Adoption Reform Hero: Dr. Elizabeth Bartholet

Continuing the series on adoption reform that appears on this blog sporadically, today’s post features a look a someone who does so much more to make a difference for the positive than simply wag fingers in vaguely accusatory directions and slap the same old, tired links all over the place in an effort to make tiny bits and pieces look imposing and important.

Dr. Elizabeth Bartholet is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School. She teaches civil rights and family law and specializes in child welfare, adoption and reproductive technology.

Her background includes work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and she was founder and director of the Legal Action Center, a nonprofit organization in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance abuse issues. She has authored numerous publications on adoption and has won several awards for her writing and advocacy work in adoption and child welfare, including the Radcliffe College Human Recognition Award in 1997.

So, what has Dr. Bartholet done that has me casting her as a hero of adoption reform?

I’ll start with her extensive and dedicated research into adoption agency practices in placing Black children … adoption racism.

What she found was that agencies were typically racially-matching, in response to a 1972 policy put forth by the National Association of Black Social Workers(NABSW) that declared, “… black children belong, physically, psychologically, and culturally in black families in order that they receive the total sense of themselves and develop a sound projection of their future.”

In 1991, when the NABSW reaffirmed its stance in a paper that claimed that even, ” … the most sensitive, loving, and skilled white parent could not avoid doing irreparable harm to an African American child,” the mentality was entrenched.

Also in 1991, Dr. Bartholet published an article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, titled “Where do Black Children Belong? The Politics of Race Matching in Adoption”.

What Dr. Bartholet discovered was that this posture had created an Everest of evils, and that the costs to Black children was taking a tremendous toll. She found that agencies, “…typically . . . hold black children in foster or institutional care for significant periods of time after they are or could be free for adoption,” and were resisting transracial placements because of political pressure.

When she looked at the ravaging consequences of institutionalization and successive foster care placements, she realized that although the risks of transracial placements were speculative, the costs of racial-matching policies are real, as can be illustrated in case after case.

“… the Drummond case, in which the Fifth Circuit affirmed an agency’s removal of Timmy, a two-year-old biracial child, from the home of the Drummonds, a white foster couple with whom Timmy had lived since he was one month old. Despite the trial court’s findings that the Drummonds were qualified in all respects except race, that the Drummonds had cared for Timmy for two years, and that the agency had no Black home in which to place Timmy, the Fifth Circuit upheld the removal of Timmy on the basis of race in order to “avoid the potentially tragic possibility of placing a child in a home with parents who will not be able to cope with the child’s problems.” The real tragedy, however, is that Timmy lost the only parents he ever knew and has since been placed in one foster home after another.

Thanks in no small measure to Dr. Bartholet, the Multiethnic Placement Act was signed into law in 1994 and amended by the Interethnic Adoption Provisions act of 1996.

Not satisfied that all was suddenly right with the world with the passage of laws, Dr. Bartholet noted: “… The problem is that we don’t have any organizations that could support the right kind of legal challenge to what’s going on.”

For the Journal of teh American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, her “Cultural Stereotypes Can and Do Die: It’s Time to Move on With Transracial Adoption” continues to focus attention on the fact that cultural stereotypes are still impacting placements and that agencies violating the Multiethnic Placement Act will face significant financial penalties.

More on her work in the next post.

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