Brumble and Kampfe (p. 158) speculate this could have been due to the great number of American soldiers who saw, first hand, the devastation of the war and the need to help orphaned children. During the 1950s, Harry and Bertha Holt adopted eight Korean children, getting federal laws changed in order to do so. They were pioneers of international adoption and founded what has become the largest international adoption agency in the world. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement and the war in Viet Nam fostered a new tolerance and acceptance of human differences. Special needs adoption gained momentum in the 1970s, as more people became willing to adopt healthy children who were older, bi-racial, and possibly needed to be placed with
There were more people willing to adopt children once considered "unadoptable," who had mental, emotional or physical problems (Brumble and Kampfe, p. 159).
The case of Roe v. Wade in 1973 meant that a woman did not have to give birth if she did not want to do so. Social mores have also changed. Whereas an unwed mother was once shunned by society and sometimes even by her own family, single women give birth and raise their own children with much greater frequency that ever before. Both abortion and the trend of single mothers keeping their babies has resulted in fewer babies being available for adoption.
Higher rates of infertility means that more couples are looking for adoptable babies. Many women are waiting until their thirties and forties to have children and may not realize until they want to start a family that they will have trouble doing do. After 35, a woman's
