Instead of Abortion, Adoption should be mandatory for unwanted children.

I'm not sure what Pro means by it being mandatory to put a child's needs before anyone else in a foster home. I know of no such law that requires this. Perhaps Pro can point me in the direction of where a law or policy states this. And in any case, it's logically impossible for this to be the case due to the fact that foster homes contain more than one child so it would be self-contradictory for each child to be put before every other child in the home. The more children that are in a foster home, the more the love, attention, time allotted per child etc has to necessarily be shared between them. Children are also often moved around to more than one foster home during their time in care, making it harder still to latch onto a motherly and/or fatherly figure. Maybe I misinterpreted what Pro meant by this statement though. If so, I would ask them to please clarify. They can't solely have meant what they say in the next sentence because Pro already agreed at the outset that many children never end up getting out of the foster care system and into a loving home at all due to the supply exceeding the demand. I agree with Pro that with proper child development and care for a baby, a child can have a chance at life that abortion would not have given them. But as I've already demonstrated in the previous round, this is often not the case and is only true when numerous factors are ignored. And of course, what I said in the previous paragraph also plays a role. The more children in a foster home, the more each child has to share the time allotted with the foster parents. This is the very definition of a lack of proper child development and care for a baby. An unintended but unavoidable form of neglect if you will. Pro then states that most foster homes are state funded. This varies wildly from state to state[5] but I'm willing to accept that Pro's use of the word "most" is justified here. State funding certainly does outweigh private funding in most states and outweighs it significantly when taken as one measurement nationwide. So it's a fair statement by Pro. But Pro then uses this fact to assert that because of this, they're subject to status checks. This was in response to my question about what standards these foster homes maintain. But this does not answer my question, it merely changes what the question is. Because then the question becomes: how rigorous and thorough are these checks, what standards do the checks require in order to give any given home a pass and how easy is it to deceive the people doing the status checks? Foster parents in Oregon were able to repeatedly get the thumbs up from status checks despite keeping twins in homemade cages in a blacked out room and depriving them of food and water. One of the twins was also not given much needed regular medical care from a neurologist due to a shunt that was put in his head at birth to drain fluid. Pressure had built up and he was nearly comatose when finally rescued. The status checks had not kept on top of whether or not the carers were taking him to the neurologist. They weren't even bothering to visit the home in person for the status checks a lot of time. They often just did it via a phone call. And on the occasions when they did actually bother to visit the home, they were greeted with a room that had been set up as a fake nursery. The status checks were not sufficient at preventing - nor putting a stop to - this going on. If not for a relative of the foster parents blowing the whistle, it may have been allowed to continue indefinitely[6]. Another thing to consider here as well is that checking up on the children during their stay does nothing to help them after they leave. Where is the support for that? For instance, a collaborate study on Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin found that 24% of the children that came of age and had to leave foster care to make room for other younger children ended up homeless and almost half ended up in prison within two years of leaving foster care[7]. Is this really any kind of life to have? Pro claims that the emotional trauma on a mother that has an abortion is the same as the emotional trauma of a mother that brings the child to term and puts it up for adoption. I have explained why I think this is not the case (insofar as emotional trauma can really be quantified in any meaningful way). That the best case scenarios for adoptions are just as bad as those for abortions and that in the worst case scenarios, the adoption option adds additional factors for trauma and are also longer lasting. So that collectively, the sum total of trauma felt by a sample group of women that give up their children for adoption is greater than the sum total of trauma felt by a sample group of the same size that have abortions. Pro has not given such an explanation for asserting that the trauma is the same or of a similar amount. I'm glad that Pro and I can agree that outlawing abortions would not stop abortions from happening. This is not the entire point though. It's not just that it won't stop abortions, it's that it doesn't reduce them at all. Not even slightly. If outlawing abortions doesn't affect abortion rates, it's unlikely that encouraging adoption would change that either, given that the adoption option has always been available to those that opted for abortions and its availability is common knowledge. It's also worth noting that the goalposts have been moved here (although probably unintentionally). The resolution is about making adoption mandatory, not simply encouraging it. I agree with Pro that mothers are not justified in choosing to kill their child but Is the issue about the welfare of the child (as Pro has argued throughout this debate) or is it about bringing the mothers that have abortions to justice? Because the two are mutually exclusive. I argue that, on balance, adoptions are worse than abortions. But to bring mothers to justice for having abortions would require that adoption first become mandatory. Pro may not have their cake and eat it too. [3] thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)30380-4/abstract (reposted due to link not working properly when posted in the previous round) [5] https://www.cga.ct.gov... [6] http://www.oregonlive.com... [7] https://www.chapinhall.org...