If Only We Really Did Care: The Truth About Foster Care, Trafficking, and Legal Orphans

Fifty-five foster children go missing every day. Twenty-three thousand reports each year. One in five likely trafficked. Black children are fifty-five percent more likely to be removed from their homes than white children with the same risk profile.

This book follows seven families through the wreckage of the American foster care system: a mother who overdoses after losing her daughter, a girl who ages out into homelessness, eight children who vanish from a group home, five American citizens lost between immigration and child welfare.

Based on five years of research and the latest peer-reviewed data, If Only We Really Did Care exposes a system that financially incentivizes family separation, profits from vulnerable children, and calls adoption "permanency" while parents die of broken hearts.

The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. The question is whether we will continue to let it.