Educational Resource
Backgrounder: Child Welfare Provide Inclusion Act (2014)
Backgrounder: Child Welfare Provide Inclusion Act
The Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2014 (H.R. 5285, S. 2706) would prohibit the federal government and any state that receives certain federal funding from discriminating against child welfare service providers (e.g., adoption and foster care providers) on the basis that the provider declines to provide, facilitate, or refer for a child welfare service that conflicts, or under circumstances that conflict, with the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.
The Inclusion Act is needed because child welfare service providers are being subjected to discrimination because of their sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions. For example, certain religiously affiliated charities in Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and the District of Columbia have had to stop serving adults and children through the provision of adoption and foster care services because of requirements imposed upon them to place children in households headed by two persons of the same sex. These requirements are contrary to their sincerely held religious belief and moral conviction that children ought to be placed in homes headed by a married couple – one man and one woman. In Illinois alone, more than 3,000 children in foster care (more than 20% of the state’s total) were displaced from religiously-affiliated organizations.