Catholic and Enjoying It!
…regarding the inhuman plan of the Party of God and Life to make war on adoptive children:
Adoption is hard. If you’ve adopted a child, you know. If your close friends or family members have adopted a child, you know. The most marvelous result — an orphaned, abandoned, or abused child finding a home — is typically preceded by years of uncertainty, red tape, and staggering expense.
You can work through bureaucracies for months, only to have a judge change his mind at the last instant. You can patiently and faithfully care for a birth mother, and she can exercise her proper and unquestioned right to keep the baby. You can work through foreign countries only to have a nation change its laws and slam the door in your face. To meet an adoptive family is to meet a family with a story — one that often involves prevailing in the face of adversity and almost always involves financial strains that few other families understand.
How much does it cost to adopt? An Adoptive Families Magazine survey of 1,100 families who adopted children from 2012 to 2013 found that the average family spent $34,093 on independent adoptions and $39,966 if they went through an agency. My family adopted our youngest daughter in 2010, and those numbers match our experience.
Even for upper-middle-class families, that’s a staggering amount of money to spend, and the expenses are often concentrated within the span of a few months in a single year. Agency fees, legal fees, travel expenses — they all pile up. So families often seek help. They raise money from family and friends. They appeal to churches. They go into debt.
There is, however, one thing that helps these families, and it helps a lot: It’s called the adoption tax credit, a $13,570 non-refundable credit that phases out for truly high-income families.
It doesn’t cost the government much — according to the Tax Policy Center, the so-called “tax expenditure” (forgone revenue) from the credit totaled $300 million in 2015 — but it makes adoption affordable for thousands of families. I know. It helped my family immensely when we adopted. It’s helped other adoptive families we know. It can be the financial difference that makes adoption possible.
And the newly released Republican tax-reform plan would abolish it entirely.
He is, of course, shouted down by the super duperest prolifiest conservatives in the universe: the readers of NRO. There are lots of choice quotes, but I think the most archetypally super duper conservative “prolife” quote from the comboxes is this one:
No special deductions. If you want the kid so badly. It’s on YOU! Every “special” deduction given is an increase to the Federal Deficit. Sorry. If someone wants to adopt a child so badly, why should others paid for “your new kid”? ie: tax breaks? PERSONAL RESPOSIBLITY. This is greatly lacking in today’s America.
You will recall that the great cry of the “prolife” conservative is “Adoption, Not Abortion”. So here comes somebody willing to undertake the arduous task of adoption. But it’s massively expensive, so the adopting family asks for some tax help. And the cry of the “prolife” conservative? “SCREW YOU!” And when pressed, the super duper ultra-prolife conservative–as you knew he would–produces his un-aborted children as human shields for refusing to contribute a nickel out of his paycheck to save some other damn worthless kid:
By this logic I am due roughly $100k. I have three children that I chose not to abort.
Such a snow-capped summit of ultra super duper Christian love for the least of these. I chose not to abort these brats, so why should I have to give a shit about some other brats. If they aren’t adopted, they can be aborted or end up in foster care or die in the street. What difference does it make. I want my nickel!
This is why I don’t believe it when people gripe that tax monies used for obvious human goods like adoption “rob me of the chance to be personally charitable”. Guys like this would not know personal charity if it bit them on the face. They resent shelling out a nickel even it spells the difference between life and death for some child. What they want is the *feeling* of being charitable and (just as important) the *power* to condemn those they deem unworthy to destitution. If they really were interested in “charity” they would not care how their nickel was employed just so long as children in need of adoption found a home.
Meanwhile, God bless David French as he continues struggling to speak common human decency to the resistant and brutal readers in his comboxes.
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