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Issues In Adoption For The 1990's
Although there is no report comparable to A Blueprint for Fostering Infants, Children, and Youths in the 1990's that identifies concerns and makes recommendations for reforming adoption, there has been no dearth of interest in the subject or lack of discussion of the critical issues. Through the popular media, many people have become aware of some of these issues, such as the decrease in the availability of healthy white infants for adoption, the number of adult adopted persons searching for their birth parents, or the controversy surrounding transracial adoptions. The professional literature has also explored the future of adoption.
In 1992, Watson identified the following four broad challenges facing adoption in the immediate future:
- the increasing number of children coming into the foster care system and the complexity of both the circumstances that bring them into care and their needs;
- a three-way division in providing adoption services among the independent practitioners, the voluntarily supported nonprofit agencies, and the public agencies;
- the need to restructure adoption funding so that the primary criterion for adoptive parenthood for those seeking healthy white infants will no longer be their ability to locate and pay for their child;
- a technology that is making parenthood possible in a variety of new and complicated ways with little awareness of the potential impact on a child as the "product" of these efforts.44
Journals such as The Future of Children have devoted entire issues to the subject of adoption,45 and have presented articles identifying and discussing the following critical areas:
- compiling accurate and complete information on adoption in the United States,
- reviewing and restructuring adoption law,
- the adoption of children with special needs,
- current status and future prospects of international adoption,
- the continuing controversy about transracial adoptions,
- open adoption and the reduction of adoption secrecy,
- agency versus independent adoptions,
- the long-term outcomes of adoption,
- the adoption of drug-exposed infants, and
- children in poverty.
Likewise, a special "Adoption" issue of Child Welfare46 explored open adoption and transracial adoption as major unresolved issues and also included additional articles on the available adoption statistics by State and on the disclosure of medical and social history in adoption.
The articles mentioned above and in the cited literature provide a comprehensive overview of the problems in adoption and of some possible solutions. More significantly, this research highlights a new awareness of the complexities of adoption and thus helps assure that some of the romantic assumptions and simplistic procedures of the past can be put to rest.
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