Nation States: Adoption and the American Idea of Belonging

America adopts more children into permanent families than any other wealthy nation, and Steve Yates argues that fact reveals something deeper about the American idea itself. Drawing from adoption data, international comparisons, personal experience as an adoptive father, and a memorable White House encounter involving President George W. Bush and Romania, he explores how law, love, and shared commitment can define family and citizenship beyond bloodlines. Share your thoughts and experiences with adoption, family, and belonging. Follow Nation States with Yates for clear, common-sense insights where Steve Yates serves as your personal national security advisor, breaking down world events in ways that matter to Main Street, not just Washington. Connect with the show at [e-mail] and follow on X @NSWithYates.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Nation States with Yates. The world comes at
you fast, whether you're in the White House or at
your house. We aim to help you navigate the wild
and woolly world out there, hopefully making some good common
sense of it all and empowering you to engage in
the meaningful conversations about the issues that affect the fate
of our nation. Today we've got another special episode, but

(00:22):
it's going to be one that's not on the usual
list of national security or international issues you'd typically think of,
But it's one that actually was relevant during an important
part of my tenure in the White House and also
an important part of my own life. So we're going
to get into it. It is about adoption and the
American idea that we're bound together as a nation and

(00:45):
families in some cases, not by blood alone. So if
you think about it, you walk into any American elementary
school and look around. In a lot of those rooms,
you're going to find a kid who did not arrive
in the family the usual way. Different hair, different eyes,
same last name, same team. Nobody treats it as a scandal.

(01:07):
That's not how most of the world works. In some ways,
people might not appreciate fully and appropriately how exceptional America
is in terms of the culture of adoption. We spent
a lot of time on this show talking about how
countries hold together or fall apart. Borders, armies, treaties, supply chains. Today,

(01:27):
I want to talk about something quieter that tells you
as much about a nation as any summit, how people
decide who counts as a family. America is unusual here.
We adopt at a scale and with an openness that
most other rich countries do not come close to matching.
Not just relatives, not just kids who look like the parents, strangers,

(01:48):
foster kids, kids from the other side of the world.
And then we treat them as ours. We love them
as ours. They are ours. Now, this is not a
theory I picked up in a book I grew up
with friends who were adopted. It never seemed strange. Later,
my wife and I adopted both our children. That blessing

(02:08):
changed how I see the concept of identity, my own,
my family's, and this country's. My argument is simple. America's
comfort with adoption is not just kindness or a big
foster system. It comes from how Americans define identity. We
do not, at our best, Say you belong because of blood, ethnicity, class,

(02:30):
or an old family name. We say you belong because
you are claimed. You take the name. You live the life.
Adoption is that idea practiced at the kitchen table. In
our deep dive today, we're going to look into what
the numbers actually show, how we compare with Europe and
East Asia, why the difference in culture is as much

(02:53):
evident It is cultural as much as it is legal.
And what that means for us as a nation state.
Then I'll close with what I think we should protect.
These are the important and essential things. With that, I
thank you for coming along for these conversations. Please continue
to download, like, subscribe, and share all the good things.

(03:14):
At the end of the program, we'll share some ways
to interact with the show, but we're going to take
a brief break and we'll come back with our deep
dive on adoption and and the American Idea. Stick with us.
More to come. Welcome back to Nation States with Yates.
Thank you for coming along for today's deep dive on
adoption and the American Idea. It's not what you usually

(03:38):
think of as the fate of the nation state, but
it says something about the character of our nation state
and how exceptional it is. And I think it's important
for us to understand that. It has an impact on
our relations with other countries. And it's something that I
think we should be appropriately proud of, but also something
we need to actively nurture just the same. Sort of

(03:59):
begin with a basic concept. What normal looks like here?
Take a picture of a class of 25 kids. Nationally,
a little over 2% of American children live in adoptive families.
That's not two adopted kids in every single room, but
add foster care, open talk about adoption, families, that do

(04:22):
not all look alike, and it's familiar. Teachers don't freeze.
Neighbors don't whisper like something is off. That's everyday ease,
and that is the point. In a recent year, the
United States finalized about 80,000 adoptions that were not step-parent cases.

(04:45):
That's roughly two-thirds coming out of foster care. About a
third were private, domestic, international adoption, used to be huge
is now a little bit smaller, around 1,200 per year.
At its peak in 2004, we brought in nearly 23,000
children from abroad. That channel collapsed everywhere, not just here. China, Russia,

(05:07):
South Korea, Guatemala, Ethiopia all slammed the door or slammed
it most of the way. Numbers went way down. Even
with international adoption minimized some, we still move far more
children into permanent legal families than any of our peers.
The United Nations data from the last serious global snapshot

(05:28):
put American domestic adoption of young children at several times
the rate in Britain, many times Germany, and an order
of magnitude above France or Japan. More recently, country studies
of kids already in state care show the same tilt.
In a given year, the United States adopted much larger
share of children in care than England. and England adopted

(05:52):
a much larger share than Germany or the Nordic systems.
We don't just foster. We finish the job often. We
make the children legally ours. That was not because Americans
are nicer, necessarily. It's because we're built different rules. We
carry a different idea of what a family is allowed

(06:12):
to be and what a nation is. Most of Western
Europe has stronger family support, easier access to contraception and abortion,
less stigma on single mothers keeping their baby, so there
are fewer infants to place in some cases. When a
child does enter care, many systems prefer long-term foster care

(06:34):
or kinship care. They're slower to cut the legal tie
to the birth family. Germany's yearly adoption totals are small
for a country of 80 million plus, and a large
share of stepparent cases are not our step-parent cases, not
strangers becoming parents. Nordic countries are especially cautious about full

(06:55):
legal severance. Some European countries, Spain, Italy, France, and Sweden,
used to take large numbers of children from abroad. That
looked like openness. Then the sending countries stopped sending, and
those numbers in those countries fell like a cliff. Domestic
stranger adoptions did not rise to replace it. Now, I'm

(07:16):
using the term domestic stranger. I feel a little awkward
about it. Those are adoptive parents. But that's sort of
the technical jargon used in research about adoption across cultures
and across countries. So hopefully if there are others like
me that are adoptive parents out there, and I'm bristling
thinking about stranger adoptions, we aren't actually strangers to these kids.

(07:39):
We're the only parents many of them have ever known.
And we basically feel like any other family. We'll pivot
from Europe to East Asia. Japan and South Korea are
a clean contrast. Bloodline still matters a great deal in
those cultures. In Korea, surveys still find that we are
a blood family as the top reason people hesitate to adopt.

(08:02):
For decades, Korea sent children overseas in part because unmarried
mothers of an unrelated child did not fit the family story.
Japan adopts plenty of adults, often for a family name,
a business, or inheritance. Adopting an unrelated child is another matter.

(08:23):
In much of the Islamic world, the model of guardianship,
not full parenthood, is followed. In a lot of the world,
care of a child who is not yours stays inside
the clan. Formal adoption of a stranger with new birth certificate,
new last name, is the American style. Other rich countries
love children. They are not necessarily cruel. They are simply

(08:46):
less willing to say the child is now mine in
law and in public, even if we do not share blood.
American adoption at its core ends one parent-child relationship and
creates another. The child is not a ward you are watching.
The child is your son or daughter. That legal completeness

(09:06):
is the American model. and a lot of the world
copied pieces of it in the 20th century. On the
public side, in the 1990s, the system was pushed more
towards permanency. If a child cannot go home safely, the
clock starts. Adoption is the goal, not endless temporary care.

(09:27):
Multi-ethnic placement act also made it harder for agencies to
block a home because the parents and the child do
not match by race. that is contested in some cases,
is also why transracial families are common enough to be
ordinary in a lot of towns now. Now, in full transparency,

(09:47):
mine is one of those transracial families. My daughter is
mixed race, Native American, black and Irish. My son, all
we know is black and white. We don't know a
lot more. Uh, my son and daughter didn't look exactly alike.
My daughter had a little bit of red in her hair,
which she absolutely hated. Uh, but, uh, I thought it

(10:09):
was beautiful. Most of the world thought it was beautiful. Uh,
my son just basically looks like a light skin African
American and, uh, When we'd walk places, if the child
is walking with mom, people probably make presumptions about what
dad looks like. If the kids are walking with dad,
they make presumptions about what mom looks like. It's natural

(10:30):
people's minds go there to fill in the blanks. But
it's legal. And it's now, in this day and age,
pretty widely accepted in the United States while there's still
some murmurings. And I think that's one of the beauties.
of the American ideal and American culture. We have a
large foster care system. It's not necessarily a compliment. We

(10:53):
have too many kids that are born in circumstances that
require foster care, but they do enter care. Too many
stay too long. But once they're there, American policy is
more willing to give them a new permanent family. In fact,
the current administration has a major initiative advocating a home
for every child. The Health and Human Services Department has

(11:16):
done amazing things with all 50 states and the territories
to try to get new initiatives and new standards in
place to show the love and acceptance for these children
that they deserve. Find a home, find a family for
every child. Europe often tries hard to keep the original
family intact and support that family with the state. Different bet,

(11:39):
different results. No doubt there's also a private infant adoption
path that still exists here, imperfect and expensive, and a
religious culture that treats adopting a child as a calling,
not a last result. Hollywood made it visible. Churches made
it normal in places Hollywood never goes. All of that
is machinery. Machinery does not explain why the neighbors accept it.

(12:03):
For that, you need the idea of country. That's kind
of where we get into the identity argument about The
United States, what makes us different? A little bit exceptional,
maybe a lot exceptional. America's open embrace of adoption comes
from a distinctive way we define our own identity. In
a lot of nations, who you are starts with descent, ethnicity, readity, villages, class,

(12:28):
the family name that has been on the land for
300 years. You can be a good person in those
societies and still feel that a child who does not
share that line is not quite yours in the deepest sense.
The American idea, at its best, runs the other way.
You become an American. You take an oath. You take
the name. You take the responsibilities. Blood helps explain a person.

(12:51):
It does not exhaust the person. That does not settle
the question of membership in a family. You become a
family by an act together. Adoption is that same logic
inside a household. Child is claim. The law writes a

(13:12):
new fact. The community is asked to treat the fact
as real, not almost a son, a son, not the
girl they took in, their daughter. That is why a
classroom where kids do not all resemble the parents does
not break the American picture of a family. The picture
was never only a blood photograph. It was a household

(13:33):
bound by law, loyalty, and daily life, and eternal love.
This show is called Nation States for a reason. A
nation state has to answer who's in and on what terms.
Ethnic nations answer with ancestry. Civic nations answer with a
belonging plus obligation. America has always been a messy mix,

(13:56):
but adoption is one place the civic answer still wins
in ordinary life. You can see the opposite when a
culture cannot imagine their full heir who was not born
in the line. You can see our version when a
kid with a different story sits at the Thanksgiving table
and nobody is performing. They just pass the plate. This

(14:18):
is the ideal. We fail it sometimes. Adoptees can get
dumb questions. Who are your real parents? Transracial families can
still catch some stares. The foster system is rough. International
adoption has some ugly chapters. Coercion. Sloppy paperwork. Countries that
treated children as an export. Exceptional is not the same

(14:41):
as innocent. I'm saying the standard we publicly hold is unusual,
and it's worth defending. I did not come to this
as a researcher first. I came to it as a
kid who had friends who were adopted. In my world,
it was not a plot twist. It was a fact,
like who plays shortstop. My very best friend growing up

(15:04):
in rural Maryland was adopted. It was something we talked
about from time to time, but we considered it sort
of interesting, a reality. Didn't make it good or bad.
It was just different. It was part of the stories
we were writing of ourselves as we were growing up together.
Years later, my wife and I adopted both of our children.

(15:26):
I'm not going to turn all of their lives into content,
but I'll say nothing teaches you faster that identity is
made as well as given. than bringing in two wild
and woolly kids, loving them as your own. You learn
it in the pediatrician's office, at the school pickup line,
in the quiet of a house at night. You also

(15:47):
learn that a country around you, for all its fault,
has a language for what you are doing. Our kids.
Not a footnote. That is the richness that I talk
about in America. Once you have lived it, You hear
political talk about who we are differently, a nation that
can look at a child with no shared blood and say,

(16:10):
this one is ours. It's practicing the same muscle it
needs to remain a people instead of a collection of
bloodlines sharing a market. So this is a small social
issue in some ways, but it's a window into the
American nation state. The family is the building block of
our civilizations. The nation state is the building block of

(16:34):
our international system. It's why we're talking about these two
things in a way. And I think that it says
a lot about our country that we can have this
idea of taking people into our family and they are
fully ours, a full-fledged member of our family, legally, in love,

(16:55):
and in reality. And that's the same way when people
immigrate legally the right way, and they come in and
they achieve citizenship and they swear an oath, then they
are given the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities of other citizens.
They are our national family when they come the right

(17:18):
way and assimilate and join the family the way a
child joins an adoptive family. Now, There are some joys
of going through the adoption process that could be made smoother,
just like there are some joys of going through the
immigration process that could be made smoother. There are some
joys about the American experiment that could be made smoother.

(17:40):
When it comes to the adoption side of things, I
think it's super important that as a society we value
it enough that we make sure that those young couples
who are in a position to be able to take
children in and to nurture them, protect them, and care
for them the way children need at an appropriate age.

(18:01):
Those are often people who are not at the stage of, say,
employment success to have unending resources to be able to
do it. So it's not just for those who are
of means to be able to do it, but good
people who have good families and homes to be able
to open and share. They need to be empowered. And

(18:23):
so we really need to be looking at how do
we make sure that these processes are not too onerous,
not too expensive, and that what funds are spent are
spent to the benefit of the child, not to the
fueling of a legal system, a bureaucracy, and sort of
a nanny state trying to micromanage the social work of

(18:44):
this process. We need to make sure that we continue
in our own culture, in your conversations that you have
with your neighbors and your churches, in your public squares,
so to speak. Make sure that you're speaking of ideas
of adoption, realities of adoption, of families who are put
together out of love and circumstances, maybe not necessarily the

(19:06):
old-fashioned way, doesn't make anybody better or worse, just different.
And how special it is that we have American families
and American communities who are big and strong enough to
define our identity in a way that allows for this,
that welcomes it, makes it home. That, I think, ultimately
is the greatest blessing in all of this. Ultimately, that's

(19:29):
what America at its best is. It's home. It's home
for those who take an allegiance to the Constitution, the flag,
want to support our nation. Those who want to make
a contribution to help the country grow and to take
care of others and some ways to take care of

(19:50):
the rest of the world because we're big and powerful
enough to make that kind of a difference. That's what
these families coming together with adoption are doing too. Well,
I think also we might do some good if we
advocate in our public policy that while we respect other
countries and other cultures, we're not telling them what they

(20:12):
must do. We should not be bashful about what they
can do. And with this, I want to share one
story from my time in the White House 20-something years ago.
It was one of those days that the vice president
wasn't available to attend a leader meeting that the president
was having in the Oval Office. And so it was

(20:32):
my turn to be his representative. It was with the
leader of Romania. And it was at a time when
the Romanian government had put a pause on all international adoptions.
And there were a lot of American families who had
been out thousands of dollars, months, if not years of time,
in some cases, partially way through the process of adopting
a child, a child who is in need of being

(20:53):
placed in a home and wants to be placed in
a home, and those were frozen. And the leader of
Romania was coming to the Oval Office. This was in
the post 9-11 environment. When you have a meeting in
the Oval Office, The top leaders around the president meet.
They call it a pre-brief. It could be the national
security advisor, the press secretary sometimes. It could be the

(21:17):
secretary of state. It could be the vice president, the
chief of staff. Other senior staff could be there. The
Oval Office is smaller than people think. You usually have
only about 16 people for a meeting. So that's half Americans,
half the other side. And so I was there. with

(21:38):
the president, I was representing the vice president, the secretary
of state, national security advisor, chief of staff, series of
others were there too. In the pre-brief, they're talking through
things and they're basically saying to the president, just be
mindful that we have large strategic equities at stake with
the government of Romania. We're in the global war on terrorism.

(21:58):
There are concerns about things related to Russia. There's concerns
related to some other matters. But there was still a
contingent of us that were talking about the importance of
the adoption issue. The president took notes, as he did characteristically,
with a fat marker on 3x5 cards to kind of
cue himself to remember some things he wanted in the conversation.

(22:19):
He took it in. He began the meeting with the
usual business of welcoming the leader, talking hard policy. He
got to the part of the agenda that some of
those senior members of the cabinet had recommended he maybe
de-emphasize so that we don't ruffle the feathers of our guests.
by criticizing them for stopping their international adoptions. It was

(22:39):
in that moment that George W. Bush, the president, really
became George W. Bush, the human being. It's something the
rest of the world didn't really get to see often enough.
I'm not saying he was a perfect man or a
perfect president, but I do think this was a beautiful
example of what a president can do when he's the
right person in the right circumstance. He paused the meeting
at a certain point there, and he looked the visitor

(23:01):
in the eye, and he said, you know, as president,
leaders of nations, we have a special responsibility to our people,
and most of all, to the most vulnerable among our people,
especially children. I want to talk to you about this.
He talked as a brother in a family that had
an adopted sibling. He talked about the miracle of adoption,

(23:24):
the beauty of the American family that is put together
with adoption, the love of that family, but how important
it is for those children and that the children deserve
to be loved and accepted and given the opportunity, and
that we as leaders of nations, the president is saying,
not me, Steve Yates, the president was speaking, we need

(23:46):
to take that responsibility for making sure that what we're
doing is being honorable servants for the most vulnerable among us. Now,
I don't remember everything he said. I remember that it
was the most articulate passage I ever heard George W.

(24:07):
Bush utter, that it was moving, borderline spiritual. And I
don't know that it had an effect on the counterpart.
I think it did, but it definitely had an effect
on the rest of us in that room. And in
my five years of serving in the White House, I
had many, many times I went into the Oval Office
where my job was to basically shut up and take

(24:29):
notes and report back to the vice president. And I
did that In many of those meetings, this was one
of those that after the meeting, I made a point
as everyone else went out, I stopped and shook the
president's hand. And I said, thank you, Mr. President, for
speaking up for adoption, for adopted families, for going against
the advice of your senior staff who said to minimize

(24:51):
this issue. I said, as a father of two young
children who don't look like me, This was the most
meaningful time I had had the honor and privilege of
spending in the Oval Office. President just looked me back,
shook my hand, sort of patted me on the shoulder,
sent me on my way out the Oval. We went
about our day. But that, to me, was an exceptional

(25:13):
experience in an exceptional country we should be proud of.
Adoption and the American experiment, two things that are great
about our nation state. So with that, I want to
thank you for coming along for today's conversation. We're going
to take a brief break and come back for some
parting thoughts. In the meantime, always remember to like, share,

(25:33):
and subscribe. Downloading the episodes and telling others to do
so helps us carry the program, build the audience, and
build out the show. Come back in the parting thoughts section.
I'll share with you some ways to be in touch
with us to build out the program's ideas and things
we might be launching in the not-too-distant future. So stay
with us right after this brief break. Welcome back to

(25:57):
Nation States with Yates. A special thank you for sticking
with us through this conversation on nation state and adoption
and the American ideal. It's a topic near and dear
to my heart. Hopefully it makes sense to you why
it fits in with the broader conversation about nation states
as you get a little bit of perspective about how

(26:18):
America compares to some of our peers in the world
when it comes to this conversation. Interesting concept of how
families are formed and what our cultures and our countries
do under these circumstances. It happens to be an area
where America, at least in my estimation, compares very favorably
to other countries. We don't have to talk down about it,

(26:40):
but we should have appropriate pride for this and a
commitment to sustain this admiral part of our nation's culture
and encourage others to come along with us. America adopts
more children into permanent families than any other wealthy country,
especially from foster care, and treats those families as ordinary.

(27:01):
This is not an accident of wealth. Other rich countries
have money. They do not have the same habit. The
habit tracks a civic idea of identity. Belonging can be
created by law, love, and loyalty, not only by inheritance.
I have seen that idea in friends I grew up

(27:21):
with and in my own home. It made me a
more careful student of what a nation is. If we
start telling ourselves that only blood is real, only ethnicity,
only heritage, only the original line, we will not just
change adoption. We will change the country. The same instinct

(27:43):
that says a child cannot really be yours unless the
DNA matches will eventually say a citizen cannot really be
ours unless the story matches. So let's do the hard
parts out loud. Let's fix foster care so fewer children
need a new family in the first place. Tell the
truth about international adoptions abuses and how it's cut way

(28:06):
down in recent years. Listen to adult adoptees when they
say The story was tidier in the brochure than in
the chest. Exceptionalism that cannot stand a flaw is just advertising.
But with that reality check, it's a beautiful part of
who we are in our system. And it's something to

(28:29):
make sure that we invest in and make sure it thrives.
A nation state that is more than a flag or
a tax code. It's a story about who may sit
at a table and call it home. On that score,
the American practice of adoption is one of the better
things that we have done. It is not the whole
of American exceptionalism, but it is a clean example of it,

(28:52):
visible in the school cafeteria, enforced in a courthouse, and proven,
for some of us, at the dinner table. I'm Steve Yates.
This is Nation States with Yates. Thank you for listening.
If you want to have some show ideas come our
way or give any kind of feedback, the tricky formula
is feedback at nationstatesyates.com, or follow us on X at

(29:16):
NS with Yates. We have a show website coming soon.
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some other places. Content will be coming in slowly. We're
still a new show, building things out. We invite you

(29:38):
to join us in the growth. We invite you to
join us in the conversation. Please stay with us. Until
next time, I'm Steve Yates here at Nation States with Yates.
Be strong, America.