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But nothing has been so devastating as crack. By one count there are 365,000 American babies who were exposed to drugs in the womb, two-thirds of them the victims of crack. Unlike earlier street drugs, crack has lured at least as many women as men, with corrosive effects on family life. "I used to have heroin mothers in court who could hold a family together," says Penny Ferrer, director of New York City's office of adoption services. "But crack mothers cannot." And even as new cases cascade into the child-welfare system, the number of foster parents has been declining. With more women working, fewer are home to take in children. Some adoption officials foresee an eventual return to the system of warehousing children in orphanages.
Though one major study shows that most older adoptees -- even those ten and above -- flourish within their new families, for special-needs children suffering the effects of mistreatment or prenatal drug use, the future may depend crucially upon how quickly they can be brought into a stable, attentive home.
A home made all the difference for Michael Mazzafro, now 17. The son of an alcoholic, drug-abusing mother, he spent six years shuttling back and forth between foster care and his mother's home. At last he was adopted by a Pennsylvania couple, but his behavior soon proved too much for them. While they made arrangements to terminate the adoption, he was stashed in a hospital for more than a year. That's where he was when Joe Mazzafro, a Philadelphia bachelor now 39, took him in.
When he first arrived a little more than four years ago, Michael refused to bathe, disappeared from school for weeks at a time and filched money with Mazzafro's cash-machine card. "I was used to people taking me, then leaving me," the boy recalls. "I guess I was testing Dad all the time to see what he would do."
What Mazzafro did was offer Michael large doses of love and patience. That formula had already worked wonders with Tuan, now 14, a Vietnamese refugee who had come to Mazzafro four months earlier, speaking no English and still toting the cardboard box that had been his bed at a relocation center in Malaysia. Now he's an honors student at the local junior high, while Michael has become a computer whiz with his sights set on Princeton. Meanwhile, Joe Mazzafro is applying his methods to Brandon, 9, his third adopted son, who tumbled through nine foster homes in his first eight years. When he joined the family last year, he was so anxious to please that he was constantly hopping up to get things for his prospective father -- a drink of water, a napkin, anything. "Finally I told him that he wasn't going anywhere but here," says Mazzafro. "He was here because we love him, and we want him to stay."
Faced with a shortage of couples for the growing numbers of special-needs children, adoption officials have been forced to discard orthodox notions of what constitutes a family. Two years ago a White House task force recommended that states eliminate barriers to adoption by singles like Mazzafro, working couples, older people and the physically handicapped. "We've had situations where married veterans have been encouraged to adopt special-needs children, but when they show up in a wheelchair, they are shown the door," says Mary Sheila Gall, who headed the group. "We had to change the system."