Mickey is 19 months old but weighs less than 14 lbs. Born infected with the AIDS virus, he was abandoned by his addict mother at birth. His huge, watchful eyes seem to fill half his face; his legs dangle like matchsticks. For ten months after he was born, Mickey languished at a New York City hospital. He never had a visitor.
All you need is love, John Lennon promised. Sometimes that's true. Then again, there are the children like Mickey who need more. They may need hospital care because their mothers used crack during pregnancy. They may need psychiatric treatment to deal with the effects of sexual abuse. They may need wheelchairs, costly medication, special classes. And without a doubt, they will need a home.
For all his frailty, Mickey is in some ways fortunate -- he's in the process of being adopted. That makes him an exception among "special-needs" children, to use the innocuous term for kids who don't find permanent homes easily -- and most often don't find them at all. They include blacks and other minorities, the physically or mentally handicapped, and any group of siblings who must be adopted together. The term also applies to children who are simply too old for a market that favors infants. In the beauty contest that is adoption, it is never wise to turn five.
By some estimates, these special-needs children account for about 60% of all those available for adoption. They make up the large majority of the youngsters now handled by the public adoption agencies of most states. Yet while there may be dozens of couples bidding for every healthy white infant, only about one-third of the approximately 36,000 available special-needs kids will be taken in any given year. Some of the rest can be found in hospitals as "boarder babies" -- left behind at birth by addicted or otherwise incapable mothers. Others are crammed into group facilities.
By far the largest number spend years carting their toothbrush and T shirts from one foster home to the next, at each stop growing less hopeful, less open to the exchange of affection and trust that comes naturally to most children. "If you've got a kid who is 16 and has been in ten foster homes, you can't imagine the devastation," says Catherine Tracy, chief deputy of children's services for Los Angeles County.
In recent years the number of special-needs cases has been exploding. As reported instances of physical and sexual abuse of children have risen, so has the willingness of judges to remove the victims from parents who beat and molest them. Now such children constitute nearly 60% of the foster-care caseload. And by 1991 the number of newborns infected with the virus that causes AIDS is expected to rise to 20,000.