Legalizing Love

Understanding the Effect of Legalizing Gay-Marriage on Adoption Rates in the United States

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the state-level legalizations and national legalization of gay marriage affected the number of children adopted in the United States—both on average and in each of the five age groups. To this end, this paper uses a difference regression using data from the Kids Count Data Center, which details the number of children in each of five age groups adopted each year from 2000 to 2017. This regression analysis found a 9.1% increase in the number of total adoptions after the 2016 national legalization of gay marriage. However, the analysis also found that a state’s legalization was correlated with an 8% decrease in adoptions in that state, creating a complexity in the results that underlines the need for further research. However, the difference in effect between state-level and national legalizations may imply that the barriers to gay couples adopting in the United States may be more cultural than explicitly legal.