Children Who Need Adoption: A Radical View

THE ATLANTIC

BY RAEL JEAN ISAAC

WHILE the number of illegitimate children, the chief source of adoptable infants, has been steadily rising, from 88,000 in 1938 to nearly 250,000 in 1962, improved methods of handling infertility have cut down the number of couples seeking to adopt. Formerly, dozens of would-be parents waited for each white infant, but the gap between supply and demand is now closing rapidly.

Furthermore, in the past fifteen years, state legislatures have been making it more and more difficult to adopt a baby. The pressure on the legislatures for the passage of restrictive laws has come essentially from two groups: the agencies, both private, so-called “voluntary,” adoption agencies and state departments of public welfare, which wish to eliminate all private placement of children; and organized religious groups, especially the Catholic Church, which are determined to ensure that no child whose parents are of one religion should find adoptive parents of a different religion.

Traditionally, in the United States, there have been two ways in which a mother might place her child for adoption. She could either turn her child over to an agency or place her child for adoption directly with a relative or with someone unrelated to her. In the latter case, the mother customarily used the services of an intermediary, usually a doctor or lawyer, either of whom is likely to know of couples eager to adopt. Of the 107,000 children adopted in the United States last year, 49,000 were adopted by relatives. Of the remaining 58,000 children, 60 percent were adopted as a result of agency placement and 40 percent as a result of independent placement, or, as agencies call it, “the gray market.” Fifteen years ago the proportions were reversed, and the change reflects both an extension of agency services and the action of a number of states in outlawing or severely restricting independent placement.

In 1959, in a commendable if belated effort to test the truth of its own axioms, the Child Welfare League of America sponsored a study among its member agencies. An agency’s initial interviews with five couples seeking to adopt were taped and sent to agencies around the country; the purpose was to determine the amount of agreement among professional caseworkers about the desirability of these couples. Each of the interviews was approximately an hour and a half in length; and caseworkers were asked to indicate not only if they felt the couple should be accepted for further study, but also how they would rank the couples in relation to one another. Twenty-eight agencies in thirteen states cooperated, with 184 worker-judges taking part. It was decided that the “correct” judgment would be defined as that reached by the majority of caseworkers. Three couples were accepted and two rejected by the consensus.

The agreement between caseworkers ranged from 89.13 percent for Couple A to 61.41 percent for Couple D. However, as the author of the study himself noted, the agreement, while statistically significant, was of little practical value. For example, while seventy-five caseworkers put Couple B first of the five, thirty-six rejected Couple B outright. In many agencies, moreover, there was an even split between the social workers as to whether to accept or reject a given couple. Workers wrote comments on sections of the interviews, and the range of reaction to specific statements illuminates the problem better than any statistics. At the close of the interview the husband in Couple B remarked:

Well, we’re not perfectionists on this thing and if it’s possible for us to get a child, we’d sure be very happy to have one. I mean if through your examining and cross-examining you feel that it isn’t our time right now, that’s up to you folks. We’re not going to come down here swinging an axe at you.

While some social workers interpreted this remark as showing healthy objectivity, others thought it revealed a deep fear of rejection, while still others felt it showed a clear desire to be rejected. The hard fact seems to be that an adoptive couple’s chance of acceptance by an agency is determined not so much by objectively discoverable merits as potential parents as by luck — luck in being interviewed by a congenial agency staff member.

Occasionally a couple will find out why they were turned down, perhaps through being accepted by another agency. One couple, rejected after two years of study by an agency in New York, on moving to New Jersey, applied to an agency there, which in turn asked for the records of the previous investigation. The second agency gave the couple a child and also revealed (presumably, contrary to agency ethics in such matters) the reason for the original refusal. The social worker in the first agency had decided that the woman, when she became a mother, would be overprotective of the child.

Although agencies are most commonly criticized for insisting upon middle-class bank accounts and home ownership, a couple who are “too desirable” may also have trouble. A well-to-do and highly intelligent professional couple applied to a New York agency. After two years the applicants were told that the agency had decided they would not be able to love a child who had intelligence inferior to their own. Since the agency could not be sure of providing a sufficiently intelligent child, they would have to be turned down. On being told this in the offices of a social worker, the overly intelligent husband seized a paperweight and crashed it upon the glass-topped desk, breaking the glass and no doubt convincing the social worker that the agency had indeed acted wisely.

This case is cited because it illustrates an attitude of the agency, on the surface reasonable enough, but fundamentally open to serious question. When it is not dealing with handicapped children or racially mixed children (and the agencies have made admirable if tentative strides in placing such children), the agency seeks to match the child to the family. Color of hair and eyes, intelligence, religion, national background, and social background are all characteristics that the majority of agencies feel require “matching.” Both philosophically and practically speaking, such an attitude is hazardous. It assumes that a couple who are able to love an adopted child as their own cannot adjust to a color of eyes or hair or a measure of intelligence different from what the agency thinks a biological child would probably have had.

Color of hair and eyes can be determined shortly after birth, but intelligence, which many agencies feel is the most important characteristic to match, cannot be determined early. Until recently, a great many agencies waited for between one and two years before placing children, so as to use the Cattell tests of infant intelligence. Further studies have recently shown that the correlation of the results of intelligence tests taken at one year and at four years is zero. Since no agency advocates keeping a child four years before placement, the question has begun to occur to the agency, why wait at all?

Even now, with earlier placement the rule, the United States Children’s Bureau reports that only 9 percent of children placed by public agencies and only 22 percent of children placed by private agencies went into their adoptive homes at under one month of age, while 70 percent of children placed independently were less than a month old. According to Dr. Harold Skeels of the National Institute of Health, the frequency of defective children being placed independently, at a much younger age, is no greater than in agency placement. In any case, such studies as have been made of the relation of intelligence between children and their adoptive parents indicate that the children tend to approximate the intelligence of the adoptive rather than of the natural parents. Thus, the evidence seems to indicate that intelligence is strongly subject to environmental influence.

IN THEIR latest efforts to be scientific, agencies have been considering the use of personality tests to screen applicants. But if the personality test takes over the task of adoptive-parent selection, judgments may be no more scientific than at present, since a great deal will depend upon the definition of “good” parents. If the “best” parents belong to a political club, those who belong to a political club become by definition best parents. Certainly anyone who questions the procedure will become by definition a bad parent. For the time being, if applicants grow scarce, personality tests for adoptive applicants will probably remain in the unformulated stage. The majority of applicants will be accepted — at least the majority of those who conform to the basic criteria which the agency demands be fulfilled before the evaluation of a couple is even begun.

These basic criteria constitute the core of that definite body of standards of which an agency speaks. While requirements vary from agency to agency, the list of initial requirements of the TalbotPerkins agency, which is nonsectarian and reputed to be one of the best in New York City, is fairly typical. The initial letter sent by the agency informs a couple that only if they fulfill the following requirements should they answer the enclosed preliminary questionnaire.

1. The age limit for the adoptive mother is thirtyeight years, and for the adoptive father, forty years.

2. That it is impossible, or highly unlikely, medically, of [sic] having a child of their own.

3. That the couple have residence in New York state, and within easy access to our office.

4. There is a state requirement that children must be placed in homes of their own religious persuasion.

5. Applicants must be members of good standing in their respective churches.

Each one of these requirements, none of which has any obvious relevance to a couple’s capacity to love and care for children, successfully eliminates a large number of applicants. Notice that the age limit manages also to disqualify the woman of twenty-nine who is married to a man of forty-two. The stipulation that a couple be unable to have children is interpreted with varying degrees of rigor from one agency to another. The TalbotPerkins agency will consider a couple with one or more children, provided they can have no more of their own; the Spence Chapin agency will permit couples with only one child to apply; and the Louise Wise agency, New York’s Jewish agency, will not accept a couple with any children of their own. Even where there are no children, the agency demands that a couple prove that they are unable to have children. Some agencies tend to suspect that in cases where organic reasons for infertility have not been established, the prospective adoptive parents do not really want children.

In the case of the religious requirement, the Talbot-Perkins agency’s letter passes the buck by noting, quite correctly, that New York state law requires that children be placed with a couple of the same religion as the natural mother. However, even in the great majority of states which have no religious requirement in their adoption law, agencies bow to the pressures of local religious groups and rarely place a child with adoptive parents of a different religion. Many agencies are far from happy about this situation. Privately, agency social workers will confide that there are a great many cases where a mother will say she has no religion. While the logic of religious matching should reserve such children for atheists, the agency, of course, merely finds out what the religion of the girl’s parents was and places the child accordingly. At a recent National Adoption Conference it was asserted: “None of us are born with cultural characteristics, we must learn them or be conditioned by them. In matching then, we may safely dismiss cultural differences as of little or no importance.” But because of religious pressures, the agencies are simply unable to follow their own principles.

Whether the policy of religious matching is that of the state or the agency or a combination of the two, it has the effect of eliminating large numbers of Jewish applicants (there are never enough Jewish infants available) and discriminates against mixed marriages and against anyone who is not a regular churchgoer. While Catholic children are the most plentiful, nonreligious Catholics may have the most difficult time of all in finding a baby through an agency.

IRONICALLY, the critical failure of agency philosophy and performance is best seen in an area with which the agencies have had very little to do — Negro adoption. In Chicago only 4 percent of the Negro children offered for adoption find homes, and the proportion is little better in the rest of the country. As infants, these children lie for months in crowded hospital wards only to proceed to overcrowded children’s shelters and, if they are lucky, to a succession of foster homes. In all too large a proportion of cases the almost total absence of stimulation they receive as infants has resulted in retarded intelligence; although care and love in a permanent home could probably repair the damage while the children are still very young, no such homes are available.

The situation is a desperate one, and in recognition of this fact, a number of agencies in the past few years have made a genuine effort to recruit Negro adoptive homes. The progress and results of several such recruitment programs in the nation’s large cities have been published by the Child Welfare League of America. The results indicate that social workers in the adoption field suffer an almost total divorce from reality; while babies visibly deteriorate in intelligence, the workers indulge in amateur psychiatry in session after session, dragged on over months and years.

The study made in Pittsburgh is the most revealing because it concerns itself with the problem of why so many Negro couples withdrew their applications from agencies after showing initial interest. The agencies found that over a five-year period 60 percent of a total of 224 applicants withdrew their applications; the agencies rejected another 20 percent; and only 42 couples ultimately obtained children — less than 20 percent of those who applied. Yet it was discovered that these Negro applicants came from higher educational, occupational, and social strata than those found in the community at large.

The greatest single barrier to adoptions was found to be the agency demand that the couple prove their infertility. Twenty-six couples withdrew their applications because they were unwilling to submit to tests of infertility, and thirteen were rejected because, although they took the tests, the agency was unconvinced by the results. The abysmal ignorance of cultural mores — Come on now, prove you’re not a man — is all the more unforgivable when one considers that it makes no difference whether the couple are organically infertile or not. White couples with the most glowing testimonials to infertility frequently produce a natural child shortly after adopting one, and invariably their single terror is that the agency will lake the adopted child away. The agency very rarely does so, but it is obvious that the demand for proof of infertility makes sense only as a device for dealing with an oversupply of applicants.

Apparently nothing could make the agency workers come to an awareness that an oversupply was not their problem, They rejected two couples because the woman in each case was employed, four couples because their religion was wrong, two couples because their housing was wrong, five couples because their age was wrong, eleven couples because of “psycho-social factors,” and six couples apparently for no reason at all — at least, Mr. Fanshel, who made the study, could not discover from the records of the cases what the reasons were. The perseverance of the couples who did obtain children is little short of astounding. More than half of the couples accepted were required to have between eleven and fifteen interviews, and eight couples, one fifth of the total, were not deemed mentally prepared until they had had between sixteen and twenty interviews. In some cases, agency pressure ultimately wore down a couple until they abandoned their style of life for what the agency deemed appropriate.

Mrs. Jones smiled in an embarrassed way as she told the worker that she felt silly coming to the agency again when she had thought that everything had been resolved six months ago. At that time she had decided that she just couldn’t give up working and have them live exclusively on her husband’s salary, but she hadn’t bargained on this “pain inside my heart” every time she saw a child.

The Chicago study at first looks more hopeful, since there is an apparent effort to make adjustments; for example, the Negro mother is allowed to adopt even if she goes on working. Any optimism is dispelled by the case studies, for although some of the arbitrary criteria have been relaxed, the social worker’s enthusiasm for wild psychiatric flights has not been dimmed at all.

Mr. and Mrs. Yander are described by the agency worker as a young couple who have been married nine years and were referred to the agency by a fertility clinic. She finds them poised and spontaneous and extremely eager to adopt. They are active in their church. Mr. Yander has a job in the civil service, and Mrs. Yander says she enjoys just being a housewife. The worker is not satisfied. Mr. Yander is himself adopted, and although he learned this only through boys on the street, confirming the fact later from his adoptive parents, he denies the experience was traumatic. She finds that Mr. Yander has had vague and multiple maternal figures and has lacked a father figure, that Mrs. Yander too has had disappointing experiences with her father.

What finally convinced the worker that they were not a suitable couple was Mr. Yander’s report that he had a recurring vision calling him to the ministry. The worker decided Mr. Yander’s reality adjustment was so tenuous as to constitute a serious risk for parenthood. To the reader it is the social worker’s reality adjustment that seems in acute peril — she obviously has a fixed image of twenty candidates waiting in line outside her office for each child at her disposal.

The social worker who interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Crawford found that, although the couple were so well-off they were buying the building in which they lived, and although they expressed a keen desire for a child, they had too many outside activities. While official policy was that the wife might go on working, the social worker was not happy that Mrs. Crawford wanted to continue her job of fourteen years’ duration. She decided that Mrs. Crawford was ambivalent about motherhood because of her years of early excessive responsibility. In Chicago the agencies were so concerned with maintaining good public relations that they went on with interviews after they had decided against placing a child, so that on being turned down the couple would know the agency really cared!

MORE common even than rigid religious restrictions in state law are prohibitions against independent placement. Its total elimination by law remains in the view of agencies around the country the single most important challenge confronting them. Approximately thirty states have laws which make independent placement by an intermediary a punishable offense. Typically, a state law will provide that only a licensed agency or a natural parent may place a child. The snag is that the parent may place her own child, and although it is unusual for a mother to make the placement herself (unless with a relative), there is little difficulty in making it appear that she did so. The intermediary is therefore not prosecuted.

Of course, laws aimed at the intermediary in an independent placement, for all their weaknesses, can act as a substantial deterrent if a state is willing to prosecute under them and the courts will convict. In Washington, D. C., the so-called Baby-Broker law is effective because of convictions that have occurred under it. In 1947 Harold Goodman, a lawyer, assisted a mother then being sued for divorce for adultery in placing her child. When the mother later changed her mind and Mr. Goodman refused to help her in regaining custody of the child, she enlisted the support of the Board of Public Welfare, which filed a complaint against him on the ground that he had no license to place children for adoption. Although he had acted without compensation from the natural mother and had received less than $100 as a legal fee from the adoptive couple, he was found guilty.

In a number of states, while departments of public welfare may be eager to prosecute under licensing or other statutes, attorneys general have dampened such proposals. In Indiana, for example, the attorney general has asserted that placement of a single child now and then does not put an individual in the category of an agency, which has to be licensed. In South Dakota placement by an individual to whom the power of attorney has been given by the mother is interpreted as direct placement. In New Hampshire the attorney general has taken the position that an individual is acting as an agency (and, as such, in defiance of the licensing statute) only if he knows one party and actively seeks the other. If he happens to know both parties, he is not acting as an agency.

In the last decade, in recognition of the failure of statutes aimed at the intermediary, new ways of curbing independent placement have been sought. The logical inference was made that if the difficulty with enforcing laws against independent placement arises from the fact that the mother may place her own child, the mother’s right to do so must be taken away. State attorneys general have expressed skepticism concerning the possibility of convicting a mother on the charge of placing her child, so enforcement has been secured by regulating court procedures. The statutes of both Connecticut and Delaware provide that the court may approve an adoption only if the petition is presented by a relative of the child or by a licensed child-placing agency. The mother’s right to place her child is effectively, if somewhat deviously, removed, since no couple seeking to adopt will take the child if they cannot then legally adopt it.

The effectiveness of the law in eliminating independent placement (as well as in severely reducing the number of adoptions in the state) is well illustrated by Connecticut. In 1959 there were 1092 adoptions, of which 58 percent were independent placements; in the following year 96 percent of all adoptions were agency placements, but only 573 adoptions were made, about half those in the preceding year. Similarly, adoptions in Delaware, whose law is older, dwindled from 254 in 1959 to 144 in 1960 and were down to 128 in 1962.

Because of the “success” of Connecticut and Delaware, the pressure of agencies, both public and private, has been brought to bear in other states in an attempt to secure passage of similar laws. Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina currently have pending before their state legislatures laws which would take away the mother’s right to place her own child except with a relative. Minnesota, which prides itself on its advanced social legislation, plans a complete revision of its adoption law in what no doubt will be the same direction. Recently, a legislative package has been proposed by the United States Children’s Bureau which it hopes all states will eventually incorporate into law. The proposed law would ensure that only agencies could place children: in terminating parental rights the court would at the same time turn the child over to an agency.

Actually, apart from its central purpose of giving the agencies a monopoly of the adoption market, the proposed law suggests several needed reforms, including provision for court termination of parental rights before placement. In many states, including New York, the intrinsically separate issues of the child’s availability for adoption and the suitability of an individual home are hopelessly confused, the child becoming available for adoption only at the moment it is adopted. What this means in practical terms is that parents who have adopted independently must be prepared to relinquish the child on demand to the natural mother until the final decree is signed, generally a year or more after they have assumed custody of the child.

Whereas surrender to an agency gives the agency final custody of the child, in an independent placement the natural mother must not only sign the initial surrender, but, in a state like New York, must appear in court on the day when the final decree is made. Since women frequently leave their own state to have a child out of wedlock, the necessity of producing the natural mother a year or so later causes all sorts of difficulties for adoptive parents, who often find themselves subject to blackmail or are unable to find the natural mother. Although New York expressly forbids the payment of money to the mother except for medical expenses connected with the child’s birth, the absolute refusal of the courts to grant an adoption without the final appearance in court of the mother not only condones blackmail but creates the very conditions in which it necessarily flourishes. In New York even the hospitals have joined in the harassment (sectarian pressures are strong there); the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies has recently decreed that any doctor who cooperates in an independent placement will be debarred from using Federation-sponsored hospitals.

THERE is another method which states have used to control independent placement — namely, a registration technique. One objection to independent placement is that investigation by the court of the suitability of a home generally occurs after a placement has been made, and this is too late. Maryland, Kentucky, and Nebraska now provide that a couple must register, generally with the Department of Public Welfare, before taking a child into their home, and be investigated prior to placement. Despite the fact that registration techniques provide quite strict controls on independent placement, agencies do not wholeheartedly advocate them. Indeed, the agencies fear that providing approved avenues for independent placement — thus “legitimizing” it — will serve to increase the number of such adoptions. From another viewpoint, the danger of registration techniques is that they can become a vehicle for enforcing the same arbitrary requirements now made by agencies and for making sure that sectarian interests are enforced.

Completely overlooked in the effort to eliminate independent placement is what the result of a really successful campaign on a nationwide basis would be. The now substantially defunct black market, against which laws regulating independent placement were first directed, would be revived. If the present trend of an increasing supply of white infants and a diminishing demand for them continues, there will be a large number of infants awaiting adoption in foster homes or hospitals under agency auspices. In fact, at the moment in Massachusetts there are four thousand children in foster care, a substantial number of whom are eligible for adoption but cannot be placed because the state will permit them to go only to Catholic homes.

As the agencies press so urgently for what seems to them indisputably wise legislation, they would do well to remember legislation that seemed wise to leaders in the adoption field earlier in this century. They might remember the legislation urged by Dr. Hastings Hart, onetime director of the Department of Child-Helping of the Russell Sage Foundation, who wanted the states to make it “obligatory upon each mother of an illegitimate child to care personally for her child at least one year, and if physically able to do so to nurse it at the breast for not less than six months.”

Further, the agencies should recognize independent placement for what it is — not, as they assume, a monument to the cupidity of doctors, ignorance of mothers, foolish impatience of adoptive parents, and criminal negligence of the public at large, which has failed to clap those responsible for it into jail in sufficient numbers, but as a genuine and essential alternative to the social agency.

The author of one of the studies on Negro adoption urges that the primary function of the agency may well be to “ritualize” the adoption procedure; that even if agencies are unable to distinguish between better and poorer adoption risks, the function of lending dignity to the adoption procedure makes the agency role vital. The public may wonder, if the major agency function is ritualization, whether agencies should be given such immense legal advantages over those who adopt privately. And if, as the evidence indicates, behind the elaborate and expensive rituals of selection the method is essentially haphazard, the public may well hesitate before bestowing upon the erring individuals of a social agency the final godlike power to decree who shall be parents and who shall not.