Title:	Children for Families or Families for Children
Authors:	Mary Ann Davis
Keywords:	Children for Families
Issue Date:	2011
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	My initial interest in adoption began when I was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Arlington, School of Social Work, which offered an internship at the Edna Gladney Maternity home. During this period the revolution of single women keeping their children and raising them as single parents was beginning along with the transition from secret to open adoptions. This was also the era when fellow Texan Sara Weddington was the winning attorney in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. The legality of abortions (along with the availability of improved contraception and the increased social acceptance of single parenthood) ended the maternity home movement. Almost immediately, the abundance of healthy White infants available for adoption ended and the acceptable adoptee in the adoption triad morphed into any child of any age, race, ethnicity, health, or ability for which an adoptive family could be located. My first professional social worker position was as an adoption worker for the State of Texas, working to place the hard to place child including minorities, sibling groups, and children who had emotional and physical scars of abuse. Prior to the early 1970s these children would have been considered unadoptable. The majority of adoption seekers continued to be the married, infertile or sub-fecund, essentially the same population who in the past would have adopted from maternity homes. Although they would have preferred a healthy White infant had these children been available, the cultural and legal changes that drove a narrower scope of availability led to a broader acceptance of who they would adopt. So my special area of interest is in studying the changes in who is adoptable and the adoptions of foster children and hard-to-place children. Later, I was a clinical social worker in a state psychiatric facility with psychologically and behaviorally impaired juveniles, many of whom had been adopted as younger children. Now, as a demographer, I rely on my clinical social work background to direct my research in adoption issues. Although adoptions represent a small portion of family growth, from a demogra- pher’s point of view it is significant. The United Nations (2009, p. xv) estimates that approximately 260,000 children are adopted each year; of these in 2001 the United States (U. S.) adopted 127,000 children; next in frequency is China, with 46,000 adoptions and the Russian Federation, with 23,000 adoptions. The 2000 United States census data are that in the United States in 2000, there were 2.1 million adopted children, about 2.5 percent by age group, with an additional 4.4 million, about five percent, stepchildren in households (Kreider, 2003, p. 2). Adopted chil- dren were 7.7 percent or 6,443,496 of the 84 million household children; 257,792 were foreign born adoptees (Kreider, 2003, p. 12).
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/50545
ISBN:	978-90-481-8972-4
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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