Word: whitely
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...some estimates, these special-needs children account for about 60% of all those available for adoption. They make up the large majority of the youngsters now handled by the public adoption agencies of most states. Yet while there may be dozens of couples bidding for every healthy white infant, only about one-third of the approximately 36,000 available special-needs kids will be taken in any given year. Some of the rest can be found in hospitals as "boarder babies" -- left behind at birth by addicted or otherwise incapable mothers. Others are crammed into group facilities...
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...
...Though his mother freely consumed prescription and street drugs during pregnancy, her drug abuse probably did not extend to crack. Even so, when Rick and Mary Hibbard brought him into their home in Long Beach, Calif., he was a nine-month-old veteran of pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma, so white from anemia he was "almost iridescent," recalls Rick. Now eight, Jimmy still has trouble with some motor skills. But he has demonstrated above-average reading ability...
Agencies are rethinking their opposition to placing black children with white parents. In 1972 the National Association of Black Social Workers charged that "transracial adoption" was a kind of cultural genocide that deprived black children of their racial heritage. At least 35 states imposed regulations requiring social workers to make every attempt to place children with parents of the same race. Transracial adoptions of all kinds dropped from a high of 2,540 in 1971 to less than half that number in recent years...
...consequence of this policy has been that black children, who make up about 40% of the foster-child population, tend to spend much longer waiting for adoption than whites. Recently agencies have been quietly permitting more black children to go to white adoptive homes. They have also been mobilizing to recruit more potential black parents...