Adoptions

Bless you for your continuing interest in and concern for the welfare of children as expressed in the timely and incisive stories you regularly publish with regard to foster care, adoption services, and related issues.

Your May 21 article (“Pleas Made for Adoptive Homes for Black Children,” Part I) demonstrates how racist, bureaucratic policies victimize minority children a second time when their greatest need is a stable, loving home.

My wife and I have been foster parents to children of Filipino, Mexican, black and Anglo backgrounds. We agree that children should be placed into homes of similar ethnic/racial background provided that such homes are readily available. However, the bureaucracy’s insistence that a minority child bounce around in the vagaries of foster care during the critical early years of the child’s life in the interest of “minority sensitive policies” is insensitive to the ultimate need of the child, and constitutes nothing less than child abuse and neglect. The longer the child is denied a permanent home, the more troubled the child typically becomes, and the more difficult the task becomes to find adoptive parents of any race and ethnicity for the then older and troubled child.

Your story states that the black community, for one, is already far above average in its participation in adoption. Clearly, the rest of the human community, particularly those many potentially adoptive parents for whom skin color is not a prejudicial issue, should be given the opportunity to share both the privilege and the responsibility for caring for precious children in the urgency of their need.

JOHN D. MILLER

Santa Monica