The Adoption Market

pets and babies

Quite a long time ago, when our children were still children, they decided that they wanted kittens so we took a trip to the local Humane Society. It was an interesting experience. We ended up spending several hours waiting in line to receive one of a small number of permissions to adopt a pet, filling out forms, and then being interviewed by a Humane Society employee to make sure we were suitable adopters.

What was puzzling about the experience was that kittens were and are a good in excess supply. The Humane Society had more of them (and of cats, puppies, and dogs) than it could find homes for and, although it did not like to say so, routinely killed surplus animals. Rationing goods in excess supply is not usually a problem. Yet the Humane Society was deliberately making it costly, in time and effort, to adopt a kitten, and trying to select which lucky people got to do so, despite their knowledge that the alternative to being adopted was not another adoption but death. Why?

Part of the answer was that they gave out only seven adoption permits in each two-hour interval because that was as many as they could process, given a limited staff and the requirement that each adopter be suitably checked and instructed. But that raises a second question. Since they did not have enough staff to process everyone who came, why insist on extensive interviews? Better owners are no doubt superior, from the standpoint of a kitten, to worse owners, but almost any owner is better than being killed, which was the alternative.

So far as I could tell, the real function of the process was to make the employees feel important and powerful, handing out instructions and boons to humble petitioners. That suspicion was reinforced when the woman interviewing us insisted very strongly that cats should never be permitted outdoors, stopping just short of implying that if we would not promise to keep our new pets indoors, she would not let us have them. On further questioning, it turned out that she did not apply that policy to her own cat.

We left the center petless, obtained two kittens from a friend (and very fine cats they became), and I wrote an unhappy letter to the local newspaper with a copy to the Humane Society. The result was a long phone conversation with one of the women running the shelter. She explained that there were two models for such shelters: one in which animals were given out on a more or less no-questions-asked basis and one involving the sort of “adoption procedures” I had observed. When pressed on the fact that the real effect of her shelter’s policy was to discourage adoptions and thus kill animals that might otherwise have lived, she responded that if they followed the alternative policy nobody would be willing to work for the shelter, since employees would feel they were treating the animals irresponsibly. That struck me as a kinder version of the explanation I had already come up with.

This all happened more than twenty years ago — what I have just written was copied, with minor changes, from my Law’s Order, published in 2000. I was reminded of it today by a news story in the Mercury News, the local paper:

Audit finds that shelter remains overcrowded, leading to inadequate care of animals

Feces and multiple food bowls left in kennels. Dogs cooped inside for most the day. Kittens in clean storage bins poked with holes. Animals housed in office space. All disturbing red flags visible to the naked eye.

The story was about a shelter run by the city of San Jose, not the Humane Society. The only explanation offered for the problems was overcrowding, more animals that the shelter was equipped to handle. Explanation were all on the supply side:

Like other shelters and rescues around the country, San Jose ACS has struggled to keep up with the number of surrenders due to rising veterinary costs, the increasing number of breed restrictions in rental agreements, and many owners no longer being able to take care of their pets.

There was no discussion in the article of ways of increasing the number of pets adopted. I did however see a different article about efforts by the city to increase adoptions:

San Jose plans to open a "Pawp-Up" adoption site downtown to help find dogs and cats forever homes.

At the "Pawp-Up," there will be around five dogs and seven cats daily, and all adoption fees will be waived.

We have not adopted a pet in recent years — our current cat adopted us — so have no first-hand evidence on whether the problem I observed then, at a different shelter, exists now at this one. But the Humane Society currently advises potential adopters of pets:

Plan to allow up to two hours to complete the adoption process. It may take longer depending on how many pets you wish to meet, your previous experience with pet care, and the number of other visitors at the shelter. Peak days for visitor traffic are Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, so please allow extra time if you plan to visit on those days.

Babies

I once came across a Wall Street Journal article on adoption — of babies not pets — that demonstrated a level of economic ignorance that I did not expect from that source. The article reported that the adoption market has swung between shortage and surplus, between periods when infants were unable to find adoptive parents and periods when potential parents were unable to find suitable infants to adopt, and concluded that it demonstrated a failure of the free market.

It is illegal in the US to pay the biological mother of a child up for adoption for permission to adopt it, or, less likely, to pay a couple to adopt an otherwise unwanted child. It apparently did not occur to the authors of the article that a market where the price was fixed, by law, at zero was not a free market, that mismatches between supply and demand, surpluses and shortages, were the usual result of price control.

One way of dealing with a shortage, in this case fewer babies available to be adopted than couples desiring to adopt them, is queuing, making people wait in line. Waiting is a cost; the longer the delay the fewer the couples willing to put up with it. Another way is rationing: Some authority decides which prospective buyers are given how much of the limited supply. In the case of the adoption market, the rationing is done by adoption agencies authorized to arrange legal adoptions. They impose their own criteria in order to eliminate enough prospective parents so that they can provide adoptions for the remainder. A third way is by creating costs, money that must be spent to get yourself further up the queue:

As an adoptive family, you will work with an agency to create a family profile that is shown to prospective birth mothers. The time between completing your profile and being selected by a prospective birth mother can be the most challenging wait. The way your agency gets your profile out there, which is called “advertising” in adoption, will affect the length of the adoption process.

Advertising is the most important contributing factor in an adoption professional’s average adoption wait times. The more money spent on advertising per adoptive family, the more exposure they will have to prospective birth parents. (American Adoptions)

The same thing can be done in other ways. It is legal for adoptive parents to make payments to lawyers to arrange adoptions and to the infant’s biological mother to cover her medical costs. Currently, the cost of arranging a private adoption of a healthy white infant is usually something over ten thousand dollars, sometimes much more. Presumably some of that sometimes ends up as an illegal payment to the mother for her consent, disguised as something else, and some goes to the lawyers who arrange the transaction.

The simplest way to deal with a shortage created by price control is to abolish the price control. Richard Posner was for many years one of the most distinguished judges and legal scholars in the country, judged either by academic publications or citations to his cases.¹ It was widely believed among his fellow legal scholars that his proposal to permit would-be adoptive parents to pay a child’s biological mother for permission to adopt her infant is one of the main reasons he was never considered for a Supreme Court appointment. What senator would vote for the confirmation of a candidate who had openly advocated selling babies?

Why does the proposal produce such a strong negative reaction? The obvious answer is that human beings should not be bought and sold. But what an adoptive parent gets is not ownership of a baby but parental rights (and obligations) with regard to a baby. If “owning” a child in that sense is objectionable, why is it not equally objectionable when the owner is a natural or adoptive parent under current law?

A better argument is that the mother and the adoptive parents are not the only ones whose interest should be considered — there is also the child. But it is hard to see how the present system improves on the market outcome. There is no way of giving the infant a vote in the decision so it must be made by someone for him. Adoption agencies claim to impose their restrictions with the welfare of the child as their chief objective but why should we expect them to be more concerned with the welfare of a particular infant than either its natural mother or the couple that wants to adopt it? Infants have considerable influence over their parents, natural or adoptive, and very little over the running of adoption agencies.

When the decision of what baby goes to what parent is made by an adoption agency, there is no good reason to expect the people making it to prefer the baby’s welfare to their own, just as, when the equivalent decisions are made for pets, there is no good reason to expect the people making them to put the animal’s welfare—or life—above their own feelings.

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1. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified in The Journal of Legal Studies as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited United States legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States. (Wikipedia)