Prospective Parents Had A Chance To Reconsider What Matters”: How The Pandemic Triggered An Adoption Boom

Olivia* was sat in her conservatory last May, looking out into the garden, when she realised she was ready to adopt. She’d been furloughed for three months, and the lengthy haze her abusive ex-girlfriend left behind had finally cleared. Feeling uncertain and hopeful, she caught sight of a sign, perched there on the fence. “A sparrow and a blue tit,” she beams. “I hadn’t actually seen birds in my garden for years because of construction work going on around the area. It just seemed to be a symbol of hope, really, in amongst the pandemic. That I was hoping to adopt two children and suddenly, there’s these two little birds outside.”

The 34-year-old decided to take the leap after the pandemic wrung all notions of what if from her head. “Nobody expected this time last year for the pandemic to get as bad as it did, and as it is now. You can spend your whole life saying, ‘Well, I’ll just wait until...’ And then ‘until’ never comes,” says Olivia. “With plenty of time to apply to adopt and go through the process without the pressure of having to do it around work, I thought, ‘When am I going to get another opportunity to do this?’”

Adoption interest rates are buoyant for the first time in half a decade. Since lockdown was first implemented in March, Adoption UK has seen traffic on prospective adopter web pages surge by 63 per cent. For agencies such as One Adoption West and Adopt South West, interest has doubled since the pandemic began, with other agencies across the country observing similar waves of applicants. It comes as a welcome shock to a sector grappling with a sharp decline in adoptions since 2015.

“We went into 2020 with an adopter shortfall,” Sue Armstrong Brown, chief executive of Adoption UK tells British Vogue. “So children in care waiting for adopters, and not enough adopters. The pandemic started, and everybody was deeply concerned about that. But what we actually saw was really surprising, and extremely encouraging.”

Brown suspects that a slower societal pace has allowed more scope for reflection. “It appears that the lockdown and the disruption to the world caused by coronavirus has actually been prompting people to think about what really is important in their lives. I think people have, for better or for worse, been forced to step out of their normal lives, and think about what they would really value doing.”

For Heather and Will, the pandemic has laid bare the gaping cracks in the system through which vulnerable children fall every day. “We’ve been very lucky to have a stable home and stable jobs throughout the pandemic. But not everybody is that lucky. I think the pandemic, for us, just really highlighted the social injustices others are facing,” says Heather. “Covid-19 has highlighted that everybody now has a new normal, and adoption’s no different. Adoption is a new normal for any family of any child.”

The couple had been struggling to conceive for many years, likely due to Heather’s polycystic ovary syndrome, a leading cause of infertility that affects one in 10 women in the UK. They mulled over IVF and surrogacy, but Will had spent part of his childhood in children’s homes and foster care himself, and the impulse to pay it forward outweighed any need for a biological connection.

“Trying for years, as prospective parents, and feeling like we’ve failed, what we found is that there is a whole world, a huge community out there that is already made up of adoptive families and foster families,” Heather says. “It was like: you’re not the first couple that will go through this, and you won’t be the last. I guess it’s a sense of belonging that we’re starting to find.”

Prospective adopters are enamoured with visions of mundane, unremarkable familial moments that others often take for granted. Coming home mud-slick and covered in brambles from running around the woods with the dog. Tracing two, three sets of footprints on yellow beaches, and hauling back fervent kids who wade a little too deep into the sea. Establishing private traditions of going swimming first thing on Sunday mornings, or marathoning Disney films late into the night. “It’s only when you haven’t had that experience and you’re longing for it that you realise just how big a deal that is,” Olivia says. “It’s the normal in between the highs and lows.”

But as hopeful as Olivia, Heather and Will are for their future families, they are also painstakingly prepared and trained for the high possibility of their prospective children having significant childhood trauma. Brown believes the adoption system needs to recognise what modern adoption is – a far cry from the history of healthy, unscathed newborns relinquished to adoring guardians. “We are talking about the most vulnerable children in our society, the ones that can never go back home, and may have lifelong scars from what they endured at the beginning,” says Brown. “Even if people think about it seriously for the first time because the world has changed so much, and they are searching for something meaningful to take from the year, there is – once people come forward to register their interest in adoption – a six-month approval process, at least.”

While the pandemic has unmistakably boosted adoption interest rates, it has also increased the number of children under state care. “Lockdowns have exacerbated the toxic trio of domestic abuse, increased alcohol consumption and deteriorating mental health, and those are the three drives that push children into care. All of them have gone up since March,” says Brown. “But right now, the surge in interest is very encouraging, because it gives us more confidence that all the children waiting in care with an adoption plan might well be able to be matched into adoptive homes.”

“The pandemic may have given people time to stop and take stock and put themselves forward for adoption,” Olivia says. “But it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world at the time. There are always children who are going to need a loving home, and a second chance.”

”