Companies reducing adoption benefits

"Support for adoptive parents — one of the most popular “feel-good” employee benefits of the boom years — is emerging as the first to fall under the ax in the recession. For would-be parents, the trend threatens to further complicate an increasingly difficult adoption process, calling for more planning, saving ahead and stockpiling of time off."

While googling, I came across the text of a 1997 speech given by Al Hunt titled, "Why Liberals and Conservatives Should Agree on Adoption." At the time, Hunt was still the longtime Wall Street Journal Washington reporter, now working for Bloomberg News. Hunt is married to Judy Woodruff of CNN and now PBS fame.

While the speech is a bit dated, the underlying views are still relevant.

The talk was sponsored by the Center of the American Experiment, which is a nonpartisan, tax-exempt, public policy and educational institution that brings conservative and free market ideas to bear on the hardest problems facing Minnesota and the nation.

While many American corporations are cutting back on adoption benefits, one would think that conservatives and progressives could find common ground to encourage corporations to keep these benefits in place and look for expense cuts elsewhere.

Pension and endowment funds at Catholic universities, dioceses and hospitals ought to convey their hopes that companies will keep adoption benefits as part of their employee benefit programs.