Adoption and Foster Care

Most children with disabilities are raised in the homes of one or both of their biological parents, but some grow up in other environments including adoptive and foster care homes. Although historically children with disabilities were considered not to be adoptable, by the end of the twentieth century that had changed. Greater recognition of the rights of persons with disabilities combined with the decreased adoption availability of healthy infants helped public attitudes to become more favorable toward adoption of special-needs children—those who were older, of minority race or ethnicity, who were members of sibling groups of three or more, or who had disabilities. These more favorable attitudes were reflected in federal laws in the United States such as the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment and Adoption Reform Act of 1978 and the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. This legislation expedited the adoption process by establishing adoption exchanges, training adoption workers, and offering financial subsidies for adoptive families, all of which promoted the adoption of children with special needs, including disabilities. In 2000 in the United States, 11.8 percent of all adopted children ages 5 to 17 had at least one disability, in contrast to only 5.2 percent of biological children.

Children with many types of disabilities have been adopted. Some disabilities are mild and correctable, whereas others are severe and life threatening. Although severity of disability and prognosis for a very limited lifespan are deterrents for some potential adopters, at least one-third of women currently seeking to adopt consider adopting a child with a severe physical or mental disability, and approximately 5 percent actually prefer to adopt this kind of special-needs child. As an example, in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, the AIDS pandemic began to orphan children, some of whom were HIV-positive and therefore at high risk for both disability and early death. Many of these children were placed with foster families, became available for adoption, and were adopted. Although the number of pediatric AIDS cases in the United States is declining, worldwide it is increasing rapidly, and U.S. families who adopt internationally are at some risk for unknowingly adopting an HIV-infected child.

Children with disabilities become available for adoption in two ways. Some are relinquished voluntarily by their birth parents with the disability as a contributing factor, and others are removed involuntarily because of abuse and/or neglect. For example, several studies have yielded estimates that approximately 20 percent of children with Down syndrome are voluntarily relinquished for adoption by their birth parents, almost always immediately after diagnosis. This relatively high percentage results in a fairly large number of children with Down syndrome available for adoption, and some individuals and agencies have specialized in finding homes for them. Nonetheless, infants with Down syndrome are much in demand and agencies frequently report that potential adoptive families may need to wait for several years before one becomes available.

Many children with disabilities are adopted by their foster families, especially since 1997 in the United States when Public Law 105–89, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, was enacted. This legislation is quite complex, but it and state regulations and policies related to it have resulted in a number of improvements in children's welfare: The amount of time that children spend in foster care waiting for reunification with birth parents has decreased and the number of adoptions from foster care has increased, in some states by as much as 50 percent or more in just one year. Nationally, foster care adoptions grew from approximately 31,000 children in 1997 to 50,000 in 2001. Because many children in foster care have [Page 38]disabilities, it is anticipated that increasing the number of adoptions from foster care will also increase the number of adoptions of children with disabilities.

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