Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting, by Elizabeth Bartholet (Houghton Mifflin, 263 pp., $21.95)
BUCKING current trends, Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet is unabashedly in favor of adoption: her own struggles to adopt led her to write this powerful, fascinating indictment of the adoption process. As Professor Bartholet discovered, would-be parents are subjected to the most intrusive and restrictive screenings, miles of bureaucratic red tape, exorbitant fees, and unsubstantiated horror stories in the media portraying adoption as fraught with danger. Very few “desirable” children (i.e., healthy white infants) are available for adoption in the U.S., but thousands of people wish to be parents, and thousands of older, minority, and handicapped children are rendered unadoptable by the maze of laws favoring biological parents’ rights and opposing trans-racial adoption. International adoption, meanwhile, often involves extended visits abroad and is hampered by U.S. immigration restrictions and international law. The author sees the bias against adoption as one inordinately in favor of biological bonds, and ignoring the role nurturing plays in parenting; she urges reforms to make adoption easier and a redefinition of “suitable” parents to include singles, those over forty, and homosexuals. She neglects to point out that the powerful abortion lobby in this country has been working steadily to make adoption an unattractive choice, since every “unwanted” baby brought to term is a loss for abortion profiteers. The choice of adopting also undermines a central “pro-choice” argument: that, for the pregnant woman unprepared to raise a child herself, the only alternative is to abort.
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