Domestic and international adoption.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)

I am responding to the article in the July 2006 issue of Social Work, which focused on adoptions of African children by American families and adoptions of children from the public foster care system in the United States. The article brought to my mind a number of things that are relevant to a discussion of domestic and international adoptions.

I have served as the director of adoption services for the New York state Department of Social Services and more recently I have prepared adoption home studies for families who are adopting both domestically and internationally. The experience that I have gained in those positions is quite relevant in more fully understanding domestic foster care adoptions and international adoptions by Americans.

Included in the article are two charts that compared "domestic and international U.S. adoptions." The charts indicate that the number of children adopted annually from the foster care system is twice as great as the number adopted internationally. I believe that the figures provided regarding domestic adoptions are misleading. The reader is not informed that large numbers of these domestic adoptions are situations in which relatives of the child are adopting. Such cases are also known as kinship foster care. In many large urban areas, kinship foster care cases make up as much as half of the foster care population. (One of the incentives for kinship foster care families to adopt is that the family will almost always be eligible for adoption assistance or subsidy that will continue until the child is 18 or 21 in some cases.) On the other hand, very few of the internationally adopted children are related to the U.S. families who are adopting them.

Another significant characteristic of the American foster care and adoption situation is that quite often, the majority of the nonrelative adoptive parents are currently those children's foster parents. Some states, such as New York, give preference to allowing foster parents to adopt. Thus, families who initially take children as foster children before they become legally free often have "a leg up" on other potential adoptive families. On the other hand, it is my experience that many families who apply to adopt internationally have initially explored domestic adoption of children in the foster care system. They have turned to international adoption ...