After Sister Josephine finished her wrathful remarks about abused children at the spring adoption seminar in a Washington law office, the chairman, former Pennsylvania governor Robert P. Casey, spoke in praise of outrage. "If you don't have a sense of outrage as a politician, you are not worth a damn. If you have lost it, get out of politics."

He is quite right. Sister Josephine Murphy of the Daughters of Charity told of the grossly abused babies who pass through her hands at St. Ann's Infant and Maternity Home in Hyattsville, where she is the administrator. I add, in the interests of full disclosure, that I am a friend and a fan of hers and awestruck at her competence. I believe she could run the Defense Department. I am familiar with her view on what she regards as the uneven contest between women and children ­ she notes with asperity the hullabaloo over rape in contrast to the relatively mild sentences for infanticide.

She described graphically the sufferings of the abused, abandoned and neglected; infants who have been burned at an open fire; children raped and assaulted- and sent back to their abusive homes by judges who don't care to know what is happening. She told of a 7-year old boy who reproached her for sending him home. He warned her that when he grew up he was going to "go out and kill my mother's boyfriend." She had a warning too. "The money we don't spend protecting children we will have to spend on jails."

The Family Reunification and Preservation Act is the cause of these grotesque practices. The body count of children abused to death in 1995 was 1,271, according to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. Yet in the much-praised adoption reform bills being pushed through Congress in time for Mother's Day, no mention is made of this.

The law's folly ­ requiring social workers to make "reasonable efforts" to send a child back to abusive parents ­ was remarked upon at the seminar by William Pierce, president of the National Council For Adoption. Imagine, he said, if a wife-beater were brought into court and the judge ordered the wife to return to him while he tried to straighten out.

The pendulum has begun to swing the other way, Casey says. Some states have passed laws requiring delinquent parents to improve within a year ­ or forego their parental rights.

Why don't politicians seize on this deadly danger to children? Well, it could be dangerous to them. Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading authority on child welfare, points out the political trickiness of revising the statute. "Don't forget," he says, "that six years ago David Dinkins ran for mayor of New York against (Ed) Koch on a charge that he was taking too many black kids away from their families."

Maybe that is why today's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, one of the most astute politicians in the country, is avoiding this issue in the most notorious (and still reverberating) child abuse horror: the murder of 6-year-old Elisa Izquierdo by her mother. Giuliani has created a new child welfare agency and a review panel that issued a voluminous report and suspended two employees involved in the case. But he never came to grips with the crime in the courtroom.

Elisa had been in the care of her adoring father. When he died, his sister, Elisa's aunt applied for custody. But under the Family Reunification Act, the judge gave Eilsa into the care of her mad mother. Given that the numerous social workers involved should have been more watchful and more demanding, the mayor should have realized that the tragedy began with the custody award.

Besharov, who served on the mayor's commission, says the terrible irony is that the judge who made the decision had Elisa's mother before her when the first custody choice was made. She apparently forgot all about it ­ and had no lawyer or clerk to remind her, thereby sentencing Elisa to beatings and tortures and eventual death.

Too bad Giuliani didn't read "The Book of David," also a true-life tale, by Richard Gelles of the Family Violence Research program of the University of Rhode Island. Gelles, author of 20 books about child welfare, is currently in Washington working for Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) on adoption laws. David, 15 months old, dies at the hands of his mother, a part-time prostitute. It was avoidable. His mother had also abused David's older sister, almost to death. Gelles shows the tension in social workers who must work under warring mandates: investigating abusive parents while drawing up plans to reunite them with their endangered children.

The policy, Gelles says, comes of "a persistent unwillingness to put children first." It is also the unwillingness of public men to break shibboleths. We as a nation, profess to believe that all mothers are like Whistler's and that a "family" can consist of one female, a drug addict and a "home," a drug den. As Casey says, outrage is needed.

© National Council for Adoption

Credits: Mary McGrory of The Washington Post