Adoption

There are an estimated 153 million children around the world who have lost one or both parents.¹ Millions more children have been abandoned or displaced, with exact figures unknown. Over 5,700 children are orphaned daily, and more than 8 million orphaned children live in institutional care rather than with a family or in a foster home.² In the United States alone, nearly half a million — 437,465 — children were in the foster care system in 2017. In that same year, 250,248 children left the foster care system, and 273,539 entered the system. Of those children, 117,794 were awaiting adoption.³ In 2014, there were a total of 110,373 adoptions in the United States, a decline from 133,737 adoptions in 2007.⁴ From 2015 to 2016, 53,549 foster children in the United States were adopted with the aid of a public child welfare agency.⁵