No One Wins When Adoptions Fail : Families: The spotlight stirs debate over the responsibility of prospective parents and rights of young people.

At the age of 10, Tony heard the words that pierced his heart and changed his world forever. He wasn’t wanted anymore--his adoptive parents were giving him back.

The couple, who had reared Tony for nearly half his life, said he didn’t “bond” with them and was a disturbed child who abused and endangered his 8-year-old brother, Sam.

Their decision: Keep one boy, return the other.

“I was crying and I was very sad,” Tony said in a tape recording made for the couple after he moved out. “I was adopted before and I don’t like being pushed around by people.”

Although most adoptions in America succeed, Tony’s case is among the small number that don’t have a storybook ending, just the pain and strain of a child and adults who share little but feelings of frustration and failure.

“Normally, it’s a very traumatic experience,” said Joe Kroll, director of the North American Council on Adoptable Children. “It definitely tears at both sides. You’re losing a child. A child is losing the parent.”

Tony--whose legal fight to visit his biological brother captured national attention--has turned the spotlight on failed adoptions, stirring debate over the responsibility of prospective parents and the rights of children when forging family ties.

“It creates new legal questions . . . on some of the most difficult kinds of cases in the law because they really do hit you where you live,” said Dan Polsby, a Northwestern University law professor.

“Family law issues are characteristically gut-wrenchers,” he said.

Some argue adoption is an ironclad, for-better-or-worse commitment.

“This is not something you go into thinking, ‘If it doesn’t work, we can always undo it,’ ” said Hal Gaither, a Texas family court judge who has handled failed adoptions. “A child should not be treated like commodities that can be changed.”

“We’re talking about a human being. We’re not talking about an automobile that you’re tired of,” said Pat Murphy, the Cook County public guardian who represented Tony in a court fight settled in late May when the adoptive parents agreed to sibling visits. “How many abandonments can you take in life before it really starts to kill you?”

But others contend that biological parents sever ties with children, so adoptive families should have the same option.

“There are lots of natural families who decide . . . they’re going to terminate their parental rights,” said Mary Martin, the attorney who represented Tony’s adoptive parents.

Many legal experts say that rarely happens with older children, however, because the state and agencies are reluctant to accept them, knowing they aren’t good adoption prospects.

Lawyers also say parents generally don’t reject adoptive children unless conditions are unbearable, ripping apart families and marriages.

Still, there are exceptions. Murphy cited one couple who divorced and fought over the property, but returned the child, and another in which the father, who was close to his adoptive son, died and his wife returned the boy.

Tony’s adoptive parents, known only as Joseph and Pamela Doe, a butcher and hairdresser from suburban Bellwood, said they couldn’t cope any longer with the boy’s emotional problems and abuse of Sam. They claimed that Tony struck Sam, cut him and tried to drown him.

“He certainly was doing things that were putting incredible pressure on them trying to live together as family,” Martin said.

But Murphy calls Tony “extremely likable, engaging” and notes that psychologists say the parents were too rigid.

Both boys were adopted in 1984 after being rejected twice by their natural mother, who kept their sister.

As for Tony, he was shocked when his adoptive parents announced that he would be returned to the state. “I thought they were kidding. They weren’t,” he said on the tape made with friends last winter.

The couple refused to listen to his plaintive message, according to Murphy.

Tony’s plight engendered much sympathy. In fact, Martin said the adoptive father told her if he had heard this story years ago, “I would have thought, ‘Isn’t that awful?’ But you have to live in my shoes these last six years to know how you come to this point and how painful it is.”

Few adoptions end so tragically.

Of some 50,000 adoptions annually, experts say less than 2% fail. But for special-needs children--those who are older or handicapped--the rate is between 11% and 13%, and nearly 1 in 4 for adolescents and teen-agers.

“Marriages have a 50% failure rate,” said Bill Pierce, president of the National Committee for Adoption. “In adoptions, the fact we have a 13% failure rate is an astounding success.”

Some say, however, that rate may climb because healthy white babies are scarce, while the adoption pool largely consists of older children with histories of neglect or abuse, or infants born of addicted mothers.

“The reason you might have more children who don’t work out is we’re trying with tougher and tougher kids,” said adoption advocate Kroll. “Today, every kind of kid has been adopted--kids without arms or legs, sexually abused, those in foster homes. Twenty years ago, they were written off.”

A home, though, isn’t an instant formula for success.

Experts say adoptions fail for several reasons: age, handicaps parents can’t handle, lack of personal history, and unrealistic expectations--with some children harboring fantasies about idealized family life and some adults becoming disappointed when the children aren’t grateful or relieved to have a new home.

A study of 927 children 3 years and older adopted from 1980-84 in California found that age was the strongest predictor of disruption and that the less information families had, the likelier the problems, said Richard Barth, one of the authors and an associate professor at the UC Berkeley’s social welfare school.

Lack of access to personal files prompted a Texas lawsuit by several families who claimed that they weren’t told of their adoptive children’s histories of sexual abuse or physical problems.

Thus far, the federal courts have ruled against the parents, who wanted the files to help their children’s treatment.

In a different adoption trauma in Texas, a couple gave up their adopted baby daughter after discovering that she was severely mentally retarded and deciding they couldn’t cope with that.

Judge Gaither, who terminated their visitation rights but refused to end all parental obligations, is not sympathetic.

“A birth parent has to take what they’re given,” he said. “A lot of birth parents are saddled with problems that will never be solved.”

Tony now lives in a foster home.

In his taped message, he was reassuring. “You don’t have to worry about me because I’m doing fine and I miss you a lot,” he said. He signed off as “your loving friend--and part-time son.”

One of Tony’s buddies offered an epilogue, saying when he heard what happened, “I started to cry. I said, ‘Well buddy, I’m sorry you have to do this, but this is life.’ ”