Adoption as an institution has never been in such turmoil. The first cracks occurred when anguished adoptees began the “search movement,” shattering the wall of secrecy that kept them from knowing about their biological parents. Then some birthparents, angry over being cut off from the children they bore, pushed for “open adoptions.” Most recently, activists have been attacking the very concept of adoption. For some prospective parents, the whole idea now seems far too emotionally complicated.
Ironically, the Baby Jessica case came at a time when child-welfare advocates were staunchly making the case that adoption should be seen as a cure for a variety of social ills. Too many teen mothers? Encourage some to place children for adoption. Couples unable to conceive or unwilling to spend a small fortune on fertility treatments? Adoption’s the answer. Struggling children, from teens in foster care to babies in AIDS wards? Loving adoptive families could better their lives.
If adoption is a cure-all, why is it taking so many blows? Shouldn’t America have more adoptions, not fewer? The politics of adoption make that a charged question.
Take the issue of illegitimacy. At last count, 30 percent of all children, and two thirds of blacks, were born to single mothers. In 1991, 36,000 babies were born to unmarried girls 15 and under. By contrast, only 25,000 healthy infants are placed for adoption. Studies show that adopted children have a much better chance of growing up in decent conditions than children raised by unwed teen mothers.
Commentators on the political right and left have argued-sometimes provocatively-that more single teenage women should be encouraged to place their children for adoption. Charles Murray, an academic at the American Enterprise Institute, has suggested that many young welfare mothers are simply unfit to be parents. “A great number of children born to never-married teens are living in utterly dreadful circumstances,” Murray says. The view is echoed from the left by Father George Clements, a Chicago priest who started a movement to encourage black church congregants to adopt some of the 180,000 black children languishing in foster care. “You have to bow to reality,” he says. “In most of the cases there is no father present, the mother is so often on welfare and not able to take care of herself let alone another human being.”
But efforts to deal with illegitimacy will crash into an even more volatile issue: race. That’s been the case with foster care, where there are proportionately about twice as many black kids as whites. Attempts to find them permanent homes would likely require an increase in white parents adopting black children. But for the past two decades the social-welfare system has moved to restrict transracial adoption. In 1972 the National Association of Black Social Workers shook the adoption world by declaring that transracial adoption was “cultural genocide.” Morris Jeff Jr., former president of the black social workers’ group, later warned, “It is their [white families’] aim to raise black children with white minds.”
Recent efforts to make transracial adoption easier have been snarled in racial politics. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio introduced legislation designed to speed these adoptions-prompted in part by a 1989 case in which a black Ohio child was I taken away from a white foster family and placed with a black family in upstate New York. A few months later the child was found killed-by the new adoptive parents. Metzenbaum’s bill has only split traditional allies. Jesse Jackson testified in support, declaring that “a sense of permanence and the Tight to be loved unconditionally are essential to the mental well-being of any human.” But the NAACP opposed the bill-reversing its initial position because of objections from the National Association of Black Social Workers,
Other efforts to encourage adoption have run into a different buzz saw: feminist abortion politics. On the one hand are some feminists who oppose adoption out of fear they would lend credibility to the right-to, fife forces, which have long encouraged adoptions as an alternative to abortion. The most recent edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the popular health guide produced by the Boston Women’s Book Collective, contends: “Feminists have been slow to recognize adoption’s exploitation of their sisters.” They point out that adoption has been advocated by other “anti-choice proponents who blithely tout adoption as the answer to abortion.”
But within the pro-choice movement some are starting to embrace adoption because it provides another key option for women. “This has really broadened our understanding of reproductive rights,” says B. J. Isaacson Jones, president of Reproductive Health Services of St. Louis, the abortion clinic at the center of a Missouri abortion battle in 1990. Under prodding from local right-to-life groups, the clinic opened its own adoption agency, which now places 35 children a year.
Feminist thinking has even divided over the issue of fertility technology. While some believe fertility treatments empower women by giving them control over when and how they reproduce, Elizabeth Bartholet, an adoptive mother and Harvard Law School professor, argues the opposite. “In the nearly 10 years that I struggled with infertility,” she has written, “no one ever suggested that I consider adoption as an alternative to further treatment … Now I look back and see a woman [taught that] her ability to bear a child was central to her meaning as a human being and that ‘real’ parenting involved raising that biologically linked child.”
It is the struggle over parental power-does it reside with the biological or the adoptive parents?-that ultimately threatens the institution of adoption. Forty years ago, women would place a baby, sometimes without even seeing it, and expect never to lay eyes on the child again. The child was expected to pretend his or her adoptive parents were his only parents. Closed adoption, as this conventional model is called, was designed to protect adoptees from the stigma of illegitimacy, birthparents from the shame of giving birth out of wedlock and adoptive parents from the embarrassment of infertility.
But the unreality of the approach-how can you deny the existence of those who literally gave you life?-led to an aggressive movement to open the system. Groups like the American Adoption Congress and Concerned United Birthparents have pushed to make birth records accessible and allow ongoing contact between biological parents and adoptees. In response, some agencies turned to “semiopen” adoptions, in which the birth and adoptive parents might exchange letters and first names and the child has the prospect of getting detailed information about his or her birthparents at age 18.
Yet other activists have gone further, declaring war on adoption itself. Annette Baran, a California social worker who helped found the open-adoption movement, later concluded that it has become merely a marketing tool to lure pregnant women into surrendering their children. Baran in 1990 proposed a system of “guardianships,” in which birthparents could reclaim kids.
The reality is that most adoptions work well. While experts in all camps agree that adoptees sometimes face challenges-especially in their teens when identity issues are ripest-respected studies conclude that four of five adoptions are successful, two of three decisively. Compared with the typical American family in the 1990s, that’s an impressive track record.
Only 2 percent of unmarried mothers placed their children for adoption in the 1980s, down from 9 percent some 15 years earlier.
Only 50,000 U.S. children become available each year for nonrelatives to adopt; half of these are healthy infants.
In 1991, 36,000 babies were born to unmarried girls age 15 and under.
In June 1992, 442,000 children were in foster care, a 68 percent jump from 1982.
Prospective parents have to wait at least two years on average to adopt. Some pay fees of $50,000 to more than $100,000 to get babies through private adoption.
