Why is adoption in France so difficult?

“We are worn out, and we are trying to move on. » After a decade of waiting, Valérie and Jean-Philippe*, 49 years old each and married for more than twenty years, ended up abandoning their plan to adopt a child. However, they went into it with optimism.

In 2015, after a difficult process of medically assisted procreation that remained unsuccessful, they mourned the loss of a biological child and turned to adoption. “It was far from obvious: was I going to love a child who was not mine? » remembers Jean-Philippe. It all clicked after friends entrusted their baby to them for a weekend.

The couple obtains approval, valid for five years, issued by the departmental social services. They turned to the Philippines, where it was possible to welcome children from 3 to 6 years old, “even if giving up on nursing a baby was very difficult,” confides Valérie. Ten years later, still not “related” (that is to say without a child having been entrusted to them), they are preparing to hang up their lives. However, their second approval does not expire until next September. “But we doubt it will work, and we are disappointed. »

Like them, thousands of French people waiting to be matched are facing a sudden decline in the number of adoptions. France, which still carried out more than 4,000 international adoptions in 2004, only carried out 69 in 2025, from only eighteen countries. This figure is expected to fall further, since in March 2026, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs temporarily suspended adoption procedures concerning children residing in Vietnam, where five adoptions had been carried out last year. The country chosen at the time by Valérie and Jean-Philippe, the Philippines, has not entrusted any children to France. “When we launched in 2015, we nevertheless targeted it because we saw people around us for whom the steps were successful,” they explain.

Countries close their doors

International adoption reached its peak in the early 2000s: 45,500 children were adopted worldwide in 2004. Then it fell from 2005. “A phenomenon common to all adopting countries, at the same time,” explains Jean-François Mignot, demographer and researcher at the CNRS.

Several factors explain this development. The Hague Convention, adopted in 1993, regulates the procedures and enshrines the principle of subsidiarity: an international adoption only takes place after all solutions have been exhausted in the country of origin. The objective is to avoid the uprooting of the child and the risks of trafficking. “In countries historically inclined to entrust children to international adoption, maternal and child protection has developed,” explains Anne Royal, president of the Childhood & Adoption Families association.

The increase in living standards also facilitates domestic adoptions. In Colombia, for example, most children are now adopted by Colombians. Legalizing abortion and contraception also reduces unwanted pregnancies.

The history of international adoption also remains marked by several scandals. In 2024, after a damning 2021 report revealing serious irregularities, the Netherlands decided to gradually abandon the adoption of foreign children. The same year, in France, an inspection mission also detailed the abuses of the system. “But the legal certainty of procedures has never been as strict as today, and these scandals did not concern all countries,” recalls Jean-François Mignot. For him, all countries have gradually stopped entrusting their children to international adoption.

Geopolitical or social factors have sometimes accelerated the process. Russia banned adoptions from the United States in 2012, in response to a US law targeting it. After the 1988 Olympic Games, South Korea, long the leading country of origin for international adoptees, reduced these procedures to escape its image as an underdeveloped country. These decisions only anticipated a broader reality: there are no more adoptions because there are no longer, or almost no, adoptable children.

Avoid false hopes

The blockages are not only international. They are also French. Several players in the sector, such as Marie Garidou, vice-president of the Movement for Adoption Without Borders, denounce the lack of voluntarism from the authorities. Monique Limon, president of the National Adoption Council, on the contrary takes this line: there is no longer any question of going abroad to look for children to meet the expectations of the French.

“The time when Westerners considered themselves best placed to educate children in developing countries is over. We are looking for parents for a child, not the other way around,” she explains. For the manager, social services would benefit from better explaining to candidates the difficulty of the procedures, even if it means issuing fewer approvals to avoid false hopes.

Lacking an international horizon, the focus is therefore on France. Among the approximately 400,000 minors and young adults entrusted to Child Welfare (ASE), 5,200 are wards of the State, that is to say legally unrelated to their family of origin, and therefore adoptable. However, even if their number doubled between 2013 and 2023, that of children actually given up for adoption remains stable, around a thousand per year.

“For us it’s incomprehensible,” exasperate Adèle and Bastien*, engaged in an adoption journey since 2020. Already parents of four biological children, they even moved to a larger house to accommodate a child with a disability. Five years after obtaining their approval, they have still not received any calls.

This paradox can be explained by a second barrier, this time Franco-French. The increase in the number of children becoming wards of the state does not mean that more of them can or should be adopted. In 2016, the law relating to the protection of children replaced the judicial declaration of parental neglect with the declaration of abandonment: from now on, when a parent has not maintained the relationships necessary for their education or development with their child for a year, social services have the obligation to take steps to record the abandonment. At the end of this procedure, the child becomes a ward. This law made it possible to improve identification but it did not result in more very young children without ties being immediately adoptable. Many are therefore older and already have several years of family life, placements, and sometimes violence.

“Adoption is not suitable for everyone,” says Anne Oui, of the National Child Protection Observatory. It has neither the same meaning nor the same evidence for an infant and for a child of 7, 10 or 15 years old. “The older ones may not have given up on their biological parents,” explains Karine Carpentier, head of the adoption and access to origins service in Pas-de-Calais. “Today, with the drop in the number of children born in secret, the little baby a few months old abandoned at birth, without health problems, almost no longer exists. »

The mourning of the dreamed child

This is where the route changes its nature. It’s no longer just a matter of waiting, but of honestly redefining who we feel capable of welcoming. This development also contributes to the drop in the number of valid approvals, from nearly 19,000 in 2013 to 8,700 in 2023.

Charlotte and Gabriel embody this work of mourning for the dream child. For their first approval, obtained in 2021, this couple of forty-year-olds from Nantes volunteered to welcome a baby without pathology. Unrelatedly, they requested a new approval, this time open to welcoming a child from 0 to 3 years old. “We thought about going up to 5 years, but we understood that we were doing it to increase our chances, which is not fair,” says Charlotte.

A caution that Valérie and Jean-Philippe also had to demonstrate during their efforts with the Philippines: “There is a fine line to be maintained between one’s desire to have a child and the need not to go beyond what one feels capable of. »

Some couples, however, manage to fit their project into this new reality. A few months ago, Thibaut and Marie welcomed Diane, now 2 years old, with Down syndrome. On the carpet in the family living room, all smiles, the little girl is having fun scattering the pieces of a puzzle with her little brother. “We knew that there were few adoptable children in France and that they often presented particularities. We were therefore open to welcoming a child with a disability,” say Thibaut and Marie, who had to describe this project when applying for approval. “Giving criteria is a difficult exercise, we had the impression of doing our bidding. »

All the candidates we met describe the same tension: the reality of adoption requires constantly re-examining one’s project and its limits, at the cost of long and trying questioning. For Charlotte, “the wait is sometimes unbearable, but time also allows you to mature. I probably wouldn’t have said it like that two years ago. Over the years, I understood that to adopt was to become the special parents of a special child. »

* First names have been changed.