My son was three years old and my daughter had lived on this earth for just two months when I met Sheila Hansen. She's a tall, soft-spoken woman who laughs easily and exudes warmth when she speaks; she has the kind of comfortable self-confidence that immediately makes you think she'd make a loyal friend and a good mother. On that muggy July day, sitting in the conference room of a church in southern New Jersey, she told me a story that chilled me to the bone and forever altered the way I think about my adopted children, about birth parents, and about the country in which I grew up.

In 1961, Sheila was a 21-year-old government clerk in Louisiana when she told her boyfriend she was pregnant. He responded by giving her the name of a doctor who performed abortions. The procedure wasn't legal at the time, but everyone knew you could get one if you wanted to. Sheila didn't want to. As frightened and confused and alone as she felt, the one thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to keep her baby. Her doctor didn't think it was such a good idea, though. He gave her advice like: "You won't be able to give the child a proper home." And: "This would ruin your life." Her mother was sympathetic but worried about what would happen if Sheila chose to become a parent. "How is a single woman like you going to raise a child?" she asked. "What are people going to think?" Sheila's friends didn't provide much solace either, essentially behaving as though nothing was going on at all. Everywhere she turned, Sheila was reminded that she would bear the unending shame of being an unwed mother, while her "illegitimate" child would be scarred for life with the indelible brand of a bastard. So, to keep people from seeing her in her "condition," Sheila spent the duration of her pregnancy behind the shuttered doors of her mother's New Orleans home. By the time her delivery date was approaching, she had been tortured into submission by the people who loved her most and by a society that didn't understand her at all. She felt small and helpless, too embarrassed to go to the store much less make a momentous decision that could determine the course of her life.

Her doctor, meanwhile, had found a couple who wanted to adopt a baby. With only her incidental participation, he made all the arrangements for Sheila's hospital stay and for the child to be transferred to the new parents right after birth. To "protect" her from the emotional trauma of the experience, every effort was made to separate Sheila from it: She was registered under an assumed name and was heavily sedated for the delivery, so she would feel and remember as little as possible. The nurses were instructed to refer to her offspring only as "the baby," so that she wouldn't even know its gender.

Not until 8:45 p.m. on November 31, 1995, when her son telephoned her after a determined search, did she learn she'd given life to a boy. "All I did after we hung up was cry," Sheila told me. Based on what she had endured, I expected she would feel only contempt for adoption, but she is wiser than that. While she knows the process is seldom as simple as people would like to believe, she thinks everyone can ultimately benefit if it's done right. Besides, Sheila likes the way her firstborn son turned out (she went on to marry and have another boy), respects his parents, and appreciates the loving home they gave him. "But I'll tell you this," she says, wiping away a tear but faintly smiling at her optimistic conclusion: "The system we had didn't work; thank God it seems to be changing."

After a long period of warning tremors, adoption is "changing" like a simmering volcano changes when it can no longer contain its explosive energy. It erupts. The hot lava flows from its soul, permanently reshaping not only the mountain itself but also every inch of landscape it touches. The new earth becomes more fertile, richer in color. The sensation of watching the transformation, of being a part of it, is an awesome amalgam of anxiety and exhilaration. The metamorphosis itself is breathtaking. Before our eyes, in our homes and schools and media and workplaces, America is forever changing adoption even as adoption is forever changing America.

This is nothing less than a revolution. After a decade of incremental improvements and tinkering at the margins, adoption is reshaping itself to the core. It is shedding its corrosive stigmas and rejecting its secretive past; states are revising their laws and agencies are rewriting their rules even as the Internet is rendering them obsolete, especially by making it simpler for adoptees and birth parents to find each other; single women, multiracial families, and gay men and women are flowing into the parenting mainstream; middle-aged couples are bringing a rainbow of children from abroad into their predominantly white communities; and social service agencies are making it far easier to find homes for hundreds of thousands of children whose short lives have been squandered in the foster-care system.

It's not just that adoption suddenly seems to be appearing everywhere at once, as if revealed by a cosmic sleight-of-hand. Its public image is also exponentially better than it has ever been. The new climate allows birth parents like the comedian Roseanne, the singers Joni Mitchell and David Crosby, along with thousands of men and women unprotected by famous names, to finally ease their torment by disclosing their secrets and meeting their children. It leads celebrities like Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Rosie O'Donnell to proudly announce the arrival of their adopted children, further raising the profile of the process and accelerating public understanding that it's another normal way of forming a family. And it allows adoptees to learn that they aren't "different" in any negative sense, though they've been treated that way in the past; rather, they're part of a big, successful community whose members range from baseball legend Jim Palmer to former President Gerald Ford to Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs.

Stunningly, marvelously, for the first time in its history, adoption has come into vogue. At a recent dinner party with a half dozen friends, I offhandedly cited a well-known statistic among researchers-that fewer than three percent of American women relinquish their babies for adoption today, a precipitous drop from a few decades ago-to which one woman at the table responded: "Are you sure it isn't much higher? Just about everyone I know with children adopted them." A few weeks later, an acquaintance told me that a classmate of her nine-year-old son, upon learning that he was adopted, sounded downright envious. "That's so cool," the boy said, and none of the other kids huddled around them offered a hint of dissent.

Every historic phenomenon begins with a specific group and then sweeps through the entire population. That's what is happening in America today, complete with the trepidation and triumph that accompany all cultural upheavals. The emerging new realities undeniably are replete with problems and paradoxes. They are raising new issues for families and creating new dilemmas for the country. But they also are more sensible, more humane, and more focused on children's well-being than the realities being left behind.

Adoption is at once a marvel of humanity and a social safety valve. It permits the infertile among us to share the deeply fulfilling, profoundly joyful experience of raising children. It offers a positive option for people who, for moral or economic or personal reasons, believe they can neither undergo an abortion nor parent a child. Most important, whatever it might accomplish for the adults in the picture, it provides a systematic opportunity for children to grow up in stable homes with loving parents.

The revolution was long overdue, and it already is having a penetrating impact. It is advancing the ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity that is a hallmark of twenty-first-century America, and it is contributing to a permanent realignment in the way we think of family structure. It is a revolution reflected in our national and state politics, in our newspapers and on the worldwide web, even in the ads we watch on television. And it promises to help heal one of our most virulent national diseases: the wasting away of children in foster care. Americans can feel something happening around them, and even to them, but most haven't identified the revolution for what it is. They assume, as we all mistakenly do about so many aspects of life, that only the people directly involved in adoption are affected by it. Americans are too busy or distracted to consider why they hadn't been aware of the "triad" of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents (and certainly wouldn't have talked about it if they had), yet suddenly they see triad members everywhere they turn.

Of course, we were always there. But our existence was carefully cloaked, just as the history of adoption itself has been written, and hidden, in the shadows. Sadly, for too many generations, this wonderful and vexing process diminished nearly everyone in its embrace, even as it enhanced their lives or served their needs.

Too many of adoption's ostensible beneficiaries, adoptive parents, spent decades deceiving those they cherished most; they often didn't reveal their children's origins at all, or insisted they share the truth with no one. The process's most essential participants, birth parents, were dehumanized; they were forced to bury their grief and humiliation within themselves, unable to share their burden with even their closest confidants. And this domestic drama's most vulnerable players, adoptees, the only ones with no say in the decision that defined their existence, were relegated to second-class social and legal status; in perhaps the most insidiously demeaning act of all, even very young adoptees were made to understand that exploring this fundamental aspect of their beings was taboo.

Not a very healthy state of affairs for an institution that was supposed to help people, which adoption most often has done despite its flaws. But now the revolution is upon us. Adoption is emerging into the warm, if sometimes harsh, light of day. It is changing rapidly, radically, and for the better. It's not quite a caterpillar shedding its cocoon, emerging as a flawless, beautiful butterfly. Light reveals imperfections, after all, and sometimes it even causes them. Still, the darkness was a far gloomier place to be, and problems that we see are easier to deal with and resolve than those that remain hidden. Ironically, one thing we are learning as we realize how widespread adoption has become is that generations of secrecy prevent us from knowing just how widespread it has become. The subject has been considered off-limits for so long, both by individuals and by society as a whole, that until very recently studies have not been devised, census questions have not been asked, surveys have not been conducted. There is no national organization or branch of government that keeps track of adoptions, so determining how many triad members there are-or have been-would require sorting through the individual "finalization" records in every courthouse in every city and town in every state.

What research there is indicates there are five million to six million adoptees in the United States today, about triple the number experts estimated just a few years ago. Add in birth parents, adoptive parents, and biological and adoptive brothers and sisters, and the number of people directly connected to adoption soars into the tens of millions. And many experts expect the reality is even larger because an incalculable percentage of adoptees still don't know they were adopted, while many people on all sides of the triad and within their families continue to mislead anyone who asks, as well as themselves. The most comprehensive statistics ever compiled on the subject were released in November 1997 by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York. It is one of a handful of national organizations begun in the last few years to finally explore the topic in detail. The creation of these nonprofit groups, along with a proliferation of academic and legal studies, are further proof that adoption is ending its clandestine phase-even as the research itself hastens the process's emergence into full public view. The Donaldson survey showed that nearly six of every ten Americans have had a "personal experience" with adoption. That means they, a family member, or a close friend were adopted, adopted a child, or placed a child for adoption. And a stunning one-third of those polled said they had "at least somewhat seriously" considered adopting a child themselves.1

It's safe to assume those numbers are bare minimums since some respondents don't know the truth about themselves, and since enough of a stigma about adoption still exists to induce some people to respond less than honestly. More to the point, those figures don't include the neighbors, the colleagues and friends, the teachers, the classmates, and all the other people whose lives intertwine with members of the triad and, therefore, whose behavior and attitudes toward adoption can have a profound impact, positive or negative.

Just as the numbers remain tough to calculate, the full scope and depth of the revolution isn't yet totally clear. That's partly because adoption, like any method of forming a family, remains a fundamentally private-as opposed to secretive-concern. Mostly, though, it's simply because the landscape is being altered every day, so it's too early to assemble a complete image out of all the pieces scattered around us: the white parents picking up their yellow or brown or black toddlers at preschool, the TV movies about anguished or triumphant biological and adoptive parents, the movie stars and the people down the street proudly announcing the arrival of their adopted children from Georgia or Guatemala, the news accounts about the soaring rate of foster-care children being adopted or about adoptees clamoring to obtain their own birth certificates.

On a personal level, it's also sometimes hard for people to get a perspective on what's happening around them. To a large extent that's because faulty stereotypes and aberrational horror stories have led us, as a society, to form a distorted picture of adoption. How could anyone's perceptions have remained unaffected, for instance, by the news stories during the 1990s about four-year-old Baby Richard, who cried, "Please let me stay, I promise I'll be good," as authorities in Illinois wrenched him away from his adoptive parents to turn him over to his biological father? But such agonizing tragedies almost never happen, which is why they are big news when they do; and when state laws are subsequently revised to clarify parental rights, which is what has been done across the nation, they receive little attention from the media or the public.

Many Americans also haven't assimilated the changes taking place because so many of them seem counterintuitive, disconcerting, or bewildering. Friends often seem puzzled, for instance, when my wife, Judy, and I explain that we met Zachary's birth mother before we adopted him, and that we hung out for days with Emilia's birth parents before she was born. Some family members also appear addled by our determination to increase our level of contact with the young men and women who gave our children life. When we send the birth parents letters and photos, our relatives ask questions like, "You're not going to send such a flattering picture of Emmy, are you?" Or: "If you really spell out what a great kid Zack is, aren't you afraid they'll want to get him back?" Nearly everyone is surprised, too, when they learn that we, like the overwhelming majority of adoptive parents today, were selected for the privilege by our children's first mothers and fathers.

Better Choices, Enduring Pain

It's already a mercifully different world from the one that brutalized Sheila Hansen and countless thousands of women who suffered through nightmares like hers-though birth mothers still are seen more negatively and have been the beneficiaries of fewer reforms than anyone else involved in adoption. Nevertheless, attitudes and practices are being altered irrevocably for all concerned, and the snapshots from the wedding day of a more recent birth mother provide a vivid picture of the transformation.

Donna Asta, like virtually every bride in every such photo, radiates happiness. Unlike most brides, however, she was thrilled about more than just the fact of her marriage or even the new life she was about to begin. The reason was the pretty little girl in the teal dress posing with the wedding entourage, still clutching the white basket of rose petals she'd carried down the aisle moments earlier. "I can't wait to get home to tell my mom and dad about this," six-year-old Kelly had thought in her excitement.

No one had coerced or pressured or embarrassed Donna into relinquishing her baby for adoption. She was motivated by the same core concern that leads nearly all women, and men when they are involved, to make this excruciating decision today. While they know that physiologically they can become mothers and fathers, they strongly believe they aren't prepared to be parents. The distinction may sound subtle, but it's critical.

Most often, these are women in their late teens to mid-twenties who lack the financial or personal resources to raise a child, or whose lives would be turned inside-out if they tried. Or they suffer from problems they don't want to inflict on a child. Sometimes they're rape victims who can't face the prospect of rearing their attackers' offspring. Increasingly, they're couples who already have one or more children but feel their families would be impossibly strained if they had another mouth to feed. And they are often well-educated. Researchers say women who are younger, or have less schooling, tend to think less about the consequences of their decisions, and therefore are more prone to keep their babies.2

Two threads bind these varied participants at the genesis of domestic infant adoption: They do not opt for abortion, even though it often carries less social stigma for biological parents than does placing their children in new homes; and they want good lives for their babies, better than they believe they can provide. The lingering cultural stereotype of birth mothers as uncaring or ignorant young teens who choose adoption to crassly jettison a nettlesome problem is unmitigated and corrosive nonsense.

Donna was lying on a surgical table at an abortion clinic in 1986 when she realized that adoption was the only alternative she could live with. She could barely believe she had walked into this place to begin with; just a few years earlier, after all, she had been president of a Right to Life chapter at her high school. "I was on my back there for what seemed like the longest time, talking to God out loud, asking him, 'What am I doing here?'" she recalls. When the doctor finally approached her, Donna bolted upright and raised her voice: "You will not touch me!" Donna had fallen in love with "Mr. Wonderful" while she was a 20-year-old junior at the University of Kentucky. Two months later she was pregnant, he was gone, and her sister persuaded her to temporarily move in with her in Nashville, so she would have some support while considering what to do. After she left the abortion clinic, Donna began a process identical to the one many women follow in comparable situations. She opened the Yellow Pages and looked under "attorneys" and "adoption." She was drawn, in the latter category, to a phone number for the local Catholic Charities adoption agency.

In the months that followed, Donna received counseling, read letters, and looked at photos from an array of prospective parents, and was repeatedly given the opportunity to change her mind. She offers only praise for the procedure that preceded her giving birth, but nothing could have prepared her for the emotions that seized her at the end. No matter how sure pregnant women believe they are about parting with their babies, regardless of what impact they think their decisions might have, irrespective of what might seem right or wrong, at least half change their minds once they feel their babies emerging, or hold them, or nurse them or are confronted with the impossible task of forever handing them over to virtual strangers.

The point of sharpest impact for Donna came after she had carried her daughter out of the hospital, which she insisted on doing, and after her counselor had strapped the three-day-old girl into a carrier in the back seat of her Jeep. Donna is a true believer in adoption. For years now, she has worked as a pregnancy and adoption counselor herself for the agency that once helped her. She insists she has no regrets about what she did. But Donna doesn't try to fool herself about the emotions she experienced as she watched the car drive away that day. "It was the most painful moment of my entire life," she says.

During the years that followed, Donna resumed her studies and plowed ahead. She fell in love with her husband-to-be, and they had a baby daughter in 1998. Donna says her healing process, especially early on, was helped considerably by the pictures and letters she regularly received from Kelly's adoptive parents, Carol and Michael Wierzba. Knowing the girl was happy and loved reinforced Donna's feeling that she had done the right thing. Occasionally she daydreamed about seeing Kelly again, but she didn't want to interfere with her upbringing and figured it would be too complicated until the Wierzbas' daughter (as she now thought of her) was much older. So Donna was flabbergasted when, out of nowhere, an employee from the adoption agency called to say that Michael and Carol wanted to take her out to dinner. Kelly was 18 months old, and the Wierzbas wanted to explore the possibility of her birth mother occupying a larger place in her life.

"At first, I told them thanks, but I don't think so. I mean, I just couldn't imagine what they were thinking. I didn't know if I could handle it. I didn't know if Kelly could handle it. The truth is I didn't know what to think, I was so in shock." Donna laughs at the memory. She says it quickly dawned on her that she had nothing to lose in just talking to the Wierzbas, though she feared she'd be so nervous she wouldn't give a good impression. Her voice quivering, she told the agency worker, "Tell them that I said okay." They set a date and a time and hung up. "Only then did I realize what was happening and what was possible. I was bouncing off the walls. All I could think was what a lucky person I am."

And unusual. Arrangements like the one the Wierzbas now share with Donna, in which she is a constant in her daughter's life, are still the exception. They are growing less rare by the day, however, and some degree of regular contact between biological and adoptive families is rapidly becoming commonplace by letter, on the phone, or in person.3 The main reasons are simple to understand, because they promote honesty and respect, yet difficult to internalize, because they can cause uneasiness and demand selflessness.

First and foremost, social-work and mental-health experts have reached a consensus during the last decade that greater openness offers an array of benefits for adoptees-from ongoing information about family medical issues to fulfillment of their innate desire to know about their genetic histories-even if the expanded relationships themselves prove difficult or uncomfortable for some of the participants.

At the same time, adoption professionals have learned that they lived in a fantasy world for generations and are coming to terms with a hard truth about birth mothers: The vast majority do not "forget and get on with their lives," as though they were machines built to incubate life and give it away. In fact, most of these women sustain emotional and psychic injuries, no matter how good they consider their reasons or how much denial they permit themselves. Overwhelmingly, later in life if not right away, whether they say so out loud or only whisper the truth to themselves in the protective darkness of sleepless nights, they yearn for contact with or knowledge about their children.

Adoption is supposed to help people, not torment them. So, as the consequences of the old ways have become clear, adoption agencies and attorneys who arrange "closed" adoptions have become an endangered species. It's a remarkable reversal from the standard operating procedure of past decades, when all identifying data about birth and adoptive parents were guarded like nuclear secrets-and the very idea of a face-to-face meeting was considered perverse. "What's wrong with her? Why can't she just get on with her life?" social workers asked if a birth mother hinted she'd like to know how her baby was doing. Adoptees and adoptive parents were viewed as ungrateful, perhaps even unstable, if they sought information about the people who made their families possible.

Some birth parents still seek confidentiality, and a small percentage presumably always will because of their personalities or circumstances. But as society and the adoption system permit them to feel less guilt and shame about their decisions, the ranks of the anonymous are dwindling. Most often now, it's the adoptive mothers and fathers who are apprehensive about openness-though, again, in smaller and smaller numbers.

Caution and protectiveness are understandable emotions for anyone with normal instincts and insecurities, but all the more so for most adoptive parents. Our sensitivities about raising a family usually have been heightened by fertility problems that prevented us from producing biological children, then our self-confidence has been further shaken by the emotionally turbulent voyage that adoption invariably entails. As hard as it may be to accept, however, the adoptive parents' gut-level concerns about the consequences of openness are usually exaggerated and often unfounded.

Most reassuring is the fact that there's no clinical or practical evidence to indicate adoptees or birth parents try to disrupt or interfere with adoptions that include sustained contact. To the contrary, many adoptions grow stronger and all three members of the triad become more secure when their relationships cease to be based on fear and fantasy.

In the vast majority of cases, anyway, it's the adoptive parents who are the gatekeepers and decide the extent and timing of any participation (or even knowledge) by their children. While adoptees generally are curious, and ask more and more questions as they get older, they typically don't request detailed information or consider the possibility of in-person meetings until they are into their teens. It's also unusual for adoptees to seek out their biological parents before they are well into their twenties or thirties, ordinarily as planning for their own futures heightens their desire to know more about their pasts. That's the current, fading snapshot. But, like everything else about adoption, the new picture still hasn't come into focus. Every day, more and more adoptive mothers and fathers are making contact with birth parents while their children are still very small. Adoptees are exploring their roots at younger and younger ages, empowered in part by the extraordinary resources of the Internet, while birth mothers, fathers, siblings, and sometimes whole families are increasingly summoning the courage to search for and develop relationships with their biological sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters.

There undeniably are pitfalls in "open adoption," an imprecise term applied to an array of arrangements in which birth parents stay involved after placing a child. Some problems derive from the specific personalities or situations of those involved, but many are characteristic of various phases of openness, as everyone tries to deal with emotional uncertainty and, if direct contact is included, to determine their boundaries and sort out their evolving roles. In most cases, the long-term gains are considerable nevertheless, and that's why expanding openness is the central characteristic of the adoption revolution.

I'll discuss the pluses and minuses of the new realities throughout this book. The bottom line, though, is that greater openness for adoptees means an upbringing rooted in self-knowledge and truth rather than equivocation or deception; for birth parents, it helps diminish angst and permits grieving, and therefore increases their comfort levels with their decisions; and for adoptive parents, it eases personal insecurities while establishing a steady stream of information for their children and for making critical parenting decisions (based, for example, on the birth family's medical history).

More broadly, the transformation of adoption promises to foster improved attitudes and behavior throughout a society in which nontraditional families are burgeoning. Today, there are children with one parent, two divorced parents, two parents of the same gender, a combination of parents and stepparents; there are girls born by way of donated sperm or eggs or surrogate pregnancy, and boys being raised by their grandmothers or foster parents. There are interracial couples with children who look like a fusion of their characteristics, and there are half brothers and half sisters whose biological siblings have every conceivable combination of skin tone and ethnic background.

As such diverse groupings proliferate, adoption appears less unusual and more like just another way to form a family, which is clearly one reason for its growing acceptance. Indeed, some people find adoption appealing precisely because it usually includes a married couple, and therefore produces something that looks like a conventional nuclear unit. Even as adoption profits from America's broader sociological and demographic shifts, however, it simultaneously is abetting and accelerating them-and not just by adding to the number of multiracial and single-parent households in this country.

Because adoption is the most institutionalized means of forming nontraditional families (other than divorce), and clearly is the one about which most people have the most positive attitudes, it is helping to instigate structural and attitudinal changes that will affect the whole range of complex families. One simple example: Adoption activists, both parents and professionals, are starting to educate teachers about the negative effects of asking their students to draw family trees with stereotypic, genetic-family roots.

This seemingly innocent assignment causes deep confusion and even inner turmoil for many children who only want to be "normal" like their classmates, and are too young to complain or challenge authority. So they feel sullen or angry, and some who "act out" their anxieties are unfairly identified as having developmental or behavioral problems. When the class project evolves into drawing "family orchards," or if the teacher explains that there are all sorts of families and asks the students to depict their own, the educational objectives remain intact with far less risk of unintended emotional shock waves.

Doing good for one group has ripple effects, too. Providing options when teaching about families helps adoptees, but it also benefits the students whose parents are divorced or gay, or who don't know who their fathers are, or who live in unconventional households of every sort. Recall that curb cuts (the slopes at the end of sidewalks leading into roadways) were originally promoted by advocates for the disabled as a means of increasing mobility for people in wheelchairs, and many critics said that amounted to wasteful spending because it targeted such a small segment of the population. Today, every day and in every city and town, millions of bicyclists and parents pushing baby strollers rely on curb cuts and feel frustrated when they encounter streets without them. Whatever opinions people might have about the multiplicity of parenting situations today, few believe that children should suffer for their elders' decisions. Besides, everyone in a school is better off when constructive attitudes and sensitivity become the norms, just as everyone in a society gains when systemic embarrassment and deceit-two defining characteristics of adoption throughout its history-are replaced by pride and self-respect.

A History of Meeting Needs

Adoption in some manner, with or without the name or laws to formalize it, has been around for millennia. Every Passover, Jews around the world celebrate the ancient Hebrews' exodus from Egypt under the guidance of a young adoptee named Moses. It's a lucky thing for the institution of adoption that children rarely get as upset with their parents as Moses did with Pharaoh. (On the other hand, it's instructive to note how intense an adoptee's drive to find his biological roots can be.) Typically, though, adopted people are more like another famous member of their ranks, Clark Kent, who adores his ma and pa here on earth even as he maintains an emotional bond to his birth parents from Krypton. Informally, of course, adoption has always existed. Aunts or grandparents, godparents, or even close friends would step in, and most often still do, when mothers and fathers abandon their children, are incapacitated, or die. Through much of recorded history, though, adoption by nonrelatives has been utilized more to meet the needs of adults than to help children. That's still often true today, but it used to be far more blatant. It is believed, for example, that in Rome, China, and other ancient civilizations, many infertile couples and parents who had only daughters formally adopted adult males to serve as heirs, to carry on family names or to participate in religious ceremonies.4

English common law, on which America's founders modeled our own legal system, made no reference to adoption at all; in fact, it wasn't until 1926 that England approved its first generalized adoption statute. Scholars believe that nation saw no need for organized adoption because inheritance was dependent solely on bloodlines, and children without relatives to care for them were placed in almshouses, then made apprentices or indentured servants at very young ages. The colonists in this country initially followed those traditions, but adoption in the New World quickly evolved into new forms that reflected the unique nature of a society inventing itself.

For instance, the need for farm labor in the 1700s, especially on large plantations in the South, turned a practice called "informal transfer"5 of dependent children into a widespread phenomenon. The hardships of the Industrial Revolution, accompanied by a huge influx of immigrants, left so many children homeless in the early nineteenth century that public demand grew for providing improved care. Charitable organizations, invariably led by and affiliated with religious movements, spearheaded this movement to end indentures and systematically place children in permanent homes with families.6

At about the same time, adoptive parents began clamoring for laws to give their sons and daughters some of the same rights, such as inheritance, that were automatically granted to biological children. Meanwhile, as a result of rampant poverty and disease, the number of children without parents kept growing. P. C. English, a pediatrician who studied the history of unwanted children, wrote a chilling description in Pediatrics magazine in 1984 of the scene in New York City during the middle of the eighteenth century: "The lower East Side of Manhattan was the most crowded area in the world: The population density of 250,000/square mile was twice that of the most crowded areas of London. Waves of immigration, begun by the Irish following the potato famine of 1846, packed a mass of poorly fed humanity into tenements, with unclean water, inadequate sewage and no facilities for preparation and storage of food." Similar scenarios played out all over the country: Squalid, cramped conditions killed so many people that tens of thousands of children, and perhaps many more, were left to wander the streets. Responding to all those gathering social forces, Massachusetts in 1851 enacted legislation that set out strict procedures for giving children new parents. It was the first U.S. adoption law, and it set several precedents. The most important was that it defined the needs of children as paramount-though that principle hasn't always prevailed in practice during the hundred and fifty years since.

The Massachusetts statute also marked the start of mandatory court approval for adoptions, while presaging that the process would fall under the jurisdiction of the states rather than the federal government. For better and for worse, those were two portentous decisions that every legislature emulated by 1929, and that we all live with to this day. The resulting process has helped to prevent abuses and maintain local standards, but it has also flung open the door to frivolous decision making by individual judges and led to a jumble of state laws that have left adoption under regulated, unconscionably expensive, and unnecessarily difficult, emotionally and logistically, for everyone concerned.

One of the most remarkable chapters in the American adoption story unfolded during the period when the Massachusetts legislature took its groundbreaking legal action. In large cities everywhere, public and private "foundling homes" sprang up in response to the horrendous conditions in which armies of young children were living and dying. These well-intentioned refuges rapidly turned into disease-ridden warehouses where at least as much harm as good was accomplished. A novel alternative to institutionalization was devised by the Reverend Charles Loring Brace in New York. He founded a benevolent association called the Children's Aid Society, branches of which still exist around the world, and he embarked on an ambitious program of relocating needy children into permanent homes. Reverend Brace believed the optimum circumstances for child rearing existed in rural areas where the spaces were open, the people were honest, and the work was hard. His solution was the orphan train movement, as it came to be called, which continued into the early twentieth century. By the time it stopped running, an estimated 100,000 two- to fourteen-year-olds had been transported from eastern cities to farms in states as far west as Nebraska and Kansas.7 News accounts of the time described how the Children's Aid Society announced the impending arrival of orphan trains in communities on its route, and how children were put on display so that locals could choose the ones they wanted. Records indicate few of these de facto adoptees were ever legally made members of the families that took them in, and some were evidently viewed as little more than cheap laborers.8 Nevertheless, most presumably wound up in homes that were more secure and loving than the ones they left behind-not a hard task considering so many of them left nothing behind at all.

However noble the motives or favorable any outcomes from such efforts, the people who ran the orphan trains typically ignored the wishes of any biological parents who were still around, in a grim antecedent to the condescension experienced by birth mothers like Sheila Hansen.

Simultaneously, the children themselves were dealt with less as individuals with rights, desires, or emotions than as possessions that could be taken at will and given away. That attitude still is evident in too many adults' behavior toward young people today and is perpetuated by current adoption law, which essentially treats the transfer of a child from one family to another as a property transaction. The popular notion is that "everyone wins" in adoption because it allows birth mothers to resolve a problem, satisfies a deep desire for adoptive parents, and places children with families in which they can thrive. It's a wonderful ideal, but it was a myopic vision during the time of the orphan trains and it remains one now. Adoption's glory is that it has fulfilled the dreams of millions over the years, but it has always been an emotionally wrenching and legally complicated process because, by its nature, it must balance the rights and needs of vulnerable people. One of the stark realities of this little-understood institution is that nearly all adoptions are initiated by women and men suffering from heartbreak and loss. For many of these participants, including some who reap enormous benefits from the ensuing process, the wounds never completely heal.

Adoptive parents may love their children absolutely, but many nevertheless feel the ache of their infertility forever-and never stop wondering about the biological baby that never was. And birth parents give up the lives they created, tiny beings who look like them, who gestated inside their mother's wombs and, for nine months, were as much a part of them as their limbs; it's incomprehensible that there are people who believe that a woman, especially, can relinquish a child and then put the experience aside, forget about it, pretend she didn't part with a piece of herself. During the current period of fundamental change, perpetuating the myth of "everybody wins" can impede progress because it trivializes or even ignores the feelings of grief, insecurity, and identity confusion that are integral components of adoption, for adoptees as well as their two sets of parents.

Within the adoption world, such simplistic views can undermine relationships among adoptive relatives, between adoptive and birth families, and between professionals and their clients. They also can lead people inside and outside the triad to unintentionally say and do things that inflict emotional pain on relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are tied to adoption. Children tend to get hurt the most, and the most often. Even during the revolution, we live in a nation in which "You're adopted!" is sometimes a taunt, "What kind of woman would give away her baby?" is still considered a reasonable question, and "I'm sorry you couldn't have real children" is still meant as an empathetic remark.

Discovering a New World

One of the unequivocal benefits of the growing candor about and openness within adoption is that people feel increasingly comfortable confronting and trying to remedy their problems. As a result, just as civil rights activists over the past few decades have sensitized Americans about their language and conduct toward minorities and women, adoption activists are finally helping people understand that adoptees and their various parents have hot buttons, too.

Naturally, some of those buttons differ within the many distinct types of adoption being practiced. Adoptees from foster care typically are older and have lived with their birth mothers, for example; their sensibilities and sensitivities therefore can differ markedly from those, say, of children adopted as infants from abroad or those adopted domestically at any age who don't share the skin color or cultural backgrounds of their adoptive parents. It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to understand such subtleties and complexities overnight, but it's easier for people to excuse the occasional slip of the tongue or behavioral slight if they feel they are generally treated with respect.

Members of minority groups seldom believe they have achieved that goal, while people outside those groups often have trouble fully grasping the gravity of the problem. (How many generations has it taken for people to "get" that racist and sexist jokes, even if they strike some listeners as funny, hurt people's feelings and perpetuate negative stereotypes?)

Here are two examples to illustrate the point as it pertains to adoption:

On May 28, 1998, newspapers around the country published a "Herman" cartoon-actually a reprint from years earlier, syndicated that day because the cartoonist was on vacation-that showed a bratty-looking boy holding a pair of shears, which he'd just used to cut down one end of a hammock. A hawk-nosed man lay on the ground between two trees, telling his son: "Tomorrow, I'm having you adopted."
A few years ago, the American Greetings company issued a Valentine's Day card with a cat on the front saying, "SIS, even if you were adopted, I'd still love you . . . " Inside, the thought continued: "not that you are, of course. At least I don't think so. But, come to think of it, you don't really look like Mom or Dad. Gee, maybe you should get a DNA test or something. Oh well, don't worry about it. We all love you, even if your real parents don't. Happy Valentine's Day!"

Is it political correctness to label those attempts at humor as thoughtless and destructive? The people who wrote them didn't intend to hurt anyone, and perhaps they wouldn't if birth parents ceased feeling pain as soon as they relinquished their children, but they don't. Or if adoptive parents were perfectly secure about their children's emotional development, but they aren't. Or if a seven-year-old boy, looking for a card for his sister on Valentine's Day, understood that his birth mother gave him a new home as an act of love and sacrifice. But he hasn't internalized that difficult concept, at least not yet, so the "joke" just inflames his sense of rejection and fuels his resentment at being different.

Adoption operated so clandestinely for so long that most people have learned very little about it, which has led even the smartest and best-intentioned among us to accept erroneous stereotypes, draw unfair conclusions, and act without realizing that our actions can inadvertently inflict pain on a family member or a friend. That's not to say America has been a breeding ground for generations of emotionally damaged or dysfunctional residents because of adoption. Whatever issues the process may raise, it has given the vast majority of its participants joy and has enriched us as a nation. After all, everyone faces hurdles in life, and most of us figure out how to get around the ones we can't get over. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say on Saturday Night Live, "It's always something." For some of us it's adoption, for others it's racism or divorce or Uncle Charlie, who promised two years ago that he would move in for only six weeks. Most important, unlike many other complexities of life, adoption is seldom an oppressive or minute-to-minute concern. And, in most cases and for most people, the upside is huge.

That's why some couples are willing to deplete their savings, borrow from relatives, or even take out bank loans to pay the $15,000 to $35,000 it typically takes to adopt a white baby in this country or a child from abroad. It's an outrageous sum of money that locks out far too many would-be parents-and that's hardly the only way in which the mighty dollar has come to play a corrupting role in adoption. What's clear, nevertheless, is that neither cost nor any of the other myriad obstacles that line its road have prevented the process from becoming an increasingly prevalent means of creating a family.

"After we discovered our fertility problem, we resigned ourselves to not having children," says Susan Correia. Her husband, Russell, shakes his head in agreement as he puts their smiling Chinese daughter into her baby seat. "We never thought we'd adopt, that's for sure," he explains. "We thought from the beginning that we didn't want to get onto that roller coaster." Even without doing much research, they knew the procedure could be bureaucratic and anxiety-producing. They'd heard the heart-wrenching stories about prospective parents who thought they had "their" babies, only to learn that the mothers had changed their minds. And they believed the costs might be prohibitive.

"We didn't have a whole lot of information, but there are so many potential pitfalls, and the fear of the unknown may be worst of all. It was our sense of things that it could turn out to be a nightmare," Susan recalls. Then, one day, a friend told her that infant girls in China were being abandoned and, she says, "It went straight through my heart." She decided to talk to her husband about the possibility of adoption. Infertile couples seldom fully accept the notion that they'll never have children. Often they try sophisticated and expensive medical interventions, sometimes they turn to sperm or egg donors (a misnomer, since both the men and women "donors" are usually paid), occasionally they employ a surrogate mother. Invariably, they fantasize about somehow defying physiological reality and becoming pregnant.

The Correias are both social workers who live in a modest house in Portland, Maine. They didn't consider any of the costly modern methods available for appealing nature's ruling that they would not produce offspring. Still, after deciding that they wanted to adopt an infant from China, they had to find a way to pay the adoption agency, to pay for the airline tickets to travel halfway around the world, to pay for the hotels and all the other expenses they would incur. They took out a home-equity loan.

Eighteen months and $18,000 later, the Correias came home with Hope. In every way. She was ten and a half months old and weighed just ten pounds when her new parents first took her into their arms. That was about two hours after they arrived at the well-kept, two-room brick building, a couple of hours' drive from Beijing, where forty-eight infant girls were unknowingly awaiting their turns to become someone's daughter again. Susan and Russell stayed away from domestic adoption largely because they didn't want to be disappointed or hurt. But having children is always a gamble, whether the risk is miscarriage or a stillbirth, a frustrating bureaucracy or a pregnant woman's change of mind about keeping her baby. Adoptive mothers and fathers invariably have tales to tell, and sometimes they're unnerving. They inevitably end with a common conclusion, however: The parents would go through it all again in a heartbeat to get the child they found at the end of their journey.

When the Correias arrived at the orphanage in Gao Ming, they saw a couple of attendants carrying a baby out the door. It was Hope. She was being rushed to the hospital, where she had spent much of the previous week being treated for bronchitis and pneumonia. "They told us she was very sick," says Susan. "I'm not religious, but I thought, God's not going to send us this far for something horrible to happen." It didn't. The hospital prescribed antibiotics for Hope, an English translation of the name she had been given at the orphanage, and soon released her to the Correias. They took the child to a private clinic, where they paid a doctor to examine her again, and he pronounced her ready for travel. In another week, after all their final paperwork was completed and processed-China operates one of the safest, most efficient adoption programs in the world-Russell and Susan took their daughter back to Portland.

For primarily cultural reasons, though finances also are a frequent factor, more than ninety percent of all the people who adopt infants outside the public-welfare system are white, like the Correias. Blacks, Latinos, and Asians historically have cared for needy children within their extended families, adopting them formally or informally, but seldom taking in unrelated babies. For the most part, the white prospective parents who seek to adopt want infants of their own color, though that is changing with a sharp rise in foreign adoptions, the growth of intermarriage across ethnic lines, and a steady shift in social attitudes as the population of our country becomes increasingly diverse.

Ironically, some of the same factors that have coalesced to improve both adoption's image and reality also have reduced the number of available white infants. The stigma attached to unwed mothers, for example, led more than eighty percent of them to give up their babies into the middle of the twentieth century. Researchers estimate that figure fell to under twenty percent by the early 1970s, and today most experts believe it has plummeted to less than three percent.9 Again, those numbers describe white women; the rate of relinquishment among other races has remained below two percent throughout the history of U.S. adoptions.

Whatever the absolute number, it's nowhere near large enough to satisfy the desires of infertile, late-parenting baby boomers and members of the generation that followed, many of whom are now starting families of their own. The laws of supply and demand (along with their frequent companions, greed and graft) are largely responsible for the escalating costs of adoption; they are also among the key reasons so many Americans have come to rely on other nations to complete their families.

A small number of international adoptions took place after the two World Wars, when Americans took in orphaned children from Europe. But the practice didn't become systematic, and didn't start regularly crossing color lines, until Americans began adopting the mixed-race children whom G.I.s had fathered during the Korean War.10 South Korea remained the major source of young adoptees until the 1990s, when China opened its doors to the adoption of little girls, who are viewed as less important than boys there. The Soviet Union's breakup further accelerated the pace of adoptions abroad, particularly since many of the orphans were white Europeans. By the end of the twentieth century, Russia overtook China as the largest source of adopted children.11

Turmoil in other nations, whether political as in Russia or social as in much of Latin America, has contributed mightily to the adoption revolution in this country. That's true because it has placed little Asian girls and Latino boys in previously all-white schoolyard in small towns from coast to coast. This reality forces teachers, fellow students, other parents, and members of the communities at large to deal with issues that have long been commonplace in larger, already diverse cities and towns. And it's true by virtue of the sheer numbers involved, which invigorate the process itself, raise its public profile and-because so many of the kids are different colors from their parents-thrust adoption into the open simply because no one can pretend the caramel kid and his sunflower sister look very much like their freckled Irish mom or olive Italian dad.

Unlike its domestic counterpart, for which no records are kept, international adoption is precisely tracked because legal documents for everyone who enters the United States must be filled out for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Just under 1,700 children came into this country for adoption in 1964, the first year for which the INS statistics office could provide me with data. Within twenty years, the number had climbed to almost 9,500. By 1998, the last year for which figures were available before publication of this book, it had nearly doubled to 15,724-and the trend line looks like an upward slope for the foreseeable future.12

Nationalists in Russia and some other nations are critical of cross-border adoption, arguing that Americans are capitalizing on the misfortunes of other societies by taking their children, and then are depriving those children of their heritage by raising them in a foreign land. It's an argument with direct parallels to transracial domestic adoption; for instance, detractors maintain that African-American culture generally and black children individually lose out in adoptions by whites.

The confounding dilemma in the adoption world is that there are probably more than enough needy children in the United States to fill the homes of everyone considering adoption. There's a big obstacle in the doorway, though: They're rarely perfectly healthy white babies. Instead, they're older boys and girls of every race, many with emotional and behavioral problems. There are perceptual obstructions, too: Some Americans believe they'd have to cut through exasperating bureaucracies to secure one of these children, and they're too often right. Many also think the older child they adopt from abroad will have fewer problems than the one they'd get from foster care, and they're too often wrong.

The good news is that the revolution is shaking the public system to its core, with potentially huge consequences for adoption and for our nation. More than half a million children were mired in temporary living situations toward the end of the last century, draining the public's energies and tax dollars with little promise of growing up to be productive citizens. But today, state after state is radically revising its standard for the placement of children under its supervision. For decades, the defining principle in the public welfare system had been "family reunification" at almost any cost, a wonderful ideal that entailed putting kids in foster homes while their mothers (and fathers, when they were around) received help to deal with their violence, alcohol, drugs, or other issues. Unfortunately, far too often, the children were shuttled back and forth between foster and biological parents for years. They grew up amid instability and worse, so a lopsided majority developed emotional and behavioral problems that hurt them personally and made them less appealing prospects if and when they became eligible for adoption.

Studies underscore this point, which is intuitively evident anyway: The younger the child, the more likely he or she is to be adopted. They also indicate a direct correlation between the age of a child and the long-term stability of an adoption (the earlier, the better13), while virtually every piece of current research agrees that stability and love during children's youngest years play critical, lifelong roles in their psychological development, their emotional well-being, and their ability to learn.

So there's no mystery about the goal. Educate prospective parents so they know they can choose not to spend tens of thousands of dollars for an adoption, because they can use the public system for little or no money. And reform the government bureaucracies so they're less intimidating to enter and easier to navigate. For a variety of reasons, not everyone would pick this option, and it probably will never provide enough newborns for all the people who want them and can afford to adopt them elsewhere. Many more people would use the public system, however, if the children were younger and less challenging, and if the procedures for adopting them weren't so wrapped in red tape.

It's quite a dream, but not a fantasy. Nationwide, in response to inducements ranging from budget crunches to altruism to court orders, the "best interests of the child" is finally being interpreted as "permanency." So after a specified period of time that can be as short as several months, state officials must now either determine that children will live with their birth families-which is usually the case, and should be-or take legal action to terminate parental rights and open the door for adoption.

This approach has been accelerated by federal financial incentives enacted during the Clinton Administration, and it has already led to stunning increases in public-sector adoptions. From 1995 to 1998, as permanency became the primary objective, the number of these adoptions soared to more than 36,000 children nationwide-an increase of about forty percent. And the jump was even higher in some individual states.14 "It's been a horror show until now," says Jeffrey Katz, former executive director of the Rhode Island Adoption Exchange, a private organization that promotes adoption of children in state care. "It's finally changing, though, and it's changing very fast."

If done well and sustained as a matter of policy, this overhaul of foster care could have a pervasive positive impact, even beyond helping the millions of children and adults who will be directly affected. First, assuming the number of people turning to public care continues to grow, monetary considerations would abate from a higher percentage of all adoptions. At the same time, the balance could gradually shift toward the supply side, thereby applying pressure on private agencies and lawyers to become more competitive.

Be prepared for horror stories, too. Revolutions produce victims, and in this one there inevitably will be birth parents who don't get sufficient opportunities to keep their children, adoptive parents who won't receive enough counseling to cope with their new families, adoptees who will be trouble and troubled. But the new approach in foster care was meant to make kids the number one priority, and they should be the big winners in the long run, whatever the short-term difficulties.

Obviously, the overarching benefit for children is the chance to grow up in a secure environment. They will also gain, however, if money becomes less of a factor in adoption. Children are concrete thinkers who have trouble grasping a conceptual distinction like the one between paying for services required to adopt a child, and buying the child. A five-year-old might not talk about it or even consciously consider the implications, but imagine the potential psychological effects of seeing a television program on which it's mentioned that the adoption of some child from her home nation "cost only $18,000." Or if she overhears someone, maybe her grandmother or her father's fishing buddy, asking, "How did you find the $25,000 to get your daughter?" The problems abound, yet the adoption community is teeming with enthusiasm and optimism. A world in flux can be a disconcerting place in which to live, yet adoption is helping make America a more exciting, vital nation rather than a more unsettled one.

I remember the moment it dawned on me that we all might be in the midst of a phenomenon bigger than just a sociological blip caused by aging, infertile baby boomers seeking alternative ways of forming families. As West Coast bureau chief for the Boston Globe, I was covering the O. J. Simpson murder trial at the time. Dozens of us reporters sat shoulder to shoulder in a small press room on the twelfth floor of the Los Angeles courthouse. I was typing my daily story, right on deadline, when the interruption came.

"This is awful," said Diana, a computer specialist and the only nonjournalist in the room. She was standing right behind me, rustling a newspaper and pointing to a story in it. I turned around and asked what was wrong. Diana showed me the offending article. It was about the Baby Richard case, in which an Illinois man won custody of his biological son from the adoptive parents with whom the four-year-old boy had lived nearly all his life.

"Imagine how I feel," I replied. "I have an adopted son." (We hadn't adopted our daughter yet.) "Really?" said the Chicago Tribune reporter sitting at my left elbow. "I've got two adopted kids." The Time magazine correspondent to his left looked amazed. "I've got two adopted kids, too," he said. Diana, wide-eyed with disbelief, whispered: "I'm adopted."

I was surrounded, and so are we all. Suddenly, or at least it feels sudden, adoption is being transformed from a quiet, lonely trip along America's back roads to a bustling journey on a coast-to-coast superhighway. The infrastructure has become so extensive that it has made all of us-not just adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents-into fellow travelers. We should do all we can to make this a smooth ride.

For more information, please contact:

Adam Pertman, Executive Director
Adoption Nation Education Initiative
apertman@peoplepc.com
www.adoptionnation.com
617-332-8944 (work)

Credits: Adam Pertman