The Changing Nature of Adoption

The Changing Nature of Adoption Although historically adoption typically involved the placement of a healthy, newborn, white infant ADOPTION 11with a middle class to upper middle class, infertile, white couple, the nature of adoption has changed dramatically. Beginning in the 1950s, the number of healthy, white infants available for adoption began to decline in a striking manner. Whereas approximately 20 percent of infants born to unmarried, white women were relinquished for adoption from the mid- 1950s to the early 1970s, by 1995 the corresponding rate was less than 2 percent. In contrast, rates of adop- tion placement during this same period among African-American and Hispanic women were quite low, ranging from 1.5 percent prior to the 1970s to less than 1 percent in the mid-1990s. The overall de- cline in the number of infants available for adoption has been linked to several factors, including the legal- ization of abortion, greater availability of contracep- tion, greater societal acceptance of single parenthood, and increased availability of family sup- port programs. One significant outcome of the reduced availabil- ity of adoptable infants was that many individuals began to consider adoption through private place- ments, which frequently offered greater hope for finding a baby, rather than through licensed agen- cies. Today, healthier newborn infants are placed for adoption through independent means than through the adoption agency system. In other cases, prospec- tive adoptive parents began looking beyond the bor- ders of the United States in their effort to adopt children. Beginning after World War II and escalat- ing after the Korean and Vietnam wars, international adoption has become a major source of children for individuals wishing to become adoptive parents. In 2000, for example, U.S. citizens adopted more than 16,000 children from other countries, with the great- est numbers coming from Russia, China, South Korea, eastern Europe, and Central and South Amer- ica. In many cases, these adoptions involved place- ments across racial lines. Still other prospective adoptive parents began considering adopting foster children whose history and personal characteristics (e.g., older age at placement, minority racial status, exposure to neglect and/or abuse, chronic medical problems, mental and/or psychological problems) were thought, in the past, to be barriers to adoption. Interest in adopting these so-called special needs chil- dren grew with the passage of the Adoption Assis- tance and Child Welfare Act in 1980 and has continued with the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act during the Clinton administration. There also has been considerable change in the types of individuals who are seeking to become adop- tive parents. In the past, most adoptive parents were white, middle class to upper middle class, married, in- fertile couples, usually in their thirties or forties, and free of any form of disability. Agencies routinely screened out older individuals, unmarried adults, fer- tile couples, individuals with financial problems, ho- mosexuals, and disabled persons as prospective adoptive parents. Even foster parents were seldom approved for adoption of the children in their care. Since the 1970s, however, adoption agency policy and practice has moved in the direction of screening in many different types of adoption applicants as op- posed to screening them out. As a result, many of the restrictive criteria for adoptive parenthood have been eliminated, opening up the possibility of adoption to a much larger segment of the population. Adoption has become a remarkably complex social service prac- tice and a highly diverse form of family life