New Adoptive Families Open Up Ranks to Help Each Other : Parenting: As adoption ‘comes out of the closet,’ groups work to implement legal and cultural changes.

Alice Johnson is 40, single and wants a child. She hopes to adopt a Romanian orphan and expects the process to cost $10,000 to $12,000.

Joan McNamara, 43, is mom to 13 adopted children of different races, all with physical or emotional handicaps. She calls them her “rainbow.”

Forty-two-year-old Kate Burke was adopted and says she would never adopt a child herself. Burke, who has helped raise four stepchildren, believes that adoption is a feminist issue, that birth mothers are frequently shamed and badgered into giving up their babies.

A woman who hopes to become a mom. A mother of many. A woman who counsels birth mothers. Their day-to-day experiences may not mesh--but the common experience of adoption binds them.

“Adoption has its own culture,” says Pat Johnston, author of “Adopting After Infertility.”

“It was closeted before, and people tended not to talk about it. But they’re coming out of the closet.”

About 800 men and women from across the country “came out of the closet” for a recent Adoptive Families of America Conference in Los Angeles. The unofficial theme of the conference: Adoption is more than getting a child and living happily ever after.

Johnston says one in 10 people in the United States is touched by adoption, and one in five couples who want to have children are faced with infertility. In the past, those involved with adoption didn’t openly discuss it, hoping to avoid feeling “abnormal,” she says.

But the controversy surrounding many adoptions--mixed-race families, expensive lawyers, single parenting and foster children among them--is creating a Super Family of sorts. There is a growing network, a kinship, among adoptive parents and adopted children.

Adoption groups across the country are working to implement a number of legal and cultural changes in society. These include:

* Legislation to grant parental leave for adoptive parents.

* Government subsidies for adoption, especially for children with medical problems.

* Adoption columns in newspapers or television segments presenting children who need homes.

* Changing negative portrayals of adoption in the media.

Members of adoption groups launched a letter-writing campaign to producers of the film “Problem Child,” because, they said, it portrayed the idea that older children were not adoptable. The producers responded to their accusations and said they would be more sensitive to adoption issues when making “Problem Child 2.”

* Making the public aware that references to “real” or “natural” parents are offensive; the preferred language is biological or birth mother.

“There is a cultural bias, just because it is not the way most families are formed,” says Sam Pitowsky of New York, who has two adopted daughters, 4 and 7. “Kids are not pieces of wood.

“When my wife and I got married, part of our dream of how we wanted to live our lives was to have children,” says Pitowsky, a member of the New York City chapter of the Adoptive Parents Committee. “When it became apparent we couldn’t have children, it became more important to be parents than to be pregnant. It’s an alternative. They’re not second best.”

Many families spend years battling the often complicated and disappointing adoption process, waiting and hoping to form a family of their own.

Edward and Laurie Figueroa have been exploring adoption possibilities for a year. Edward has two teen-age children from a previous marriage, but he and his wife want to raise a child together. In this era of networking and searching, the Trabuco Canyon couple have experienced mostly stress and frustration.

“It is a difficult decision to make, and it’s a difficult position to be in,” 45-year-old Edward Figueroa says. “You lose control. You have to sell yourselves to (the adoption agencies). You see babies out there, you know you could give them a safe home and guide them through life, yet you have to go through so much bureaucracy and frustration.”

Brian and Marla Oken began looking into adoption about a year ago after finding they could not have children. When the Canyon Country couple first approached county agencies, they walked away feeling hopeless and discouraged.

“There’s no way we would pay for a child because we can’t have kids through no fault of our own bodies,” said Brian Oken, 33.

“It’s an incredibly personal and intimate situation, and you have to expose yourself to anyone who asks--doctors, lawyers, strangers know everything. We have to send our fingerprints to the FBI. If everyone had to go through what we had to go through to have a child, it would be a different world.”

Interracial adoption is a dominant issue within the adoption community. Most babies available in the country are black or Latino, according to a study by the North American Council on Adoptable Children.

Fred and Carla Sutton of San Diego are white and recently adopted an African-American baby. They formed a support group for interracial families and hope to give their son an awareness of his heritage as he grows up.

“We had gone through soul-searching and concluded we would be happy with a child of a different race or ethnic background,” says Sutton, 43, cradling 8-month-old Kyle. “He’s perfect.”

Singles who want to adopt usually have a tougher time than couples.

Alice Johnson, who has been active in Romanian relief operations, says that because she is single, the process of adopting a Romanian orphan will be complex--she may have to adopt a child and a sibling, an older child or a child with medical problems.

One single mother said she was unprepared for the difficulties of adopting a 5-year-old out of foster care.

“If I had known everything I would have had to go through, I might have made another decision,” says the Los Angeles woman. “I had no husband, no mother, no support. But we’ll make it.”

Her daughter has lived in three foster homes, she says, and now doesn’t trust that she is in a home to stay. “I don’t need a momma,” the girl says frequently.

The complexity of the foster care system can create complications and pain in the lives of both parents and children.

Of 80,000 children in foster care, only 1% are available for adoption. The rest are in limbo, waiting to be returned to their birth parents or for a judge to decide if those parents are unfit. The lag time can be as long as six years.

“What is best for the biological parents is not always best for the child,” says Steven Humerickhouse of Adoptive Families of America Inc., who has a 5-year-old daughter from Honduras. “The foster care system is collapsing under its own weight, and it perpetuates the systemic abuse.”

One Orange County mother described her struggle to adopt her 24-month-old foster daughter, who has lived with her two years. The girl was supposed to stay with her and her husband for only six months. Now they can’t imagine giving her up.

“In the back of our mind is the horror of her going to her natural parents,” who are “always in crisis and neglectful,” she says, adding that because those parents occasionally visit, they still have rights to the child.

“We just love her each day as much as we can, because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”