ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, May 21, 1996 TAG: 9605210061
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOAN BECK
A WARM, fuzzy issue - the kind that helps children and families, that doesn't cost a lot of money and has little opposition - is highly useful in an election year.
That's why President Clinton is making a public power play to grab some of the credit for the adoption legislation that Republicans in Congress have been trying to push into law. No one is supposed to remember that Clinton vetoed some of the same provisions when they were included in last year's welfare reform package. That was then. This is an election year.
The House passed the legislation by 393 to 15. The Senate has still to act. But even if - make that when - the bill becomes law, it won't help as much as Clinton suggested last week.
The bill is worth supporting for the good it would do for children who need adoptive parents. But it won't remove all the barriers that now keep youngsters adrift in the foster-care system for years or solve all the problems that keep eager parents from finding a child to adopt.
In the political tradition of throwing money at a problem, the House bill, sponsored by Rep. Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., would give a $5,000 tax credit to families who adopt a child. Families with an income over $75,000 would get a reduced benefit; those over $115,000 would be ineligible.
The tax credit would cost about $1.7 billion over seven years - stamp change for Congress. The money might help a few low-income families adopt, especially if the credit is made refundable.
But most healthy babies of every race are adopted by eager parents as soon as they are legally free. So passionately are many couples seeking a child of their own that they advertise in newspapers to find pregnant single women who might give up their baby. Or they go wherever in the world politics and poverty make children available - to Romania a few years ago, to China and Russia now.
There are, however, about 21,000 youngsters waiting to be adopted in the United States who have what are generally called ``special needs.'' They have physical disabilities, learning problems, emotional difficulties due to parental abuse, are older or are part of sibling groups.
Some states now give small subsidies to parents who adopt such hard-to-place kids - usually less than the cost of keeping the children in foster care. Congress could do more to get these children into adoptive homes by adding to these subsidies and providing Medicaid coverage than by passing the proposed tax credit for all adoptive parents.
The Republican bill would also encourage adoption across racial lines when adoptive parents of the child's race cannot be found within reasonable time. To deny a child the opportunity to be adopted by loving parents because of his race is indefensible and must be changed.
In the 1960s, in the wave of public support for integration, some white parents adopted children of black, mixed-race or other minority heritage - intending to build new families who would prove love and parental caring could transcend race and prejudice.
But black social workers objected strongly to transracial adoption. They charged that whites were stealing black babies and that white parents could not raise a black child to cope well with life in a racist society. It would be better for a black youngster to be stuck in foster care and never adopted, they insisted, than to have white parents. Their views prevailed.
The bill the House passed would allow states and adoption agencies to consider race if adoptive parents of the same race as the child are available. But it would ban them from discriminating on the basis of race against parents who want to adopt or to delay giving a child a permanent home until same-race parents can be found.
No other policy should be acceptable in a nation trying to grow out of its racist past and support loving families of all races.
The House bill would also end the unfair provision in the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which gives Indian tribes jurisdiction over adoption of youngsters with Indian ancestry, however small a percentage of their racial heritage. In a few cases, tribes have used the law to block adoption by non-Indian parents, even after the children were living happily in their new homes.
Reasonably, the House measure would limit tribal power unless one of the child's biological parents has ``significant social, cultural or political affiliation with the tribe.'' (Clinton opposes this provision.)
The House bill notes that 450,000 American children are living in foster care, 40 percent of whom are black. But neither the tax credit nor the ``race-matching'' provisions will help many of them because they are not legally free to be adopted.
The foster-care system is intended to help children whose parents cannot take care of them short-term, but who should eventually return to their own homes. Sometimes this happens. Too often it does not. Too many of their biological parents really don't want to take responsibility for their children or can't get their lives under control because of substance abuse or other problems or behave abusively but won't relinquish their offspring for adoption.
So these children remain stuck in foster care. Some are lovingly cared for by foster parents who would like to adopt them. Far too many are pushed around from one home to another, never sure where they belong, always longing for a family that is truly theirs.
It is legally, morally and socially difficult to free more foster children for adoption before they become old enough to be considered ``hard-to-place.'' But until our laws give first priority to the best interests of the child - not the biological rights of irresponsible or indifferent parents - tax credits and transracial adoptions won't help enough kids.
Joan Beck is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune|
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