So you're selling my baby

National Review, Sept 1, 2008 by Herbert W. Stupp, Kevin Williamson

In his article "Lost Generation" (August 4) Kevin D. Williamson illustrates another tragic result of the Roe v. Wade decision and its concomitant 50 million abortions: a trend toward fewer children available for adoption in the United States.

Yet in commenting on the apparent disconnect between millions of white Americans seeking to adopt while 500,000 children, most of them minorities, "languish" in foster care, he takes too great a leap in embracing the actual sale of parental rights.

Williamson claims that the system is stacked against potential adoptive parents, citing a survey that found antipathy to transracial adoptions on the part of caseworkers in New York. But the "tilt" against transracial placements, as perceived by Williamson, can be explained instead by the realities of foster care.

Here at Little Flower Children & Family Services, more than 30 percent of all foster-care placements are in "kinship" homes--that is, with a child's family member. These adoptions are thus not likely to be "transracial." If no family members are available, the policy of Little Flower is to try to place foster children in their home communities, providing continuity and greater likelihood for a successful placement. In practice, this means that a black child placed in a non-kinship foster home will often continue to live in a neighborhood that is significantly black.

Despite the "adoption bureaucracy" cited by Williamson, Little Flower has won repeated "outstanding" ratings from New York City's Administration for Children's Services, achieving 227 adoptions from foster care in 2006 and 2007. We charged no one a fee. The City of New York's census of foster children has shrunk from over 46,000 in the 1990s to about 17,000 today.

The buying and selling of parental rights cannot be an improvement on the current condition. In most of the instances where children are removed from their natural parents, substance abuse is a key reason. Do we really want a policy that would transfer cash from adoptive parents to those who would, in many instances, convert it to illegal purchases on our nation's streets?

Herbert W. Stupp

CEO, Little Flower

Children & Family Services

Brooklyn, N.Y.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON REPLIES: Congratulations and sincere thanks to Mr. Stupp and Little Flower for their excellent work in finding homes for children who need them. But I disagree that liberalization of adoption practices "cannot be an improvement on the current condition." Under current regulations, parental rights and money both change hands, but the money goes primarily to lawyers, bureaucrats, and gray-market adoption fixers.

If a private couple chooses to compensate a pregnant woman for participating in an adoption--on certain conditions, such as taking her pre-natal vitamins and not smoking crack--the results are: The couple spends money that was going to be spent anyway; a pregnant woman receives medical care and financial assistance; financial incentives protect the health of a vulnerable child; parental rights change hands, subject to review by a judge or some other responsible party; a child goes into an adoptive home rather than into the social-welfare bureaucracy.

Is that not an improvement?