You are here:
  1. Home
  2. Report
  3. Finding Children Forever Homes…

Finding Children Forever Homes: LGBT Foster & Adoptive Families

Authors

Movement Advancement Project
Family Equality Council
Center for American Progress

Partners

American Civil Liberties Union
Human Rights Campaign

Share

Bluesky Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Bluesky

Report Resources

Finding Children Forever Homes: LGBT Foster & Adoptive Families
Download

Recommended Citation

Movement Advancement Project, Family Equality Council, and the Center for American Progress. June 2012. Finding Children Forever Homes: LGBT Foster and Adoptive Families. https://mapresearch.org/report/finding-children-forever-homes-lgbt-foster-adoptive-families/.
Download

The Bottom Line

In an ideal world, every child would be born into a loving stable family, yet the reality is that many children are not. For the more than 400,000 children living in foster care, the goal is to establish safety and permanency with family members or to find adoptive families to provide “forever” homes. Unfortunately, LGBT families who wish to foster and adopt are often barred from doing so by archaic and discriminatory laws, policies or practices. This need not be the case.

Finding Children Forever Homes: LGBT Foster & Adoptive Families highlights the compelling need to find adoptive families for waiting children, provides an overview of the barriers faced by LGBT families wishing to foster and adopt, and includes targeted recommendations designed to ensure that LGBT families can help fill the need for loving, stable foster and adoptive homes for children.

The brief, which is based on content from All Children Matter: How Legal and Social Inequalities Hurt LGBT Families, was produced in partnership with the the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Both reports were co-authored by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), the Family Equality Council and the Center for American Progress.

Related resources

Child Welfare Nondiscrimination Laws
Child welfare nondiscrimination laws protect youth in the child welfare system from discrimination based on the youth's sexual orientation and gender identity.
Map
Religious Exemptions
State religious exemption laws permit people, churches, non-profit organizations, and sometimes corporations to seek exemptions from state laws that burden their religious beliefs. These laws have recently been used as a defense when businesses discriminate against or refuse service to LGBTQ customers and same-sex couples.
Map
Family Leave Laws
State family leave laws covering same-sex couples govern whether an LGBT person can take leave from work to care for their same-sex spouse or partner.
Map
Targeted: Child Welfare Services
Map
LGBTQ People
LGBTQ people in the United States have families, work hard to earn a living, pay taxes, and serve their communities and their country. MAP offers a collection of resources addressing the many aspects of LGBTQ people’s lives.
Policy Overview
LGBTQ Families
LGBTQ families are part of the fabric of neighborhoods and communities across the United States. An estimated two million children are being raised by LGBTQ parents. Decades of research shows that children with LGBTQ parents grow up as happy, healthy and well-adjusted as their peers.
Policy Overview
Adoption
There are more than 440,000 children in foster care across the country, with more than 125,000 children waiting to be adopted. LGBTQ people have long served as foster and adoptive parents. Research shows they are more likely to foster or adopt than their peers. Despite this, some states have passed
Policy Overview
Talking About Family Recognition Laws & LGBTQ Families
Family recognition laws establish a secure legal relationship between a child and their parent or parents. Learn conversation approaches that help people understand why strong legal child-parent ties are essential to a child’s security and well-being and why families—no matter how they are formed—should be treated equally under the law.
Guide
Community Acceptance: Resources for Communities Working with Transgender & Gender Diverse Children

Many people don’t understand what it means to be transgender or gender diverse, so some parents or family members struggle when their child comes out as transgender or gender diverse. It is natural for parents to have questions, and this document, jointly created by the Biden Foundation, Gender Spectrum, and

Blog Post

Join our community

Get research updates, stories, and ways to support.

Subscribe