Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004270413
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TRACY WIMMER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This crowd wants children.
Those who are smart will dial the number at midnight and let it ring until morning.
Those who are smarter will come in person - arriving no later than 6 a.m. - even though one goes here another goes here another goes here the doors won't open for another 2 1/2 hours. Some show up at midnight.
It is an unwritten rule that on the first working day in January, social workers do not call in sick. Instead, they go in early to find a parking space, work their way up the long driveway, onto the wrap-around porch through swarms of people both eager and anxious to make their acquaintance.
Once inside, workers are given last-minute instructions, handed a stack of intake interview forms, then seated at tables. When the clock strikes half-past 8, the doors open. The crowd shuffles in, quickly forming five lines.
First the worker records the exact time, then gets the person's name and address.
Within two hours, some 50 people will have registered their desire to adopt a child with Catholic Charities of Southwest Virginia.
They leave not with the knowledge that they will soon have a child, but with the hope that one day they may.
Throughout the process, they will hear the word patience. Adoption today is an exercise in the virtue.
For while pregnancy takes nine months, adoption can take nine years.
Available parents, no children
Both in Southwest Virginia and throughout the nation, there simply aren't enough children to meet the demand of couples who want to adopt.
Or rather, there aren't enough children of the right kind - healthy white infants. There is a perpetual pool of kids who need homes: children who are black or racially mixed, who are above toddler age, who have siblings or who have handicaps.
The dwindling number of healthy white infants placed for adoption has much to do with social trends: legalized abortion, school systems that assist teen mothers in finishing their educations, the strengthening of rights of putative fathers, the reduction of the stigma once associated with out-of-wedlock births and a lack of comprehensive maternity homes.
While the number of adoptable healthy white infants continues to shrink, the number of would-be adoptive parents continues to grow.
One in every 6 American couples is infertile, according to Resolve, a national infertility education group. That figure has increased in recent years, because many baby-boomers who postponed pregnancy in their 20s in order to establish careers are finding out in their 30s that they can't conceive.
Their options are limited: To resign themselves to childlessness or to join the throngs of people pursuing someone else's offspring through agencies, ads, attorneys and, more often than not, anything that works.
Available children, no parents
No one actually knows how many children are adopted in the United States each year. The federal government stopped keeping track in 1975 because adoption records were haphazardly submitted by the states on a volunteer basis. A more reliable federal counting system should be in place by 1991.
The best estimate from the National Committee for Adoption is that there were more than 60,000 adoptions by non-relatives in 1986, the most recent year for which records 9 1 ADOPTION Adoption are available.
That figure could be much higher, were it not for a great irony: While adoptive parents literally will go to the ends of the Earth to find healthy white or foreign infants, thousands of American children who are older, from racial minorities, or who have siblings or handicaps go begging for homes.
In 1986 the nation's foster-care system harbored at least 36,000 of these adoptable "special-needs" children - a euphemism for kids who cannot be placed easily. Keeping them in foster care costs taxpayers millions of dollars every year.
Only 13,500 found families in 1986. But that same year, more than 9,000 couples and single parents adopted children from overseas.
The government does keep track of the number of foreign children adopted, through naturalization records. It increased to 10,000 this year.
Adoptive parents are learning that they can cut the waiting period for a child down to as little as a year by adopting foreign children. The most prohibitive factor in foreign adoption is cost, which often runs between $10,000 and $20,000.
Last year, the National Committee for Adoption estimated that only 25,000 couples pursued and found healthy white infants born domestically.
It's easy to understand why the demand for white infants is so great.
When a couple adopts a child, most try to construct a family as close as possible to the one they would have had by giving birth. So most wish to adopt within their own race. And in this country, the great majority of adoptive parents are Caucasian.
When they adopt a newborn, parents feel they begin at the beginning - starting anew with a child whose concept of life they will shape from the beginning.
But finding the baby is a different matter.
A normal way to build a family
Women simply are not choosing the "adoption option," according to the National Committee for Adoption.
Take the number of abortions each year, and add the number of out-of-wedlock births. Then compare those figures to the number of infant adoptions. You'll find that only 1 percent of women facing a problem pregnancy choose to place a child for adoption.
Virginia ranks 50th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in terms of the number of unmarried women who put their babies up for adoption.
The national average is 1 adoption per 100 abortions. Of the unmarried women and teens who become pregnant and decide not to have an abortion, 97 percent now choose to keep their baby.
Utah has the highest number of children placed through adoption, running about five times ahead of the national average. New Jersey is the only state to rank behind Virginia.
The National Committee for Adoption does not take a stance for or against abortion. Instead, it works to emphasize the adoption option.
Lobbyists for the group have called on state legislatures to provide more funding for public adoption agencies. The group urges churches, foundations and corporations to support private agencies.
And most recently, the committee has pushed for adoption programs to be implemented within schools as part of sex-education programs like the family-life curriculum implemented in Virginia schools.
"We want people to understand that adoption is a normal method of building a family," said Mary Beth Seader, vice president for the National Committee for Adoption.
Seader has been an active lobbyist on adoption issues for 10 years. What concerns her, she explained, is that many family-planning and teen-service clinics often fail to discuss adoption at all.
"They automatically assume that these women don't want to hear about adoption," she said. That assumption came to light in a 1985 study of pregnancy counselors by a professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
"Few women can make informed decisions if they don't know what's out there," Seader said.
Black children, white parents?
Racial and ethnic issues have at times complicated the placement of children. Efforts to place black children in white families have been blasted as "cultural genocide" by the National Association of Black Social Workers. They believe that black children raised in white households may not develop a sense of racial and cultural identity.
But transracial adoption, although controversial, does allow for the healthy development of children, according to American University professor Rita Simon and University of Maryland professor Howard Altstein.
"No one argues that it isn't better for children to be placed within their race," Simon said. "But that is not one of the choices. Often it's either institutions, foster homes or transracial adoption. That's it."
In 1972, Simon and Altstein began studying 200 Midwestern families who had adopted transracially. In 1975, 1981 and 1987, the professors went back to the families to study the effect race had on each. They reached 96 percent of the families they initially studied.
Their conclusion: Black children suffered no ill effects as a result of growing up in a white family.
While some social workers dispute their findings, no one disputes that the pool of black adoptive parents is small and growing only slowly.
The reasons are complicated and numerous, according to Janice Mack, director of the Baptist Children's Home in Chesterfield County. Among them: Black people have traditionally cared for their own, rarely engaging in formal adoption.
Also, many of the black children available today have been emotionally scarred, often the casualties of drugs and volatile environments. Even though the state offers emotional support for parents and financial support for counseling, adopting such a child is emotionally risky.
Of the 35,000 children legally free and waiting for homes in the United States, more than 38 percent are black, according to state reports submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services.
In Virginia, there are now 725 children in foster care waiting to be adopted: 53 percent are black, 44 percent are white; 3 percent are of mixed races. Some 71 percent of these children are age 5 or and older. The average wait for placement is four years.
A toll-free adoption hotline has been established to encourage people thinking of adoption to consider these hard-to-place children (1-800-DO-ADOPT).
In recent years, the Virginia Department of Social Services has operated programs designed to enlist black adoptive parents. "Claiming Our Own Through Adoption" is one effort to make adoption easier for non-typical black families. Similar programs are designed to enlist parents for older children.
Adults who have never married, or who are divorced or over age 40, who have a modest income or a disability all will find that adopting special-needs children is relatively easy compared to seeking a healthy white infant. Financial assistance is also made available for attorney's fees, special medical costs, living expenses and even counseling.
Still, while Seader supports the push, she believes that no family that passes its home-study evaluation should be eliminated from getting a child because of race.
"The problem is that if our population is only 14 percent black [nationally], we are never going to place these children entirely in black homes," Seader said. "And while everyone wants to match races, it is wrong - definitely wrong - to hold these children up in foster homes for years" in hopes that someday a black family will want them.
Janice Weaver, a 19-year-veteran of the Roanoke City's Department of Social Services adoption program, said she literally drops everything when prospective black adoptive parents come into her office.
"There just aren't a lot out there," she said.
The foster-care merry-go-round
Weaver and other social workers labor in a frustrating system. Many of the department's children are freed for adoption after the courts have terminated the rights of birth parents who are found to be abusive, incompetent or criminal. But before rights are ended, birth parents are usually given a chance at rehabilitation while their children are bumped from foster home to foster home.
When rehabilitation works, the children go home. But too often it doesn't. A child who has been repeatedly moved can become unable to trust, unable to bond - and ultimately harder to place in an adoptive family.
No one purposely moves a child from home to home. But adoption authorities like Seader say that social workers tend to err on the side of the biological parent.
"It's as if they think the only way a child can succeed is by being reunited with his biological family," Seader said. "That's not true."
In 1989, the Roanoke City Department of Social Services placed 315 children in foster care. In the same year, 25 birth parents had their rights terminated by the courts. Also in that year, 21 children were placed for adoption, some of whom had been in foster care for years.
The social services department, by state law, can't turn any child away. Private adoption agencies can, but they too wrestle with special-needs issues.
"It's not easy," Sharon McGraw said, "but we don't place black children with white families."
McGraw is district supervisor of the Roanoke office of Children's Home Society of Virginia, a statewide, non-sectarian private agency. It gained state and national attention in 1983, after finding a home in Connecticut for Andrew, a Roanoke infant born without a brain.
"Finding homes for special needs children is like a puzzle," McGraw said. "It can be tough but it can be done. We enjoy it."
Two years ago, the state social services department was so overwhelmed with special-needs children that it contracted with Children's Home Society to help find families for them. The society placed 10 black children with black families both in Roanoke and Richmond.
But there are children coming along who will prove harder than any before to place.
An estimated 365,000 infants have been exposed to drugs in the womb - two-thirds of them victims of crack. By the end of 1991, another 20,000 infants will have been exposed while in the uterus to the virus that causes AIDS.
Testing these children for exposure to the AIDS virus will present new legal questions: Do infants have rights to privacy? Do adoptive parents have rights to know?
Different states, different laws
A legally adopted child has all the rights of a biological child. Once a child is adopted, all legal ties are severed with the birth parents.
For the most part, adoption in the United States is regulated by the states. Federal laws pertain only in special cases, such as in foreign-child adoption, which is subject to U.S. immigration law. However, the federal government does provide funds to the states to use for adoption subsidies, services and foster care.
There are three basic types of adoption. In an "open" adoption, the birth parents and adoptive parents know one another's identities. In a "closed" or traditional adoption, both parties remain anonymous.
"Direct" or "private" adoptions are those handled without the help of a licensed child-placing agency.
Because states develop their own laws and policies, adoption regulations vary widely.
For example, 34 states permit direct adoption with relatively few restrictions. Only 11 of them require a home study of adoptive parents before the child is placed.
Such adoption policies have resulted in a marketplace mentality, with healthy white infants as the hottest commodity.
"I've actually counseled pregnant women who have been approached by people in malls wanting to buy their baby," Seader said.
Direct adoptions usually fall under public scrutiny only when something goes wrong. The most recent case to make national headlines was that of New York City attorney Joel Steinberg, who shocked the world in 1987 when he murdered the daughter he never formally adopted. Steinberg received the maximum sentence for first-degree manslaughter.
The case prompted legislators around the country to write tougher adoption laws to help banish what is commonly known as "baby buying."
Virginia was no exception. Last July, direct adoptions in Virginia were virtually eliminated by means of strict new regulations.
A home study by a licensed child placement agency must be conducted before the child is placed. Anyone can help adoptive parents locate a child, but nothing of value can be given or accepted for the service.
But the most radical change aims to prevent any more Steinberg-like cases. Birth and adoptive parents working outside an agency must now exchange identifying information, including names, addresses, phone numbers and health records.
Direct placement
Evans Jessee is a Roanoke attorney who has handled direct placement adoptions for 12 years.
While he seems sure direct-placement adoption has been abused by attorneys, doctors and adoptive and birth parents alike, he said he knew of no such abuse in Roanoke. Direct placement does have its benefits, he noted.
"For example, few agencies will guarantee a birth mother her child would be placed in the home of the religion of her choice. But if she chooses the parents, then she knows," Jessee said.
One of the greatest changes in adoption in recent years is the new power awarded to the birth mother. Around 80 percent of birth mothers today have some say in selecting the adoptive parents, sometimes stipulating religious preference or even requesting visitation rights.
Birth-parent visitation rights are not common in Roanoke, but as babies become harder to find, more adoptive parents are willing to compromise.
And advertise.
In both the Radford University and Virginia Tech student newspapers, classified ads recently appeared that were written by infertile couples who desperately want children.
"Love, laughter and a place in our hearts," wrote the couple from Fairfax. "Love, laughter and a brother's hand to hold," wrote the competing couple from Charlottesville.
Both said they would pay whatever expenses allowed by law at the time of adoption.
The Fairfax couple had obtained their first child through a similar ad. Following years of infertility medication and surgery, Julie Schumaker and Kevin Dombkowski joined Families for Private Adoption, a non-profit support group.
Their ad three years ago in college and university papers around Virginia put them in touch with an unmarried college couple. The two couples worked out an adoption agreement, and Schumaker and Dombkowsi were allowed to come to the hospital during delivery.
Schumaker, a Fairfax consultant, said she advertised partly because she didn't want a long wait. But more important, she said, was knowing her son's biological mother, whom she now refers to as being like an "old college friend you don't see very often."
Schumaker and Dombkowski invited the birth parents to attend the baby's first and second birthday parties. But Schumaker admitted that they haven't decided whether invitations will go out every year.
When a child is too young to know who the occasional visitors are, there's no problem. But what worries the National Committee for Adoption are the implications of continued contact. Two sets of parents can be one set too many for some children - and for their adoptive parents.
"The birth mother can become like some sort of an aunt, someone that visits and plays with the child" but who never has to be the bad guy who enforces discipline, Seader said.
"Adoptive parents need to know they have control," she continued. "They need to know their adopted children are their children."
In the teen years, youngsters question their identity and challenge their parents' authority. The birth parents' presence in a teen-ager's life can even undermine the relationship between adoptive parent and child, Seader explained.
Adoptive parents who will agree to anything to obtain a child have lost sight of the true purpose of adoption.
"The purpose is to serve first the child, then the birth mother," Seader said.
And the childless couple? "They get final consideration."
by CNB