It is a lamentable fact that the care system fails many of the children entrusted to it. A family environment needs to be exceptionally terrible – murderously, malevolently endangering – before a child isn’t better off there than in care. It’s a sad failure of the state and calls into question the extreme fastidiousness of the adoption process. Good luck adopting if you smoke, but the outcomes for children brought up in the households of smokers are far better than for those whose childhoods are spent in care. But the adoption system is not held accountable for the failings of the care system,
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