"You Can Always Adopt!" — The Bullshit We're Tired of Hearing
You know when you have lived something for your entire life, and then one day a trigger turns a lightbulb on in your mind, realising that something has been staring you in the face for decades and you just didn’t see it, making you feel somewhat foolish?
Well, we had one of those revelations recently, while Vickie was writing her very first blog post.
Nearly every childless person will experience someone saying to them, "You can always adopt," when sharing their story and grief. And quite frankly, it pisses you off. Because, for one, there is an assumption that you ‘haven’t thought’ about it, when in reality, when you are desperate to have a child, believe me, you have thought about it A LOT.
But as anyone who looks into modern adoption quickly learns, there is NO ‘always’. And while you are dealing with a maelstrom of emotions—annoyed, grief-triggered, belittled—it can be damn hard to come back with facts in the middle of a casual conversation.
So this piece is designed to educate those who don’t understand what they are actually saying, and to give us childless people some factual ammunition when navigating this exact debate. As we are based in Australia, this piece naturally reflects our society's view and legal history of adoption.
First things first:
Adoption is a legal measure of child protection, not an accessible consumer alternative for infertility or childlessness.
Thinking any other way is entirely outdated. Yes, in the post–World War II period, Australia experienced a massive surge in adoptions. Between 1951 and 1975, an estimated 140,000 to 150,000 adoptions took place across the country.
This era was driven by strict societal attitudes against single mothers and the "clean break theory," which argued that it was best to completely sever a child’s ties to their unmarried mother to safeguard their welfare. Tragically, this led to an era of forced adoptions, where babies were systematically removed from vulnerable mothers who were offered no emotional support, no financial aid, and no real choice.
My wife Vickie was nearly a product of these practices. Her mother, Lynette, was very young when she became pregnant. The attitude of the family back then was to send Lynette to a girls' home to wait out her pregnancy, and then to Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sydney—an institution notorious for coercive practices that forced vulnerable women to relinquish their babies.
And this is where we feel a little foolish. We always knew that Vickie was destined to be adopted if it hadn’t been for her mother fiercely fighting the system to keep her. Yet for decades, we never correlated Lynette’s fight with our own journey when we were looking into adoption. It has fundamentally transformed our view on the ethics of adoption. (A powerful resource if you want to dive deeper into this history is the VANISH Submission for the Inquiry into Historical Forced Adoptions, available at www.vanish.org.au).
I can’t begin to imagine the complex web of emotions a Gen X adoptee feels if they discover they were part of that era of forced adoption... Can you?
Things began to change in the early 1970s—not because of a decrease in willing adoptive parents, but because of a massive shift in Australian society.
The introduction of the Supporting Mother's Benefit in 1973 provided vital financial assistance to single mothers, allowing them to keep their children. Alongside this, the wider availability of contraception, access to safe abortions, and changing social attitudes meant far fewer infants were placed for adoption. By 2023–24, Australia recorded a historic low of just 207 total adoptions—a 98% decline from the 1971 peak.
But wait, there’s more!
Today, the idea of adopting an unknown baby (referred to as a "local adoption") is extraordinarily rare. In the 2019–20 financial year, there were only 48 local adoptions in the entire country. Overseas (intercountry) adoptions have similarly plummeted, falling from a peak of 434 children in 2004–05 to just 37 in 2019–20 due to strict international child protection frameworks and program closures.
So who is being adopted today? The vast majority are "known child adoptions." In 2019–20, out of all adoptions in Australia (249 children), the orders were granted to people who already had an established relationship with the child—nearly 70% were adoptions by foster carers, while others were by step-parents. Today, children being adopted are also much older; only 22% of known child adoptees are under five years old.
Rightly or wrongly, foster care adoptions involve children who have experienced trauma or significant disruption, requiring specialised care and deep emotional resilience from carers.
Now contrast that reality with a childless person—particularly those who have undergone IVF, who spent years exhausting every avenue to have a child naturally, arriving at the end of that road battle-weary, financially drained, and carrying profound grief. They may consider adoption later in life, only after drawing their line in the sand and processing their loss. For many, this 'processing' takes years—for us, it was close to a decade. It was an emotionally and mentally draining time that left us both depressed and medicated.
Even if you still want to try, the system sets huge hurdles. Most adoption criteria require couples to be completely clear of fertility treatments for up to two years before applying. By the time you process your grief and navigate those waiting periods, age limits and health checks often shut the door permanently.
They are then forced to ask themselves an incredibly heavy question:
Do I have the emotional resilience to enter a complex, highly invasive legal process where success is extremely unlikely?
So it would seem the only avenue left to us is to be a foster carer. And another heavy question is posed:
Can I step into foster care knowing the primary goal of the system is family reunification, not for building our family?
This is a highly complex and individual decision to make. For us, our life had stood still for over two decades. We were damaged. To bring a child into our home that you want to love and nurture, while knowing that a knock at the door could change all that in a moment as the child is returned to its biological parents, was not something we felt we could deal with.
So, NO—"You Can Always Adopt" is a complete fallacy.
If someone tells you, "You can always adopt," here are three simple ways to answer:
"Local infant adoption virtually no longer exists in Australia—there were fewer than 50 in the whole country last year. It’s not a backup option."
"Modern adoption is a child protection service for vulnerable children, not a consumer alternative for adult fertility struggles."
"We spent years processing the end of our fertility journey. Every path to family building takes an immense toll, and we have chosen peace."
So when someone casually says, "You can always adopt," know that their thinking is decades out of date. There is absolutely no "always," and there is an exceptionally slim chance of adopting an infant—even if you have the personal fortitude to endure the process.
Modern adoption is no longer a service designed to provide childless adults with babies. It is strictly a child protection service designed to provide a permanent, safe home for a child when no other options exist.
As it should be.
A Final Reflection
After Vickie wrote her first blog piece and we sat together reflecting on how we felt, a very uncomfortable realisation washed over us.
How could we have ever been sure that, had we been able to adopt back then, we wouldn't have ended up with a child taken from their mother through coercion? We knew firsthand the trauma Lynette suffered under that barbaric mindset, yet it took us decades to connect those dots to our own desire to adopt.
It showed us that when grief and desperation drive your desire for a child, it’s easy to overlook the wider ethics of the system. Realising that truth was uncomfortable, but it brought us a profound sense of clarity. Modern adoption belongs to the protection of the child, not the completion of our adult lives.
