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WCC Public Policy Positions: Promote Adoption and Foster Care
Here we elaborate on each of the WCC's 2023 Public Policy Positions. The complete document can be found below. You can learn more about Catholic Social Teaching on the USCCB website.
Promote Adoption and Foster Care. Adoption and foster care not only give children a family, but also represent a community's support for some of the most vulnerable children. Wisconsin must support adoption awareness campaigns, adoption counseling for birthmothers, adoptive parents, and children, and tax credits for adoptive parents. Parents adopting or fostering children with special needs must receive the additional support to help their families thrive.
As noted in the last Capitol Update, families are “the primary place of humanization for the person and society” and the “cradle of life and love” (Compendium, no. 209). In families, one learns “the love and faithfulness of the Lord,” and “the first and most important lessons of practical wisdom, to which the virtues are connected” (Compendium, no. 210).
As a society, every effort should be made to offer parents the resources needed to support their children and family unification. However, when extraordinary needs or circumstances persist, foster care and adoption can provide a needed avenue for parents to place their children in another stable and loving home.
In his Message to Adoptive Families, St. John Paul II praised the witness and gift of love of adoptive parents:
Adopting children, regarding and treating them as one’s own children, means recognizing that the relationship between parents and children is not measured only by genetic standards. Procreative love is first and foremost a gift of self. There is a form of ‘procreation’ which occurs through acceptance, concern, and devotion. The resulting relationship is so intimate and enduring that it is in no way inferior to one based on a biological connection. When this is also juridically protected, as it is in adoption, in a family united by the stable bond of marriage, it assures the child that peaceful atmosphere and that paternal and maternal love which he needs for his full human development.
Society must continue to support children and families and continue to place the family at the center of civic, social, and economic life. For example, the WCC has supported policies that aid children and families including but not limited to: providing adoption tax credits, adoption assistance especially for children with special needs, training and support to foster parents, and material and financial support for foster children through age 21.
Foster care and adoption can be great acts of love and humility. In the words of St. John Paul II, “To adopt a child is a great work of love. When it is done, much is given, but much is also received. It is a true exchange of gifts.”
We are called to support these families, relationships, and all those involved–children, birth families, and adoptive families–throughout the foster care and adoption processes.
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