In partnership with the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, Center Co-Directors Jeanne Howard and Susan Smith examine fundamental issues in promoting ethical adoption policy and practice which is in the interests of all parties to adoption. Projects which have been completed through this partnership include:
This publication represents the most thorough, intensive and sophisticated effort to date to understand contemporary infant adoption, particularly as it relates to the least-understood and most-stigmatized participants in the process: the women and men usually termed "birthparents."
According to this report, parents who choose adoption for their infants do not have their rights and needs sufficiently addressed in U.S. law and practice - largely because of basic misconceptions about who these women and men are - and they invariably fare better when they have ongoing information about and/or contact with the children they place into new families.
This monograph examines the needs of children in foster care awaiting adoption, the use of gay and lesbian adults as resources and the laws and policies that support, ignore or work against such adoption.
Finding Homes for Waiting Children: Is Adoption by Gay and Lesbian www.adoptioninstitute.org.
This Policy Perspective brings together for the first time research and years of broad experience on a range of issues that affect millions of boys and girls nationwide. The report points out that, as adoption becomes increasingly normalized in the United States, more and more adoptive families are confronting challenges when their children attend school - and it offers recommendations for how educators can better meet those challenges. The report also states that educating educators about the realities of adoption is a diversity issue and also a fairness issue, because adopted and foster children are sometimes derided in ways we would never accept if the taunting or stereotyping referred to other aspects of their being - such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion or disability.
The primary safeguard to regulate the adoption of boys and girls from one state to another is the Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children (ICPC). For a large number of foster children, finding permanent families requires moving in with relatives or other families outside their own states. For these children, accomplishing permanency is a more complicated process, requiring the cooperation of child welfare agencies and judicial systems in two jurisdictions. The ICPC was created four decades ago, and the pressure to expedite interjurisdictional placements has finally built to the point where serious efforts are now being undertaken to reform the process. This policy brief outlines the relevant issues in an effort to inform the discussion during current efforts to improve the ICPC system.
[Updated April 22, 2008]
