A quarter of US abortion clinics have closed down in the last five years, a new report from Bloomberg Business has found.
The report, by Esmé Deprez, counts at least 162 abortion clinics that have closed down or stopped offering the procedure since 2011, affecting access for 30.5 million women. The single greatest factor was new legislation
The succes of this movement perplexes me. There’s never been a morals campaign that has succeeded – and definitely not one that has had concrete results like the one in the headline above – without somehow generating a lot of revenue for some interested party.
So who gets paid in all this? SuperPACs? Mega-churches? Insurance companies?
Who profits from forcing unwanted children on unwilling mothers? Military recruiters? Manufacturers of baby cribs and clothes and food?
How does one “follow the money” in this situation?
the adoption industry is the answer you are looking for. The book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce is a GREAT place to start reading about this and it is pretty awful once you realize how deep it goes. Adoption is a for-profit industry and the products are children (usually children under the age of 5 who are healthy while something like 95% of the worlds “actual orphans” are over 5 or ill). A few snippits to start to get at answering your question:
Roe v. Wade is often recognized as the unofficial end to the Baby Scoop Era, as women with unplanned pregnancies gained greater access to legal abortion and, concurrently, societal norms began to liberalize, making single motherhood more acceptable. But within the Roe decision were the seeds of a new model of adoption pressure. With the backlash against legalized abortion, millions of apolitical evangelicals and Catholics were transformed int a mobilized religious right who developed and early wave of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), nonprofits set up by antiabortion groups to offer free pregnancy tests and dissuade pregnant women from having abortions.
and
…Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the number of women relinquishing children for adoption has not just fallen but dropped of a cliff. There are few reliable, current numbers on domestic infant adoptions, in part because states are not legally required to report how many babies are privately adopted within the United States. But among the figures that are tallied, there has been a drastic dropoff in infant relinquishments, from 19.2% of unmarried white mothers in 1972 to 1.7% in 1995 to around 1% ever since. Among never-married black women, the rate of relinquishing infants for adoption has been statistically zero for decades. What that adds up to in real numbers is disputed. A 2010 report by Jessica Arons for the Center for American Progress found that annual domestic infant adoption rates have dropped so low that they are hard to track, but Department of Health and Human Services estimates have ranged from 7,000 to 23,000 in recent years, with an average for 14,000 per year. By comparison, 1.2 million choose abortion and 1.4 million decide to continue the pregnancy and parent their child. In a fretful 2009 feature, “Last Days of Adoption?” the conservative paper the Washington Times put the numbers at their lowest estimate, at 6,800 a year between 1996 to 2002, based on data compiled for the paper by the National Center for Health Statistics. Whatever the exact figure, these private domestic infant adoptions, so common during the Baby Scoop Ear, are now the least common form of adoption in America, falling behind adoptions from the foster care system, within families, or from overseas. But demand for adoptable infants has not decreased with this reduction in supply
and
Adoptive parents- almost always a more privileged cohort than birthparents- have access to an adoption system that legitimizes their parenthood over that of the poorer women who birthed their children. The system masks that discomfiting fact by obscuring or denying the significant role of money in the adoption services sector, where domestic infant adoptions generally range from $15,000 up to $40,000; babies’ adoption fees are sometimes bluntly scaled to reflect their race and health condition; and large agencies may take in as much as $10 million annually. The perception of adoption as the ultimate form of charity diminishes all of these costs and profits.
