Contact Person:
Professor Cynthia R. Mabry
(202) 806-8067
cmabry@law.howard.edu
HOWARD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW
2900 Van Ness Street, NW
Washington, DC 20008
"Welcome to Howard University School of Law’s Adoption Awareness web site! This site is designed to promote adoption of children in the child welfare system in the Washington Metropolitan Area including the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Northern Virginia. The child welfare system was chosen because a majority of the children who are waiting to be adopted are in the public child welfare systems in these states. This site offers general information about the adoption process, adoption laws, local adoption agencies, adoption attorneys, and selected national web sites that provide a wealth of information about children who are available for adoption and the child welfare system..."
We are currently waiting to hear about these 3 sisters. How can you NOT fall in love?According to a 2004 National Vital Statistics Report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2000, 15.6% or 1,003,000 of the 6,401,000 pregnancies in the United States ended in either a miscarriage or stillbirth; the CDC also indicates that in 2003 the number of live births in the United States was 4,093,000; of those births, 27,500 ended in the death of an infant under the age of one.
Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is to promote Support, Education and Awareness for grieving parents nationwide (and worldwide).
Too many families grieve in silence, sometimes never coming to terms with their loss. Our goal is to help others relate to our loss, know what to say, do or not say, not do and to help families live with their loss, not "get over" their loss.
from http://www.october15th.com/
We lost 3 babies. I think of them often.
A reality series...it took months to figure out the details.Adoption Diaries, a new original series on WEtv explores the process behind privately held open adoptions. The series, which premiered September 12, showcases the matching process between the couples and expectant mothers who turn to open adoption.
Each episode follows a different story from the beginning stages, as a birth mother is faced with choosing her baby's future family. Throughout the series Dr. Jennifer Bliss (National Associate Counseling Director and Southern California Branch Co-Director at the Independent Adoption Center) works to match the birthmothers with the right families...
When is the right time to move from infertility to adoption? When do you emotionally feel ready? Will you ever feel ready and must move forward with other ways of creating your forever family! Mardie Caldwell, through her personal experience and over 20 years of working with couples nation-wide, has made it her life's work to bless children needing forever adoptive parents....
The Adoption Clubhouse is a program of the National Adoption Center, whose mission it is to expand adoption opportunities throughout the United States, particularly for children with special needs and those from minority cultures.Read More about the National Adoption Center
The Adoption Clubhouse is designed, authored and formatted by adoption professionals who believe...
Adoption is not the end but the beginning of a lifetime of experiences and relationships heightened by the unique aspects of being adopted.
The Adoption Clubhouse is designed with your child's adoption needs in mind. Through the activities and information on this site your child can experience a sense of belonging to a wider adoption community of peers.
The staff of Adoption Clubhouse takes every precaution to insure a safe internet experience for your child but we ask you to be the lead in guiding them when using this and other websites.
To read about the contents of the Adoption Clubhouse, please see our Parents’ Guide for information.
Dear family & friends,
Just a note to bring you up-to-date with our adoption journey. It's been nearly a year since we embarked on our journey to build our family through adoption.
We have updated our home study to include up to two children age newborn through five years old. We are really hoping for a sibling group of two, much to our surprise! This type of adoption is through Social Services, and we are considering children from all 50 states. Don't be surprised if you find us on your doorstep looking for a place to crash ;)
By widening the age range, we hope to speed up the adoption process a bit.
We are currently being considered as adoptive parents for three sibling groups. Don't worry, we will let you know when we become parents!
Thank you to those of you who have been helpful and supportive in our journey to build our family. Your support is greatly appreciated.
Take care, and we hope you are enjoying your summer.
Please visit our blog about our journey at http://afamilyisborn3.blogspot.com/
Love, Julie & Chris
Julie, I don't know if you remember me or not... I've chatted with you on the infertility forums over the years and have emailed you before. I just want you to know, I continue to follow your story and you touch my heart in so many ways. I love that you are documenting your journey to becoming parents and really enjoy reading all of your words of wisdom along the way. I always have my eyes and ears open to children that may need a mommy and daddy and have you in mind lots. Take care and keep the faith... you are going to be an awesome set of parents some day because of your adventure along the way!!!!
AK
We are being considered as adoptive parents for these 2 sets of siblings as well as another set of brothers (whom I do not have a photo of).Every adoption experience is as unique as the families, children, and service personnel involved. Common to every adoption, however, are certain steps that lead from first thinking about adoption to finally welcoming a new child (or children!) into your life. The 15 steps listed below--typical for most domestic (adoption of American children by American citizens) special needs adoptions--provide a basic overview of how you may want to approach the adoption process....
for the rest, click here
No, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need...
This bill will prevent the 2001 Adoption Tax Credit from expiring in 2010. This tax credit enables thousands of Americans to grow their families via adoption. Without it many families would not have the financial resources to bring their children home. Please click on the button above to learn how you can help make sure this credit will still be available to adoptive families after 2010.
Anthony (Tony) and Michael
Dustin, Rodney, Ashley, and Katie
In Chicago, Theresa Reid and her husband had lucrative careers and a beautiful home. What was missing from their lives was children. But they knew in Eastern Europe, there were children who were missing parents-and they set out to find their family. This is Theresa's account of how Natalie and Lana came to be her daughters-a journey that takes readers not only to Moscow and Kiev but into the deepest parts of a mother's heart. Reid addresses the issues that arise for many an adoptive parent- including the guilt over taking children away from their roots, and the slow, stumbling steps toward trust and tenderness that played out between them. For any parent, adoptive or not, this book offers not only a compelling story but valuable insights into the transformative power of loving a child.
These days, when people say they want to adopt a healthy infant, they receive dirty looks from some in the adoption community. “Why not adopt one of the hundreds of thousands of children waiting in foster care?” people ask. “Why not adopt one of the millions or orphans from around the world?”
If you want to adopt a healthy infant, some insinuate that you’re an adoption traitor. They imply that you should be more altruistic and less selfish than to desire what every parent who gives birth wants: a healthy baby.
“Parental rights will be terminated upon identification of a permanent resource.”
“Adoption is about people coming together to form a family. In whatever way possible!”
A Heart Gallery is an exhibit of portraits. Portraits of children who want to be adopted. Typically photographs are donated by professional photographers who volunteer their time. A Heart Gallery exhibit is distinct because the photographs of the children are done as a portrait of the child’s personality – a more personal feeling than is derived from a typical adoption photo listing.
But he is not allowed to leave his state (which is not our state). So instead he will remain in foster care. This is the thing I don't get. Who made these rules? OMG, can you believe that little face? Which also begs the question "what is he doing in foster care in the first place?" which a question I now find myself asking me several times a day.
She really wanted the baby. Her kids did, too. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend of three years did not.
"I talked to God a lot, asking what does this mean. What am I supposed to do?" she recalls. She was working long hours as an office manager at a chiropractic firm and just making ends meet. She would need to take on a new expense: child care.
"We live simply," says Renee, 36, looking around the living room of her three-bedroom town home. "There wasn't much more we could simplify in our lives." As much as she wanted the baby, she says, "I didn't want to hurt my children."
So after giving birth Dec. 30, she nursed Josephine Olivia Renee for six days. She then did something she would not have imagined nine months earlier: She gave her child to another family.
Renee says placing Joie (pronounced "Joey") for adoption was the most difficult thing she's ever done, but she has no regrets.
"I've never been more at peace in my life," she says. "Joie deserved better." ...
click here to read the full story
In a recent column, I argued that the most plausible reason that couples with daughters divorce more often than couples with sons is that parents, on average, prefer boys. Since then my e-mail box has overflowed with objections, alternative theories, and requests for clarification. In the meantime, I've changed my own mind. I think I have a much better way to explain the facts. So, I want to revisit these issues.First, to the e-mail. The easiest ones to dispose of are those that question the facts, particularly the claim that a one-child American family with a daughter is 5 percent more likely to get divorced than a one-child family with a son. The facts are accurate. The divorce numbers come from a study by Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti based on more than 3 million observations from the U.S. Census. With that kind of sample size, there's no way the 5 percent difference is "just a coincidence," as some readers suggested.
Other readers accepted the reality of the 5 percent difference but questioned the conclusion that daughters cause divorce. After all, marriages differ in all sorts of ways that might be relevant—financial stresses, infidelity, emotional distance. The phrase "correlation does not imply causation" popped up a lot.
But in this case, correlation does imply causation, and here's why: If you take 3 million people, have them all flip coins, and divide them into two groups according to whether their coins came up heads or tails, then the two groups are going to look statistically identical in every way—same average income, same average intelligence, same average height. That's called the law of large numbers, and it works for two reasons—first, the sample size is huge, and second, coin flips are random. Now do the same thing, dividing your 3 million people according to the gender of their last-born child. The same thing happens—parents of boys are going to be statistically identical in every way to parents of girls, because you've still got a huge sample size and because the sex of a child is as random as a coin flip. Since everything else is equal, the only thing that can be causing the difference in divorce rates is the gender of the children.
"Why not just ask people why they got divorced?" inquire several e-mails. Answer: You can't feasibly ask 3 million people why they got divorced. You could feasibly ask 3,000, but then your results would be statistically suspect because of a small sample size.
In fact, there are published surveys indicating that mothers of boys are happier on average than mothers of girls. These surveys are directly relevant to the point at issue, but I chose not even to mention them in the original column because Gordon Dahl convinced me that their statistical significance was suspect.
A number of readers offered the comment that, evidence be damned, they would simply never believe that the children's gender could be relevant to a divorce decision. My favorite of these came from a therapist in Iowa—it would probably be inappropriate to mention her name, so let's just call her "Bozo the Therapist"—who took me to task for the "archaic notion" that children ever have anything to do with divorce. Unless she's been practicing not in the state of Iowa but on the planet Iowa in some distant solar system, Bozo must win the prize for "least observant therapist in human history." The fact is that children do affect divorce decisions; if we didn't know this from statistical evidence, we'd still know it from common sense. And to a smallish but non-negligible extent, girls cause more divorces than boys do. Ignoring those facts won't make them go away.
The facts are clear and worth reporting, but there's legitimate controversy about what they mean. There are three key facts: 1) Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than parents of sons; 2) in multichild families, parents of daughters are more likely to try for another child than parents of sons; 3) divorced mothers of daughters are less likely to remarry than divorced mothers of sons.
I originally said that all three facts point to a parental preference for boys. Several readers pointed out that the third fact—that divorced mothers of daughters are less likely to remarry—admits a better explanation: Mothers don't want to expose their daughters to a potentially predatory stepfather. Excellent point. So, I now think the evidence on remarriages is ambiguous regarding whether second husbands prefer boy stepchildren.
Other readers offered what they thought was counterevidence: Adoption agencies report a higher demand for girls. But this is exactly what you'd expect in a world where parents prefer boys. In such a world, boys will tend to be put up for adoption when there's something seriously wrong with them, but many girls will be put up for adoption simply for being girls. So, if I'm looking to adopt a bright healthy child, of course I'll choose a girl: I expect that among children put up for adoption, girls are on average brighter and healthier than boys. I could well make this choice even if I prefer boys to girls, as long as my preference for bright and healthy is stronger.
Still, several readers came up with other ways to explain the facts. A lot of their stories were rooted in evolutionary biology, e.g., "a boy is a better genetic investment because boys can have more progeny than girls." Unfortunately, that doesn't work. For every boy with more than the average number of offspring, there's another with less than the average number. Boys are likelier than girls to generate 20 children, but they're also likelier to generate zero.
The most creative evolutionary biology explanation comes from reader Todd Peters: Boys with low self-esteem become withdrawn and unattractive; girls with low self-esteem become promiscuous. So, if you want lots of grandchildren, you've got to raise the self-esteem of your sons (by staying married) and lower the self-esteem of your daughters (by getting divorced).
Ooookay. But let's end on a serious note, with a whole new way of looking at this—the way I wish I'd thought of to begin with. Suppose parents believe that inherited wealth is more important to a boy than to a girl—either because wealth gives boys a bigger advantage in the mating competition or because boys are more likely to do something entrepreneurial. Then parents of boys will try harder than parents of girls to preserve their wealth. In particular: 1) Parents of boys will avoid divorce, because divorce is costly; and 2) parents of boys will have fewer children, because extra children dilute the inheritance.
That could explain the divorce statistics and explain why parents of boys are less likely to try for more children. So, here's a nice theory that fits all the facts and doesn't rely on a preference for boys.
Finally, a lot of readers asked me about my own preferences. I cannot imagine why they're interested. If I were reporting on national employment trends, would you want to know my personal employment history? But for the record, I'm pleased to say that I always wanted a girl, I got the girl I wanted, and so far she's perfect. Ask me again next month after she starts driving.
Illustration by Robert NeubeckerSteven E. Landsburg deduced from an array of data that parents, on average, prefer sons over daughters. His evidence lay in a few recent studies that show that daughters have a slight but marked tendency to break up (or else forestall) marriages while sons tend to keep them together. But it turns out there's a fascinating fork in the statistical trail of bread crumbs.For years, it's been common currency in adoption circles that girls are far more popular than boys among adoptive parents. Now there's data to confirm it, which has prompted another round of speculation about gender preference among parents—an issue that is bound to rouse more interest, and concern, as the era of assisted reproduction progresses.
This past August, the Census Bureau released an unprecedented report comparing adopted, biological, and stepchildren based on results from the 2000 Census—amazingly, the first census to differentiate between these groups. First of all, the report found that there are about 105 boys for every 100 girls in the general population of biological children under the age of 18. Adopted children, it turns out, present a very different picture, with a "sex ratio"—the sociologists' term—of 89 boys for every 100 girls. What's more, adopted children under the age of 6 constitute a group where there only are 85 boys for every 100 girls. (The Census Bureau reports that stepchildren—a sizable population whose sex ratio is closer to the norm—are usually adopted at later ages than orphans are. Hence the under-6 drop-off.
Last but not least, the sex ratio of adopted children goes still further off-kilter if you look only at international adoptions. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (now part of the Department of Homeland Security) has kept up excellent data on international adoptions over decades of processing visa paperwork. Its word: Girls make up about 64 percent of all children adopted by Americans outside the United States. That's a mere 56* boys for every hundred girls.What explains the disproportion? If we didn't know better, the most obvious conjecture would be that these numbers simply reflect an imbalance in supply. After all, America's leading source of adoptees is China, where the legacy of female infanticide is the grimmest hallmark of that country's overwhelming preference for males. The organization Families With Children From China reports that about 95 percent of children available for adoption in China are girls. Other Asian adoption hubs (like Korea, the erstwhile lead supplier) have orphan sex ratios that tend in the same direction. So Americans adopt more girls because other countries don't want them, right?
Wrong. Unlike biological parents, who must simply make do with what the procreative coin toss affords them—as in a market determined solely by supply—adoptive parents get to be upfront about their gender preferences. And a look at those preferences suggests that, in fact, the adoption market in China represents a happy coincidence of supply and demand.
Numbers vary, but it's pretty safe to say that somewhere between 70 percent and 90 percent of parents looking to adopt register some preference for a girl with an agency. It doesn't matter if they're adopting from China, where girls far outnumber boys; from Russia, where the numbers are about even; or from Cambodia, where there is typically a glut of orphan boys and a paucity of girls. Everywhere, demand tends to favor the feminine.
And, as the case of Cambodia suggests, demand can in fact exert an influence on supply—and not a happy one. In the late '90s, Cambodia became a popular source for American adoptions, thanks to a relatively quick, cheap, and tidy process. But for whatever reason (some cite a Cambodian tradition that girls are expected to take care of their parents when they get older), Cambodia didn't offer the standard Asian profile of adoptable children. Boys outnumbered girls by a healthy margin. So what happened was what you would expect to happen in an underpoliced free market: Market pressure built up, until certain enterprising Cambodian adoption suppliers, or "facilitators," stepped in and found a way to meet demand.
Evidence of child-trafficking came to light in late 2001 and early 2002, when several poor Cambodian women stepped forward saying they had been approached by someone from an "NGO" who offered them a sum of money—significantly more for a daughter than for a son, though never more than $200—in exchange for their children. When that "NGO" turned out to be an orphanage, the U.S. Embassy and the then-INS slammed the gates on all U.S. adoptions out of Cambodia. They haven't reopened the gates yet.
Scholars inside the adoption community are quick to admit that the historical aura of secrecy surrounding adoption has hobbled research efforts to account for the decided preference among parents for girls. Still, there are a few decent indicators. First, there are certain norms and stereotypes peculiar to the world of adoption that have been wafting around since adoption became a modern institution. Take, for example, the following quote, an excerpt from the 1916 annual report of the Spence Alumni Society, one of the very first American adoption agencies: "Why do so many people prefer girls! The majority seem to feel that a girl is easier to understand and to rear, and they are afraid of a boy."
Quaint, yes, but the same view still crops up regularly enough in adoption-talk that it invites some probing. Parents might be "afraid of a boy" because the adoption market stalks frightful circumstances like poverty, instability, and violence around the map: When taking the somewhat risky step of bringing a foreign element into their family, parents might perceive little boys to be inheritors of their homes' uneasy fortunes, whereas little girls can more readily seem to be hapless victims of circumstance. Or it might be that, as Landsburg suggested in a follow-up piece, adoptive parents choose girls out of an inference that his theory is true—that most biological parents like sons better—and therefore they gather that "boys will tend to be put up for adoption when there's something seriously wrong with them, but many girls will be put up for adoption simply for being girls."
According to Adam Pertman, the real answer lies elsewhere. Pertman, the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a New York-based think tank, and author of the book Adoption Nation, suggests that the most important step in figuring out why so many people want to adopt girls is to look at who wears the pants in most adoption processes. Hint: It isn't the men.
"The extent to which women are the driving force in most adoptions is probably a factor," he says. "It's usually true that the women are filling out the paperwork, going to the conferences, the support groups." He adds, "If I speak at a conference—whether it's on adoption or family issues—at least 80 to 90 percent of any of these audiences are women."
If men are indeed largely silent partners in most adoptions, it could indicate that men's preferences with regard to their children's gender are simply not as strong when patrimony is not an issue. A man might hanker pretty strongly after a biological son to pass down both his name and his genes; but if that grand prize, so to speak, is not on the table, he may not care as much either way. Furthermore, if women are the ones running the show in most adoptions, and daughters are the ones getting adopted, it might nudge us toward the overall conclusion that parents merely tend to want children who are like themselves. Absent a strong paternal vote, mothers adopt daughters—and, as Landsburg noted, "fathers stick around for sons when they won't stick around for daughters." If adoption has any light to shed on the larger questions of gender preference among parents, this is probably it: More often than not, the view from adoption has it, mom wants a little girl, and dad wants a little boy.
But perhaps it's worth considering whether deeper motivations might also be at work. Let's assume that the parenting instinct combines two different components: a procreative and a nurturing urge. Some might say women disproportionately answer to the call of nurture, and men are more susceptible to the leaner procreative impulse. In most instances, adoption provides people who cannot satisfy the latter part of that instinct (procreate!) with a means at least to satisfy the former (nurture!). By that reasoning, parents (mostly women) who initiate adoptions do so because they want children to nurture and love, and they adopt girls out of a common perception—however accurate or inaccurate it may be—that girls respond better to nurturing than boys do. Perhaps adoption simply isolates one of the variables involved in why people become parents, and that variable happens to be one that favors girls.
Any institution that grafts altruistic motives, and ends, onto stubborn instinctual predispositions—which is what adoption does—is a cause for rejoicing. (Full disclosure: I have two adopted siblings.) But the adoptive parents' freedom to choose their child's gender can, as recent events in Cambodia suggest, cast a potentially darker light on this cuddly scenario. When little girls or little boys become preferred commodities—instead of just glints in the eye—there can be unforeseen, and unfortunate, consequences.
In this, adoption may be a bellwether of things to come, as rising technologies of assisted reproduction begin to afford biological parents a similar freedom to stipulate the gender of their children-to-be. If nothing else, the case of adoption shows that gender preferences can indeed skew pretty far to one side if parents are free to jot them down before the fact of parenthood (after which point one's theoretical desire for either a son or a daughter usually breaks up against an actual, beloved child of either gender). Perhaps, all speculation aside, we should regard this particular freedom with a wary eye—and applaud the growing number of adoption agencies that don't allow prospective parents to stipulate any gender preference in the first place.Correction, Jan. 14, 2003: This piece originally miscalculated the gender ratio for adopted children. It is 56 boys for every hundred girls, not 72. Return to the corrected sentence.
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