The number of babies put up for adoption fell below 100 last year, the lowest figure in nearly half a century. Adoptions peaked in 1967 at 1,493 and continued high until the mid-1980s, when the numbers fell below 1,000 annually and a steep decline set in.
The new low, to be revealed when the 1998 report of the Adoption Board is published later this year, suggests that the virtual disappearance of traditional-style adoptions is imminent. It also means that couples will have no option but to adopt from abroad.
In 1997, of 422 adoption orders made by the Adoption Board, only 136 were for babies placed through adoption societies or health boards in the traditional way. Nearly two-thirds were family adoptions in which a married couple adopted the wife's child, where the child was born outside marriage to a different father.
The board recognised 148 foreign adoption orders.
Ms Liz O'Flynn, secretary of Cunamh - which as the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society once handled hundreds of adoptions annually - told The Irish Times the society placed only 20 children for adoption last year. According to Mr Kevin Cooney, of the Adopted People's Association, two main factors account for the steep fall in adoptions: financial support for single mothers and the availability of abortion.
About three-quarters of women who become pregnant outside marriage now become single mothers, while about one-quarter have abortions.
According to Ms Evelyn Mahon, who directed research by a Trinity College Dublin team into crisis pregnancies on behalf of the Department of Health and Children, the relatively few women who give their children for adoption find abortion "completely morally repugnant".
The Adopted People's association believes that the restrictions on adopting the children of married couples should be eased. Some fostered children will never return to their birth parents and could be adopted if the law was changed, he says.
Adoption Board statistics show that since 1987, the number of babies adopted by non-relatives fell by two thirds.