The Biden-Harris administration finalized a rule in April requiring foster parents to affirm a child’s gender ideology.
“The provider must commit to establishing an environment that supports the child’s LGBTQI+ status or identity,” according to the rule issued by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The policy, says Herbie Newell, president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services, “made people of faith into a different category of foster and adoptive parent, saying that because they didn’t give in to this pro-radical LGBTQ+ agenda, that they couldn’t foster any child with gender dysphoria or any child that might be having any questions about their LGBTQ status.”
“Faith-based Christian people were put on the sidelines and not able to participate in our foster care and adoption system in the same way,” Newell says.
With over 350,000 children in the U.S. foster care system and over 100,000 of them waiting to be adopted, Newell says, he is hopeful that the incoming Trump administration will roll back such “oppressive administrative rulings.”
During Trump’s first administration, there was a sense that “the problem is way too big for us to exclude anyone from the table,” Newell says, noting that he was invited to the West Wing of the White House “three times” during Trump’s first presidency.
During the Biden-Harris administration, Newell says, neither he nor any other faith-based adoption leader he knows got such an invitation.
Newell joins this episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the changes in adoption and foster care policy he hopes to see under the second Trump administration. He also explains the ramifications of China’s decision to end adoptions of Chinese children by Americans.
