Last week I wrote about opening the records on adoptions, and it touched a nerve with many people. The stories they told me through calls and letters touched a nerve here, too.
Stories like the woman who was raped 15 years ago, and who decided on adoption instead of abortion. Now she knows her daughter is at risk for cervical cancer and diabetes and says she can’t get that information to her because the government blocks the path.
Stories like the 26-year-old woman who was shaken one day by a call from her birth father, and who hasn’t felt secure ever since. He told her how he and his wife and kids have kept an empty chair for her at their dining room table over the years, and she had to tell him she doesn’t want him in her life.
There were dozens more stories, maybe not as dramatic, but just as emotional. They were passionate, complicated stories, and while they didn’t change my belief that birth records should stay sealed, they gave me more understanding about the nature of this issue.
Here’s an update. The open records bill sponsored by Rep. Sara Feigenholtz will go no further in the spring session of the legislature. Feigenholtz will hold it and ask the Judiciary committees of the House and Senate to have hearings this summer, with an eye toward passing a bill in the fall.
Now, here’s another piece about adoption. This one’s not about open records. It’s about the greatest problem in adoption: There aren’t enough of them.
If you produce a fine, healthy infant and you want to find a home for it, sure, you’ll find a home for it.
But the U.S. has reached a scary milestone: About half a million children are in foster care, almost double what it was a little more than a decade ago. Most of the children are there because somebody beat them or sexually abused them or abandoned them. Of those half a million kids, only 20,000 or so will be adopted this year.
There are plenty of reasons for that, starting with parents who use drugs, parents who are uneducated and out of work, parents who just are not fit. But the government has been complicit, too.
Since 1980, Washington has demanded that states make “reasonable efforts” to put families back together if the states want federal money for foster care. And the states, abetted by a child welfare culture that sought the easiest route, thought it was fine for kids to spend their childhood in foster care waiting for their parents to shape up.
Well, that’s changing.
Illinois, believe it or not, is at the front of the change. Last year the legislature voted to reject “reasonable efforts” in the most egregious cases of abuse and neglect. There’s a bill moving this year in Springfield, with Gov. Jim Edgar’s support, that would give the courts more power to quickly free up children for adoption.
It didn’t draw much attention outside of Washington, but the House Ways and Means Committee Wednesday approved a bill that says, in effect, get these kids a home.
Actually, it’s written in more lawyerly terms than that. The bill would make the states speed up court hearings to decide where a kid will have a permanent home. If a child under 10 has been in foster care for 18 out of 24 months, the state would have to start adoption proceedings. It would give foster parents a right to be in court and tell what they know about the children. The secretary of Health and Human Services will issue an annual report card on how states are protecting children.
It would create what you might indelicately call a bounty system. The financial incentive has been to keep kids in foster homes–the government paid the states for kids in foster care. This bill would pay the states for getting more of them out of foster care and into adoptive homes. States would get $4,000 for each adoption they concluded above their average in past years.
In the worst cases, where a child has been abandoned, or tortured, or sexually abused, or frequently beaten, the states would be told to forget about “reasonable efforts.”
It’s hard to say whether the bill in Congress is going to have a huge impact on adoption or will wind up being feel-good legislation for congressmen who want to be on the right side of abused kids.
The feds have put requirements on states before, then not enforced them. Lawmakers have also proven that they can’t legislate against inertia. If the courts and the child welfare bureaucracies aren’t willing to move, the kids won’t go anywhere.
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It’s possible these legislative efforts could get sidetracked by muddle-headed people who think this kind of legislation infringes on the rights of parents who beat, burn and gouge their kids, but just need a little time and understanding to straighten out.
But the bills seem to have momentum and support in high places. And even if the efforts turns out to be little more than symbolism, well, it’ll be some heavy symbolism. It will be an expression of national impatience with the number of kids in foster care. It will say that the nation’s first priority is to make sure children are safe, and the second is to make sure they have a permanent home.
If anyone is clinging to federal law as an excuse for giving parents who hurt their kids a long time to get their act together, that excuse will be gone. And if the money game has contributed to keeping kids in foster care, that incentive should fade away, too.
I’m not sure what’s the more pleasant surprise, that the nation is changing how it approaches abused kids and their abusers, or that Illinois has been ahead of the game. Either way, I’ll take it.