Nobody's Children : Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative

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Summary: Randall Balmer reviews "Nobody's Children"
Review: "Elizabeth Bartholet: The Children's Advocate" IntellectualCapital.com By Randall Kennedy Thursday, August 19, 1999

It is inspiring to see an intellectual join passion with knowledge and focus them effectively upon an important social problem. That is precisely what Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard law school and an expert in family and civil rights law, has done. For a decade, she has been on a crusade to better the predicament of parentless children. . . . .

Bartholet has now written a book, Nobody's Children, that deepens her critique of the way our society fails orphans and children who are abused or neglected by "parents." I put parents in quotation marks pursuant to one of the main lessons of Nobody's Children -- that "true parenting should be defined more by social bonds than by blood." In Bartholet's view, parenting consists of nurturing a child. She resists endowing an individual with the honorific title of parent simply because that person sires a child or gives birth to it. [She argues that] the blood tie alone should be viewed as an insufficient predicate for parenthood, especially when adults seriously neglect or abuse children that are presumptively "theirs." When adults do these things, Bartholet contends, their parental rights should either be terminated or suspended and reinstated only if they show convincingly that they are apt to rehabilitate themselves forthwith. Children, Bartholet convincingly argues, should not be condemned to dangerous, dysfunctional homes once it is clear that putative "parents" cannot, in fact, parent. Rather than waste public resources and precious time on doomed efforts at "family preservation" where there is no realistic family to preserve, she advises administrators and legislators to free neglected and abused children more readily and quickly for adoption. . . . .

One need not agree with all that Bartholet writes . . . to feel admiration and gratitude for her analysis of the dismal situation in which all too many American children -- our children -- are stuck. She has distinguished herself nobly as a caring, combative and insightful public intellectual.

Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. He is also a contributing editor of IntellectualCapital.com.

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Summary: This Book Changed My Life
Review: I am a mother of two birth children and one adopted child, adopted from foster care at age 13. I stumbled across this book in a bookstore one rainy day when I had hit the emotional low-point in my own adoption journey. I read it while I was struggling with the endless and maddening redtape and delays entailed in getting our foster child out of "the system" forever. "Nobody's Children" speaks to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose hearts and beliefs nudge them to contemplate domestic adoption, yet who encounter cultural and procedural barriers that discourage most from considering adoption from the foster care system. This is a carefully-researched and footnoted work by a distinguished former civil rights attorney--whose career included work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and now Harvard Law School, where she teaches today. The author is herself both an adoptive and biological parent. Her book gave me new hope. I was inspired by it to work to help bring about the cultural shifts and procedural reforms described in this book, changes that will be required if our nation is truly serious about ending the tragedy (and travesty) of kids languishing in long-term foster care. Ignore reviews by some who utterly mischaracterize Bartholet's arguments. She, like Patrick Murphy before her, fully acknowledge that the vast majority of poor and minority families raise their children well and lovingly, and that far more social resources should be directed toward addiction treatment and supporting stressed-out birth mothers so they can keep their babies. Defenseless, innocent children are not, however, the chattel (private property) of their birth parents. All of us, as a civilized people, must speak out against policies and practices that severely limit a child's chance to be adopted after being subjected to acts of torture or repeated abuse and neglect. To fix "the system" and its horrors, more Americans need to open their homes to the children trapped in it. How to persuade people to consider adopting from foster care? Bartholet suggests a first step: imagine a system that promotes adoption as the best, instead of a second best, way to build a family. A book for dreamers and "doers" both.

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Summary: Typically self-serving
Review: Nothing more than another whining infertile wishing to strip all biological parents of their constitutional rights to parent their children without government interference, in hopes of increasing the already flooded pool of children awaiting adoption.

Ms. Bartholet does an excellent job of pointing out the serious flaws in the child welfare system in this country. Instead of calling for reform of what doesn't work, she contends the whole system should be thrown out. What she seems to be trying to say is that parents are replaceable and interchangeable, and children don't greive the loss of biological or cultural attachments. Her shift from removing children from abusive or neglectful parents to removing them from those she considers sub-standard is frighteningly Orwellian. While her suggestions would certainly make the pool of adoptable children more appealing for infertile couples and singles who will settle for nothing less than the healthy white infant/toddler, it does nothing for children living with parents they love, and love them, in spite of their failings.

Love and parenting are issues far to complicated to follow her suggestion that anything less than perfection demands all ties be severed.

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Summary: Issues of child abuse, family preservation, adoption
Review: Read this book written by a civil rights lawyer, feminist and Harvard Law professor who challenges traditional left and right poliltical perspectives on child abuse, family preservation and adoption. She is the mother of one child by birth and two by adoption who writes with power and emotion about the meaning of parenting and family.

She looks at the battered women's movement and asks why we have come to think that adult women should be liberated from abusive homes but still insist that children be kept at home pursuant to family preservation policies without regard to the level of abuse and neglect suffered.

Bartholet takes on the child welfare establishment and asks us to join her in pushing for radical rethinking of first premises. She wants our society to take adoption seriously for the first time ever, moving abused and neglected children into real homes so that they can survive and thrive. She wants to knock down the racial barriers that stand in the way of "Nobody's Children" finding the parents they need. And, finally, she points out that now is the time for reform if ever there is a time.

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Summary: A good book to read
Review: This book is great, because it talks about what foster care is about in the eyes of the author. I to have had my share of the juvenile courts issue. My children were removed from me on Dec. 16, 1990 by a police office not a social worker. I was charged on hearsay issues. I have always loved my children, but my mother had stolen my children because I was poor and unmarried. Now I have formed a class action against the abuse of the system.