Adoption process should easier

By Hillary Clinton

The first time I met Mother Teresa was not in an urban slum or a remote village in India but in the fancy ballroom of a Washington hotel. It was February 1994, and she had just delivered a speech against abortion at the National Prayer Breakfast. When she finished her remarks, she pulled me aside for a chat.

She told me about her homes for orphaned children in New Delhi and Calcutta and asked for my help in setting up a similar home for abandoned and neglected babies in Washington, D.C. I agreed to work on the project. Although we differ on some issues, we found common ground on adoption. So we sat and talked about how to find homes for the hundreds of thousands of American children who need loving families.

A year later, my daughter and I visited Mother Teresa's home for children in New Delhi. There were too many `cribs and too few toilets, and there was too little space. There was no way the place could ever pass inspection in any American city. But there were also dozens of beautiful babies. mostly girls, being fed, clothed, sheltered and lived until they could be adopted.

These images stayed with me when I returned home. I was even more determined to help Mother Teresa bring to Washington the compassion I had witnessed in India. But you cannot imagine how much red tape was getting in my way. Ironically, many regulations designed to protect children often overlook what kids need most: love and attention.

Finally, on a sweltering day this past June, the Mother Teresa Home for Children opened in an affluent residential neighborhood of the nation's capital. It is a two-story Tudor house with a swimming pool in the backyard, donated by a remarkably generous person who chose to remain anonymous. At the dedication ceremony, Mother Teresa - happy, enthusiastic and all business - took me on a tour. Grabbing my hand and leading me up the stairs, she walked me through brightly painted rooms filled with cribs, bassinets and stuffed animals.

Although it will accommodate only eight children at a time, this home is a crucial step in awakening Americans to the crisis of adoption.

We should worry less about how many cribs can be placed in a room and more about how many children can be placed with loving families. And instead of yelling at each other about abortion, we should spend our energy making adoptions easier. If that were to happen, there would be far fewer abortions and far more children in happy homes.

Today, there are about 450,000 children in the United States who need permanent families. There are tens of thousands of parents seeking to adopt.

Yet every day, complex regulations, outdated assumptions and wrong-headed laws stand in the way of bringing these parents and children together.

For some Americans, like a woman who wrote to me recently, cost is the biggest barrier. She and her husband, both musicians, spent thousands of dollars adopting a little boy six years ago. He is, she said, "the joy of our life." When her cousin's daughter recently became pregnant at age 18 and could not afford to keep the child, this same couple volunteered to adopt again.

As simple as this case should have been - the parents and baby were members of the same extended family and all parties agreed to the adoption - it still cost upward of $4,000 because of legal fees and paperwork.

For others, there is a fear factor. Like many Americans, a 40- year-old newscaster I met recently in New Mexico was interested in adopting but was discouraged by highly publicized cases like Baby Richard's. However rare they are, cases in which birth parents seek to reclaim custody of adopted children undermine people's faith in the adoption system.

Decisions to give up children for adoption should be difficult to overturn, especially in cases of children who become attached to their adoptive families during their formative years, like Baby Richard. The decision to return the child to the biological parents or to uphold the adoption should be made as quickly as possible. No child should be left in limbo.

The whole process also is made more difficult because of a historical bias against interracial adoptions, which can mean endless waiting until children are matched with parents of the same race.

In a perfect world, most of us would choose parents who shared our cultural and racial identities. But our world is not perfect. Today, there are far more minority children needing homes than are being placed for adoption. To prevent these children from languishing in foster care, new guidelines are now in place that will prohibit federally funded agencies from using race as a factor in placing children.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we did something dramatic about adoption? Why not set a goal of placing 100,000 children each year for the next five years? To do this, we would have to make adoption easier and enlist volunteer lawyers and judges to speed up the legal process. And we should also follow Mother Teresa's model, in which considerations like money, regulations, and skin color do not outweigh the more important gift of love that adoptive parents want to offer.