Sometimes a birth mother continues having more children, even while she has kids in foster care. The agency approaches the current foster parents to see if they’d be willing to take the new baby. But continued contact with this mother is part of the deal.
Picture yourself in this situation: you’ve got a child, maybe two, whose adoption will be finalized in the next few months. You’ve been doing family visits with these kids’ relatives for the past year to eighteen months. Let’s put it charitably and just say that you aren’t fond of the family. If you agree to take the mother’s new baby, you will be doing another year of those visits, even though the adoption of your other kids is finalized.
Let’s see a show of hands: Does continued contact with the birth mother make you more likely to take that new baby, or less likely?
There were 518,000 children in foster care in 2004, according to the Children’s Bureau, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These children are not "languishing," for want of adoptive parents: most of these children are not available for adoption. Of these half million children, only 65,000, or one in eight, have had their parental rights terminated, the necessary legal step making them eligible for adoption.
According to a survey done by the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, nearly one quarter of ever married women had ever considered adoption, and 1.6 million had actually taken concrete steps toward adoption. This sure looks like enough people are interested in helping the 65,000 kids in foster care who are actually ready to be adopted.
American families literally go to the ends of the earth to do international adoptions, some 19,000 in 2001. These families spend thousands of dollars, and sometimes bring home older children or difficult children with special needs. The one problem they don’t have to worry about is some grandmother in Guatemala or birth mother in Belarus popping up ten years later, claiming their parental rights had been slighted.
So the unreasonable deference to birth mothers is more than just harmful to their own kids. It is a huge factor in discouraging otherwise willing married couples from becoming foster parents.
And what attitude lies behind this deference? Birth mothers are entitled to unlimited sexual activity, with only the outcomes they want. If they want to hang on to their parental rights as long as possible, they can. As long as they meet the (very) minimal requirements of child care and protection, they can keep their kids and keep making more of them.
It’s all about adults and their rights, not about children and their needs.
In other words, the child welfare law has institutionalized the least defensible features of the sexual revolution. Sex is an entitlement. The consequences of sex are all negotiable. Kids are an afterthought.
This is why the question of what gays do or don’t do is beside the point. The most enthusiastic advocate of gay parenting has to admit that it is an untried social experiment whose full ramifications are unknown.
The foster care system has not yet recovered from the sexual revolution. Let’s clean up that mess before we start another round of human experimentation on the most vulnerable children in society.