Word: adopt
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BROTHERLY Love Dept.: As much as we like to bemoan the lack of security on the Harvard campus, I doubt that any of us would like to see Harvard adopt the measures currently employed at the University of Pennsylvania...
Faced with a shortage of couples for the growing numbers of special-needs children, adoption officials have been forced to discard orthodox notions of what constitutes a family. Two years ago a White House task force recommended that states eliminate barriers to adoption by singles like Mazzafro, working couples, older people and the physically handicapped. "We've had situations where married veterans have been encouraged to adopt special-needs children, but when they show up in a wheelchair, they are shown the door," says Mary Sheila Gall, who headed the group. "We had to change the system...
Frank and Dante, a gay Long Island couple, have not only taken in the fragile 19-month-old Mickey; they are also preparing to adopt two-year-old Jonathan, who has weathered two bouts of AIDS-related pneumonia and, under their care, blossomed from an emaciated infant into a chubby, cheerful toddler. A private adoption agency, Leake & Watts, provides the men with $1,200 for each child a month in city, state and federal funds instead of the $437 subsidy for a healthy child...
...partial remedy is being tried in New York City. The city's new adoption- counseling unit works with drug-addicted birth mothers at the hospital to explain the possibility of giving up parental rights and freeing their children for quick adoption. Earlier this year the city instituted a plan encouraging would-be adoptive parents to serve as foster parents for children who haven't yet been freed for adoption, and then adopt them as soon as legally possible. "Parents don't have to go to Korea or South America if they ! want to adopt an infant," says adoption-services director...
Parents who adopt special-needs children speak of the rewards as often as the difficulties. Says Sam Borodin of Philadelphia, who with his wife has adopted three girls with Down syndrome: "They have given us joy and love back tenfold." But there are times when caring for a child with special needs can be too hard a test. In Texas a group of seven couples has brought a lawsuit against the state adoption agency, charging that they should have been told that their adopted children had been abused. As the children approached adolescence, they began to behave in a bizarre...