Voluntary Relinquishment for Adoption
Numbers and Trends
Author(s): Child Welfare Information Gateway
Year Published: 2005
Email Order (Free) Print (PDF 195 KB) Share
Rate This 4.8/5, 4 Reviews





Voluntary placement of children for adoption is relatively rare in the United States. This paper examines some of the more recent statistics and trends regarding the relinquishment of children by birth mothers.
How Many Women Place Their Children For Adoption?

The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) is the only national source of data on voluntary relinquishment for adoption. According to the 1995 NSFG, 1 less than 1 percent of children born to never-married women were placed for adoption from 1989 to 1995 (Chandra, Abma, Maza, & Bachrach, 1999).
  • The percentage is higher for White never-married women (1.7 percent) than for Black never-married women (near 0 percent).
  • Relinquishment by married and formerly married women is rarer still, and percentages are not available.
About 1.4 million children were born to unmarried women in 2003, comprising 34.6 percent of total births (Hamilton, Martin, & Sutton, 2004). If the relinquishment rate measured by NSFG in 1995 for never-married women were applied to all unmarried women who gave birth in 2003, this would mean that fewer than 14,000 children were voluntarily relinquished in 2003.
Who Are the Women Who Place Their Children?

Other than the NSFG data on mother's race, information about who relinquishes a child for adoption is limited, in part because relinquishment is rare and the numbers are so small.
Most research focuses on unmarried teens who relinquish a child. In addition to being disproportionately White, those who relinquish tend to have higher education and income levels, higher future career and educational aspirations, and a strong preference for adoption expressed by the teen's mother and/or the birth father (Miller & Coyl, 2000).
  • Namerow, Kalmuss, and Cushman (1993) studied 592 unmarried pregnant women age 21 or younger. The sample was selected from maternity residences, clinics, and teen pregnancy programs or adoption agencies. Postbirth interviews with 527 of the teens showed that those who had personal experience with adoption or had spent time at a maternity residence were more likely to relinquish. The choice to relinquish was also heavily influenced by the preference of the teens' mothers and boyfriends.
  • A study of 162 pregnant teens residing in a maternity home found that birth fathers' preference for adoption was the most powerful predictor of the mothers' consistency in their decision to relinquish (Dworkin, Harding, & Schreiber, 1993).