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Marsha Traugot (1951)
In
this essay, Traugot discusses the changing trend of adoption in America. Now, a
lot of families accept the children for adoption who were not adoptable in
past.
Twenty
years ago, there were certain criteria for the adoption of a child. Firstly,
the child had to be white. Second, he or she had to be an infant, i.e. below 18
months old. Third, s/he had to be a normal and healthy child. Single parent
adoptions were also not possible. Until about 1960, middle or upper class
childless white couples adopted healthy white infants. Handicapped children
were more or less regarded as damaged goods. Minority and mixed racial children
were virtually ignored. So, these children waited.
This
situation remains no longer. Children once labeled not worthy to adopt are
being placed with substantially more types of families. It has been possible
because of various civil rights movements, birth control, changing mores, and
social science researches. The black civil rights movement raised the
consciousness of the people and encouraged international adoption. Liberal
whites started adopting black and mixed-race infants.
The
women’s movement changed people’s attitude toward birth control, abortion and
marriage. As a result, fewer unwanted babies were born. Even unwed mothers were
allowed to keep their babies. They kept their babies with themselves with the
support of their families. Because of all these things, the number of healthy
infants drastically reduced. They became scarce. This severe scarcity of the
normal children turned childless couples’ attention toward the other children,
the waiting children.
The
research has shown that the children kept in foster care suffer from various
problems such as pseudo-mental retardation, learning disabilities, mental
illnesses, delinquency, sexual perversion, etc. Moreover, keeping them in
foster care is very much expensive. So, today’s social workers give emphasis
upon ‘matching’ for child adoption. First the workers evaluate the child’s
personality, cultural background and emotional state. Based on these factors,
the workers search appropriate family for the child.
To
find potential adoptive parents for a child, the adoption agencies go through
certain steps. First, they look through the families listed to them. If they
don’t find any of them suitable, they register the child with the regional or
state adoption exchange. This agency distributes a photo and description of the
child to all other agencies. Sometimes, they hold monthly meetings and sponsor
parties where the prospective parents and the children get chance to meet each
other informally. Finally, when the match cannot be made, the child welfare
organizations depend upon media blitzes. These are often aggressive like
commercial advertisements. They are quite effective.
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