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The Federal Government has taken a few steps to make special-needs adoption more attractive. In 1980 Congress passed a sweeping reform of adoption and child-welfare laws that, among other things, offered for the first time a federal stipend -- $200 to $300 a month -- to some adoptive parents of special-needs children. Just last month President Bush proposed legislation to make them eligible for a $3,000 tax break.
But even when adoptive parents come forward, the foster-care and adoptive system can keep the children tantalizingly out of reach. Designed to be a short-term arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by parents who make little effort to regain their children but refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan for his or her future within 18 months should be made available for adoption, an absentee parent can thwart such attempts by just minimal contact during those 18 months. Result: of the estimated 276,000 children in foster care in 1986, the last year for which statistics are available, perhaps just 13% were immediately available for adoption.
A partial remedy is being tried in New York City. The city's new adoption- counseling unit works with drug-addicted birth mothers at the hospital to explain the possibility of giving up parental rights and freeing their children for quick adoption. Earlier this year the city instituted a plan encouraging would-be adoptive parents to serve as foster parents for children who haven't yet been freed for adoption, and then adopt them as soon as legally possible. "Parents don't have to go to Korea or South America if they ! want to adopt an infant," says adoption-services director Ferrer. "Get a home study done, which takes six weeks, register with an agency as a pre- adoptive foster parent, and you will get a child a few weeks later."
Agencies are rethinking their opposition to placing black children with white parents. In 1972 the National Association of Black Social Workers charged that "transracial adoption" was a kind of cultural genocide that deprived black children of their racial heritage. At least 35 states imposed regulations requiring social workers to make every attempt to place children with parents of the same race. Transracial adoptions of all kinds dropped from a high of 2,540 in 1971 to less than half that number in recent years.
A consequence of this policy has been that black children, who make up about 40% of the foster-child population, tend to spend much longer waiting for adoption than whites. Recently agencies have been quietly permitting more black children to go to white adoptive homes. They have also been mobilizing to recruit more potential black parents.