prosper.”
That is exactly what Catholic Charities believes and why it has a foster care ministry. It welcomes every child who needs a safe and loving home regardless of his or her race, religion, or sexual orientation. Almost three-fourths of the children the charities serve are minorities. And, together with Lutheran Social Services, they care for almost 10% of all foster children nationwide. There are more than 400,000 children languishing in the American foster care system, and the goal of Catholic Charities is to find a home for every single one of them.
This is an aspirational goal. Even with more than 8,000 faith-based agencies across the country, more than 23,000 kids age out of foster care every year. But there is always hope. In Arkansas, for example, families recruited and trained by a Christian nonprofit foster agency have adopted over 1,500 children and cared for over 18,000 children in foster care. And in Georgia, a faith-based agency has been growing in its ability to care for children at an astounding rate. In fact, the friend-of-the-court briefs filed in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia contain dozens more examples. We need more of these faith-based foster care agencies, not fewer.
Contrary to the arguments of groups such as the ACLU, faith-based foster care providers are not a threat to diversity. The menace, rather, is a rigidly narrow view of what constitutes a sufficiently woke foster care and adoption provider. With the futures of hundreds of thousands of children in limbo, the foster care space is a vast one. Filling it with a diversity of providers committed to placing children regardless of whether they are gay or straight, black or white, disabled or not, is only a good thing.
Let’s get serious about solving the foster care crisis. That means making space for religious agencies such as mine to help build loving families.
Melissa Buck is a mother to five children, including a large sibling group, all of whom she adopted through St. Vincent Catholic Charities in Lansing, Michigan.
