Evaluating the intersection of attitudes on foster care and abortion among US American evangelicals

This project brings together two institutions that affect the size and structure of families: termination of pregnancy and the foster care system, where children without a safe home can still be cared for and perhaps adopted. Activists on both sides of the abortion debate evoke adoption and foster care in their rhetoric. Those who support abortion rights make the argument that there are already too many children living in foster care and that restricting abortion would increase the burden on an already overtaxed system. Many also argue that adoption is not an adequate alternative to abortion. Those who oppose abortion urge abortion seekers to consider placing their children with other loving families, highlighting how badly some prospective families want to adopt and how difficult the process of adoption can be. These arguments both oversimplify complex issues, conflating adoption and fostering, and imagining that most foster children are newborns. In reality, nearly 60 percent of foster children are between the ages of 6 and 20 years old. The rates for adoption for children 6 and older decrease sharply, with the majority of adoptions occurring for those children 5 years old and under. This discourse is also deeply tied to religion in the United States, with divisions falling along religious lines and some church communities explicitly involving themselves in both activism and volunteer work. We are interested in the willingness of community members to "put their money where their mouth is," taking direct action to support foster children, based in the belief that this is necessary to reduce abortion rates. We conducted 31 semi-structured qualitative interviews in Spring 2023 with individuals who oppose abortion and are members of two evangelical churches in Tennessee (USA). In these conversations, we investigate how individuals’ attitudes on these topics are related, the role of religion in shaping these attitudes, as well as how these attitudes correlate with general knowledge about both foster care and abortion. We explore the intersection of their attitudes and their beliefs about the interconnectedness of the foster care system and abortion policy in a post-Roe context and a total abortion ban at the state level.