SHOULD MARRIED COUPLES GET PREFERENCE IN ADOPTION?: Maggie Gallagher

Lee, we disagree on a lot of the surrounding facts. For example.

One of the main reasons its hard to find parents for minority babies is the National Association of Black Social Workers' stance that it is wrong to allow transracial adoptions.

International transracial adoption by white American parents is incredibly common. Affluent married parents pay a great deal of money to adopt children of different races, including dark-skinned ones. Go to any Yale reunion and you'll see.

The perception among married folks seeking adoption is that a. there aren't enough babies of any kind to go around (since so many are aborted or kept by unwed moms) and b. there are barriers to domestic adoptions that aren't there for international ones. (such as the right of birth parents to take up to a year to rescind the adoption, the right of the birth father to prevent the adoption even when birth mother consents).

You take the Esbenshades' account to be so unlikely as to be perhaps not credible. (Yes, social workers are licensed, and subject to judicial oversight, but almost no-one has legal standing to contest any decision they make.) ( am having an increasingly hard time believing that single and gay people are so much more heroic than married folks as to be the only available families not only sometimes (which is credible) but much or most of the time.

It seems to me that social workers as a profession are committed to family diversity as an ideal and are acting on that belief in ways the profession does not consider inappropriate, but I do. (See for example the code of ethics of the National Association of Social Workers).

Regardless of our dispute here, my point still holds: even if married parents are rare, if they are available they should be preferred, because that is our legal and moral obligation to the babies.
posted by Eve at 1:57 AM | Link |

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