Clinton Endorses Adoption Incentives

President Clinton on Friday endorsed incentives designed to encourage states to move children more quickly from foster care settings into permanent adoptive homes.

Clinton, surrounded by adoptive families and children waiting to be adopted, said that no child should be deprived of a permanent family “even one day longer than necessary.”

He added: “We know that our children’s fundamental well-being depends upon safety and stability. Without these, children have a very hard time in this complicated, challenging world of ours.”

Clinton accepted an administration report that outlines budgetary and legislative proposals to meet a goal of doubling--to 54,000 a year by 2002--the number of children who are adopted out of the foster care system.

Nearly a half-million American children are in foster care at any given time, some for as long as several years.

Many children are placed in foster care because of an isolated instance of abuse or a sudden crisis in the family and are returned to their biological families within several months. But about one-fifth of those in foster care are never returned to their original families.

Experts believe that the longer a child remains in foster care--often while the child welfare system is attempting to improve the situation of the birth family--the greater the potential for long-term emotional and behavioral damage.

“Many of those children still will never know what it’s like to live in a real home until they grow up and start their own families,” Clinton said. “But it does not have to be that way.”

Clinton’s budget would provide $10 million a year for the next three years to help state agencies, courts and communities devise ways to speed the transition from foster care to adoption. Another $10 million would be available in the form of competitive grants designed to prompt states “to develop model strategies for moving children from foster homes to permanent families.”

Clinton said he also will propose legislation to award bonuses to states for every child who is adopted above the previous year’s total, “with even larger bonuses when the child has special needs.”

Many of the proposals will “pay for themselves, since foster care costs far more than adoption,” he said. “This isn’t just cost-effective, of course, it’s the right thing to do.”

Adoption and children’s advocates praised Clinton, who has made adoption promotion a major goal of his second term. A new law allows families who earn less than $115,000 annually an adoption tax credit of up to $5,000.

“We fully support President Clinton’s proposal, and we are committed as an organization to helping foster children get adopted,” said Samuel Totari Jr., president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys. The academy, an organization of lawyers who specialize in adoption, will volunteer its expertise to states to facilitate more adoptions, he said.

The administration’s proposal also shortens from 18 months to a year the time foster children are forced to wait for a first hearing on permanent placement.

On the controversial subject of biracial adoptions, Clinton pledged to “redouble our efforts to make sure no child of one race is deprived of a loving home when a family of another race is prepared to give it. That is illegal and wrong, and often hurts our very neediest children.”

A bipartisan measure expected to be introduced in the House by Reps. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Barbara B. Kennelly (D-Conn.) would take a similar approach to hastening adoption hearings. It also would help states locate birth fathers to tell them their parental rights are being terminated.

During a congressional hearing earlier this week, in which Olivia Golden, acting assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for children and families, described the president’s plan, Camp asked whether reducing or eliminating federal payments to the states might be a better incentive to get children out of foster care.

“We thought about the possibility of a penalty,” she replied. “But we are concerned about the potential effect on the children. We think that withholding money would pose considerable risk.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this story.