Monday, February 14, 2011

British Survey: Who Should be Allowed to Adopt?

From a British survey on attitudes about who should be allowed to adopt:
When it comes to adopting a child, Brits feel that age and lifestyle habits should be much more damaging to an individual’s case than their race, religion, income or sexuality, our poll has found. We gave respondents a list of groups in society and then asked them to judge whether each should be allowed to adopt or not.

•From our list, people over the age of 50 (46% should be allowed, 33% not), the age of 60 (16% allowed, 64% not) and smokers (44% allowed, 35% not) were the least favoured groups

•People on low incomes (53% allowed, 26% not), single people (53% allowed, 33% not) and homosexual couples (53% allowed, 34% not) came next

•The most favoured groups from our list were couples from a different racial background to that of the child (77% allowed, 11% not), unmarried couples (73% allowed, 17% not) and couples from a different religion to the child (65% allowed, 14% not)
Do you think the results would be the same in the U.S.?  Would smokers be less favored than gay people or single people here? Would it be as high for unmarried couples (73% approve)? I think we'd agree on the age thing -- what do you think? What about other countries, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia (I know there are readers from these countries and many more)?

1 comment:

Theodore said...

In case you care: I read a poll that the Dutch are VERY CONSERVATIVE in the number of parents they think a child should have: TWO, I must say that they were probably not allowed to select more than two. Unimportant details like sex, marital status and such, seem to matter to the church going minority only.

Really, you mean that marriage before pregnancy is not a sign of infertility problems? :)