Biological & Other Parents

Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting.
by Elizabeth Bartholet.
Houghton Mifflin. 276 pp. $21.95.

This past August, a screaming two-and-a-half-year-old child was taken from her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and sent to live with strangers in Iowa. The case, which received national media attention, involved a Michigan couple, the DeBoers, who had been fighting to keep the little girl they had raised since birth, and the girl’s biological parents, the Schmidts, who had been trying to get her back since shortly after she was first given up for adoption. With neither side willing to bend, both couples had hired lawyers and fought their way through almost every state court in Michigan and Iowa.

To most people, the outcome, which took the child away from the only parents she had known and deposited her with complete strangers, must seem utterly sinister and baffling. Yet while the DeBoers have suffered grievously, their claim to sympathy is somewhat clouded by the fact that they knew within three weeks of bringing the child home that her biological parents wanted her back. They were also warned that, because the biological father, Dan Schmidt, had never relinquished his own parental rights, the law—in Iowa, at least—was stacked against them. Although it would have been difficult for them to return the child at any time, the baby would undoubtedly have been better off if she had been given over at an early stage and been spared what must now be the nightmare of her life.

Still, unusual though the De-Boer case may be in some of its twists and turns, it underlines the central issue that invariably crops up whenever adoptive or foster parents take over the care and up-bringing of a child: how to resolve the tension between any ongoing legal right of biological parents to reclaim their offspring and the deep bonds that inevitably develop between a child and those who raise him. Family Bonds, a new book by Elizabeth Bartholet, throws some much-needed light on this issue.

A professor at Harvard Law School, Bartholet comes to the subject of adoption from personal experience, which she recounts here. Around 1976, a divorced mother then in her thirties, she decided that she wanted another child. She pursued pregnancy through increasingly intrusive and painful fertility treatments until, in her early forties, she endured a number of unsuccessful attempts at in-vitro fertilization. Finally, at the age of forty-four, she realized that if she wanted another child, she would have to adopt one.

But that, too, proved problematic. Many adoption agencies disqualified her from their programs because of her age and single status. So, fortified only by her intense desire for a child, she ventured alone to South America, where in 1985, after overcoming stubborn bureaucratic rules and a dizzying array of absurd legal obstacles, she adopted the first of her two Peruvian-born sons. Christopher and Michael are now seven and four years old.

The rest of Bartholet’s book, and by far the more important part, discusses the attitudes and policies governing adoption in this country—most of which, Bartholet contends, are highly misguided, totally untenable, and ultimately responsible for creating a large population of children in need of permanent homes and large numbers of adults who would love to adopt them, but no way of bringing the two groups together.

In Bartholet’s judgment, American policy-makers and child-welfare agencies see adoption as a negative process that creates inferior and defective families, never as good or as happy as their biological counterparts. As a result of this attitude, she writes, we have created a web of laws, rules, and traditions designed to limit adoption or, when adoption does occur, to create adoptive families that resemble as closely as possible nuclear, biological families.

This sort of prejudice, however understandable it may be on its face, has created havoc—making it nearly impossible, for example, for white families to adopt black children. In one of her most interesting and compelling chapters, Bartholet argues that, contrary to the assertions of social-work organizations—including the National Association of Black Social Workers—there is virtually no empirical evidence to show that trans-racial adoptions have a harmful effect on children. By contrast, the delays many minority children face while waiting, often in vain, for racially compatible adoptive homes can cause permanent and devastating damage. Yet these policies continue to be enforced, ultimately creating a large class of minority children who end up essentially unadoptable.

The preference for the “natural” family model is insidious in other ways as well. Judging prospective adoptive parents by this model, adoption agencies, often backed by state laws, ask intrusive and irrelevant questions, and have created a process so lengthy, so expensive, and so pitted with obstacles that only the most determined are successful at negotiating it, while many people who can and want to provide a home for a child are systematically excluded.

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Right now, almost half-a-million children in this country are living in foster care. For many of them that system works as it is intended—as a temporary arrangement while parents (often only one parent) overcome a brief crisis. But there are vast numbers of foster children who will never be able to live with their natural parents and who urgently need homes. Because the system is unable or unwilling to free most of these children for adoption, foster care has become a permanent and destructive way of life for them. Children spend years being shuttled from one home to another, perhaps spending brief periods with a biological parent—usually the mother—only to be neglected or abused again. When they grow up and leave the foster-care system, they will be over-represented among the ranks of the jailed and the homeless.

In New York, where I have had first-hand experience in city government, the foster-care caseload is approaching 50,000, and the system stands on the verge of collapse. The children are overwhelmingly minority, usually have little or no contact with their fathers, and enter the system as victims of abuse or neglect by their mothers or their mothers’ boyfriends. Drugs are frequently involved. The system is so large and chaotic that very little attention is paid to planning for the long-term needs of these children or for ensuring the restoration of stability and permanence to their lives. Quite frequently one reads or hears of young children taken from the foster parents with whom they have spent their entire lives and sent to live with the biological mothers they barely know.

The horror of these cases points up the total lack of regard that those who administer the law have for the relationship that develops between a child and those who act as his parents. Foster-care agencies and the city enjoy almost complete discretion when it comes to removing children from foster homes, and they use it indiscriminately. Foster parents, on the other hand, have no legal rights to the children they raise, and there is very little they can do to challenge these decisions, no matter how outrageous or how destructive to the child.

Nor is this callousness limited to instances of children being returned to their biological mothers. In countless cases in New York, and undoubtedly around the country, foster children are taken from loving and potentially permanent homes for almost any arbitrary reason at all. Children are moved to live with siblings or other relatives they have never met. They may be moved in order to break what the agency perceives as too close an attachment to their foster parents—a particularly perverse way of dealing with the system’s own inability to make expeditious decisions. Children are moved to punish foster parents whom the agency views as nettlesome—those who ask too many questions, or try too hard to secure the benefits or services to which the children are entitled. And, of course, black children are moved from white families when it becomes apparent that the family is trying to make permanent what was meant to be a temporary situation.

In other words, children are moved for any reason, or for no reason at all. And in the process, there is severed the most important relationship that many of these children might ever have.

Elizabeth Bartholet is right when she says that an overly solicitous concern for the biological family has diminished our ability to do what is best for children. Her honest and on occasion brave book may not have all the answers, but it certainly asks the right questions: why have we made it so hard to adopt children, and why have we made things so hard on the children who desperately need to be adopted?