New Ease in Adoptions

After a ten-month legal battle, Mr. and Mrs. Michale T. Liuni, of Tillson, N.Y., last week adopted a 4 1/2-year-old Beth, their foster child since infancy. The local welfare commissioner had sought to place the girl elsewhere, largely because of the Liunis' age (both are 48), income ($8,900) and the fact that, while they are dark-eyed and swarthy Italian-Americans, Beth is a blue-eyed blonde. Not surprisingly, a county court overruled the commissioner, but the national publicity that surrounded the case gave a falsely bleak picture of the state of adoptions in the U.S. today.

Red tape and prejudice continue to create some snarls and snafus, but the outlook for people who really want somebody else's children is brighter than ever. Federal welfare officials estimate that 2,000,000 of the 80 million Americans under 18 live with adoptive parents. The number of adoptions has increased more than 50% in the past decade, from 93,000 to 142,000 annually. Reason for the rise is a basic shift in supply and demand: more babies than ever are available for adoption. When it comes to prospective adoptive parents, says Louise Guenther, coordinator of Washington state's adoptive agencies, "we are the seekers now, not the critics."

Money & Religion. About 80% of the adopted children are born to unwed mothers, and, despite vastly improved methods of birth control, the loosening of moral standards has trebled the official illegitimacy rate in the U.S. since 1940.* At the same time, the Depression-born ranks of people aged 25 to 35, who most commonly want to adopt children, are proportionately slender now. There are still many more young couples wanting children than there are available infants. But the ratio, once 10 to 1, is now down to 5 to 1 in small towns, 3 to 1 in New York and other Eastern cities. In California and Flor ida, where many unmarried pregnant women go to have their babies--presumably to combine a vacation with a secret confinement--there is a surfeit of available infants.

Most adoption agencies no longer insist that applicants must be affluent and childless. In Texas, families with incomes as low as $3,000 have been allowed to take children, and Los Angeles County has placed some with families on relief. The old thumb rule that the parents' combined ages could not exceed 80 is largely gone. California and several other states have permitted a few unmarried women to adopt children.

The toughest remaining barrier is religion. Such states as New York and Massachusetts generally refuse to grant adoptions to couples of mixed religions, or nonbelievers.

Race & Results. Fewer and fewer child-seeking parents have to patronize the "grey market"--that is, to bypass the formal agencies and deal with a doctor who delivers an illegitimate child. The costs run from $1,000 to $2,000; the adoptive parents usually pay the mother's hospital bills, plus a lawyer's fees for drawing up legal adoption papers. "Independent placement" is not illegal in most states as long as no baby broker receives a profit for arranging the deal, but it can produce painful complications. If, as often happens, the natural mother knows who the new parents are, she can subsequently turn up and try to reclaim her child.

It is far harder to find homes for Ne gro, Indian, Puerto Rican or Mexican-American children than for babies born to white Protestant or Catholic mothers (Jewish babies are in the shortest supply). Close to 90% of the children adopted today are white, though about 60% of all illegitimate babies are colored. The average waiting period for a white adopted child varies from five to nine months in Los Angeles to one year or more in New York; but any white couple willing to take a Negro or Indian child is likely to have it arrive so fast that they do not even have time for one last night on the town without a baby sitter. Probably no more than 500 to 1,000 families have taken multiracial children, but the results are usually heartening.

Minneapolis Tribune Reporter Joe Rigert, 35, and his wife, Jan, 32, are the parents of a little league of nations: six children, ranging in age from H to 14, and in race from white to Japanese-Irish, East Indian-Mexican, white-Negro, Indian-Negro. Only one in that brood is the Rigerts' natural child. But when strangers ask the inevitable "Are they all yours?", the answer is plainly, and truthfully, affirmative.

* From 7.1 to 23.4 births per 1,000 single women of childbearing age (15 to 44).

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