Cover Story

in Killeen, Texas - A supposedly unwanted child entered the world in a West Texas hospital on March 13. His due date was still three months away but he entered anyway, at 26 weeks gestation, weighing 1 pound 12 ounces. He was 12H inches long, his feet were thumb-sized, and his whole body could fit in the palm of a man's hand, with those feet dangling slightly over. It was not clear whether the baby would live, but it was amazing that he had come this far. Months earlier his birth mother had gone to an abortion business, but she was too far along-and the abortionist referred her to an adoption agency. For the first several weeks the baby was almost alone in the world. No family prayed for his survival. No visitors waited anxiously at his incubator side. He was surrounded by nurses who resuscitated him when he stopped breathing, which happened frequently. The nurses loved the little fighter, but at the end of their shifts they went home to their own families. The baby was hooked to a ventilator for several weeks before his little lungs were developed enough to breathe on their own. The nurses fed him through a tube from his nose to his stomach. At first it took them 10 hours to get in one teaspoon of high-calorie formula. When he graduated to the bottle, the physical act of sucking and swallowing burned precious calories. While the child fought for life, the adoption agency searched for a family. It also had to locate possible birth fathers and get their consent for the adoption, a process that took about 30 days. On April 16 Kevin McMullen, a doctor in the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, was at his clinic. He received a phone call from the adoption agency. Mr. McMullen and his wife, Amy, have adopted two other children. Concerning previous adoptions, he said, "Both times the agency called and said, 'We've got your baby; come and get him.'" This time, Mr. McMullen noted, the agency said, "Hey, we've got a baby here, we want you to think about it." With that warning, the social worker began to tell Mr. McMullen about the complications this baby could have because he was born so early. A head ultrasound showed no obvious sign of cerebral palsy, but the social worker's message was clear: "There's no way to know right now." The call put Mr. and Mrs. McMullen into turmoil. They wanted to adopt another child, but they were looking for a girl to go with their two boys. They did not know whether they could adopt a baby with potentially serious health problems. To compound the difficulty, Mr. McMullen learned that his unit had been called up to go to Bosnia in September. For three days, Mr. McMullen says, "We were hemming and hawing. We didn't know what to do." Finally, they decided they had to see the baby in Lubbock. Mr. McMullen says, concerning their thoughts during that period: "If we take this baby, and many problems crop up, would we say we acted too quickly? Were we impatient with God? Or if we turned him down, would we later regret that we had turned down God's perfect gift for us?" Mr. McMullen concluded that "the whole motivation for wondering if we were acting in haste was based on selfishness-the dream of the perfect baby. The Bible says children are a blessing, not children with five fingers and perfect health are a blessing." With that decision, the supposedly unwanted child became Ryan Duncan McMullen. On Sunday, May 17, 1998, Ryan came home with the McMullens. Amy carried him into the house, monitor slung over one shoulder, oxygen tank dragging behind. He weighed about 4 pounds and his gestational age was 36 weeks, though he had already been out of the womb 64 days. Ryan's story is a happy one. He has a family now, but if Ryan's birth mom had not freed her baby for adoption, and at the same time had been unwilling to take on the obligations for his care, the child most likely would have found not a home but a series of foster houses. Foster care began as a short-term remedy for a family going through a period of stress caused by unemployment, illness, or a death in the family. But all too often, it has become a long-term solution, robbing a child of the security of a family during the crucial early years. In 1996 the Institute for Children, a public-policy organization devoted to reforming foster-care laws, found there were about 500,000 children without a permanent home. Both national policy and social decay contributed to the problem. The drafters of a 1981 federal law included language requiring judges and others to make "all reasonable" efforts to unite a child with his birth parent before turning to adoption, but they neither defined "reasonable" nor included strict timelines. Government bureaucracies tended to cycle children through the system over and over again, each time placing them with a different foster family and a different caseworker. To make things worse, there was no financial incentive-in fact there was a financial disincentive-to move children out of the system. Every child in foster care meant more money for government officials. Some fought anyway for the best interests of children under their care, but others had little motivation to go through the frustrating steps required to place children quickly in permanent homes. Valora Washington, program director of the Families for Kids Initiative of the Kellogg Foundation (which has funded foster-care reform pilot projects throughout the United States), testified last year before the Senate Finance Committee that legal delays and the slow process of terminating parental rights have been key reasons for children's languishing in the system. Ms. Washington cited Department of Health and Human Services statistics showing that "children lucky enough to be adopted are likely to first spend 3.5 to 5.5 years in a limbo of temporary placements." In her testimony before the finance committee, Ms. Washington described this standard scenario: "First, a judge decides whether to remove the child from the biological family; later, a different judge determines whether the child should return home or stay in state care; months later, another judge is likely to review the progress of the child's permanency plan; one or more extensions may be granted before the review is held; in a year or two or four or five, another judge may order the termination of parental rights (TPR); and later if things go well, a judge will 'finalize' an adoption." Last year, however, Congress passed and the president signed into law major foster-care legislation, the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. The new law sets up a bonus system to reward states that increase their adoptions over previous years. The law also sets deadlines: If a child has been in foster care 15 of the previous 22 months, states must begin the process of terminating parental rights. And for those children whose parents are guilty of heinous abuse-torture, killing another child in the home, sexual or physical abuse-TPR can occur almost immediately. Yan McMullen's rapid placement is the way adoption ought to work. Will the new law help it work that way more often? Many states will need to reform their own laws, and that is a step only a few like Kansas and Texas have taken. Furthermore, a visit to a typical family law courtroom suggests that making a real difference in kids' lives will require more than changing state and federal law. Outside the Austin, Texas, courtroom, a milling crowd waited for cases to be called. Thirteen cases were on that morning's docket, and for family members looking uncomfortable in their Sunday best, the wait seemed to go on and on. When the judge called a case, the relevant parties formed a semicircle in front of the bench and identified themselves. Although he regularly handled family cases, the judge did not seem familiar with many of the families before him. Problems often involved drugs and alcohol, with some families split and showing open hostility. Some of the attorneys, clearly unprepared, admitted to the judge that they had just taken their cases. The judge was being asked to rule with Solomonic wisdom, but he was limited in the kinds of remedies available, and also limited by the training he most likely received. Conna Craig of the Institute for Children says most judges receive training on what constitutes "a child's best interest" from the Child Welfare League of America, which argues that no family will ever be able to replace the family of origin. Sometimes that bias toward the biological family caused the judge to look for kinship care even when no family member had demonstrated any interest at all in the child. The judge routinely asked about housing, employment, pyschological counseling, and drug treatment. He often made those a condition for getting children back. But he never asked about church-and spiritual issues were not on his court's agenda. The same problems that plague the courts-a secular ideology, heavy caseload, and impersonality-are rampant throughout many state "child protective" agencies. Many social workers, who have caseloads of 30 or 40 children, see their charges infrequently. Many young government social workers, often straight out of college and unprepared for the intensity of their jobs, last only a year or two. That means children in the system see many different caseworkers who often hardly know them. Here's what happened in one Texas case, involving Joel Altsman and his wife Deborah. Foster-care parents for three years, they saw firsthand how an overburdened worker with an insensitivity to spiritual matters can make a mess of a child's life. Over three years the Altsmans had cared for six children, teaching them about Christ, and had worked with seven or eight different caseworkers. When an 11-year-old girl who was living with them was finally freed for adoption, a caseworker who had never met the girl before asked her what kind of family she would like to join. She said, "a Christian family whose faith makes a difference in how they live." The government caseworker found two families. One actually went to the girl's church and knew the Altsmans; the other was affluent, childless, and only nominally religious. Although this family did not meet the girl's one condition, the caseworker, not understanding or caring about the importance of the girl's faith, decided to place her with the affluent family. Mr. Altsman protested the placement, so the social worker put a series of questions to the 11-year-old: "If you had the opportunity to have a mom who did crafts and bakes, or a mom who rollerblades, which would you choose? If you went on a cross country vacation, would you rather drive in a van or fly? Would you rather go to private school or homeschool?" Like most 11-year-olds, the girl chose the hipper mom with more money. There were problems. The new family did not take the girl to church. They cut off contact with her church friends and the Altsmans. They put her in an academically intensive private school-even though she was behind academically because of her years in family turmoil. Not surprisingly, the adoption failed and the girl was removed from her supposedly "forever" home, angry and resigned to living in foster care until she's 18. Many state-run systems show insensitivity, according to reformers like Conna Craig, and are numbers-driven rather than mission-driven. In contrast, private agencies, often faith-based, are in business to help children, not conform to political fads. Although children do best when placed in two-parent families, Ms. Craig notes: "Government agencies may not be able to say that without incurring the wrath of the ACLU." A private Christian agency, however, has no problem saying it is recruiting only married, heterosexual couples for adoption: "They are much freer to define their mission and recruit according to it." The Los Angeles Times recently reported that some government social workers persist in trying to keep black and Hispanic children out of white foster and adoptive homes, even though that kind of discrimination is illegal. The private agency that placed Ryan with the McMullens does not discriminate by race. Kevin and Amy McMullen are white; Ryan is Hispanic; and their two other children are of mixed race. JoAnne Phillips, assistant director of adoption services at the agency that placed Ryan, says, "We've never failed to be able to place a child regardless of their situation. There are lots of resources out there. It just takes a lot of time." Time is something of which Ryan McMullen is oblivious. He sleeps 21 hours a day. The fat little face that peeks out from his blankets-rounded by the steroids he takes for his lungs-makes him look bigger than he is. A tube leads from a huge oxygen canister in one bedroom to Ryan's nose, and a monitor is hooked to his chest. He takes four different medicines and has breathing treatments several times a day. His second night at home the monitor went off twice, its siren-scream waking everyone in the house except Ryan. Both times it was a false alarm, a problem with the leads, not Ryan's breathing. Keeping up with his care and the needs of 2-year-old Seamus and almost-5 Dalton is a full-time job for Mrs. McMullen. Seamus has an elfin smile and a body that runs in high gear most of the time. He already loves to give his baby brother a bottle. But Dalton is quieter and took more time to ask to hold the tiny sleeping bundle in the crib. It's too soon for the McMullens to have a routine, and whatever they do develop may be broken in September if Mr. McMullen is dispatched to Bosnia; he will be gone for six months "unless one of the other units coughs up a doctor." Mr. McMullen says about the uncertainty: "We have no idea what's around the corner. You can spend your whole life trying to plan everything perfectly-when you'll have your babies, having enough for retirement-but eventually you're going to run into these bumps in the road." Thinking about his possible role in the UN mission to Bosnia has caused Mr. McMullen to consider the wonders of his own family: "I have my own little United Nations," he said. "We are many tribes and tongues gathered into one house."