Adoption Idea Raises Many Questions, Few Answers

By CARLA RIVERA and BOB POOL

Jan. 12, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

It is only a two-line paragraph in an enormous budget plan, but Gov. Pete Wilson’s suggestion that poor mothers be encouraged to consider putting their children up for adoption has emerged as one of the more provocative aspects of his welfare shake-up.

While the proposal has elicited praise and scorn from child welfare advocates and welfare recipients, local officials who would have to implement the governor’s ideas have expressed confusion and concern about the practical implications of an expanded government role in encouraging adoptions.

Peter Digre, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, said the governor’s proposals involve a lot of “untested assumptions.”

At a board of directors meeting of the County Welfare Association in Sacramento on Friday, Digre raised a number of issues with state officials but said he came away with few satisfactory answers.

“We were told that so far this has been at the level of philosophical exhortation and that no programmatical details have been fleshed out,” he said.

The question of whether the state will issue regulations or guidelines covering the level of government involvement has yet to be decided. But according to Wilson aide Sean Walsh, the governor envisions a proactive approach by welfare caseworkers.

Walsh said that county social workers must begin making more thorough assessments of the financial, emotional and physical conditions of expectant welfare recipients, especially pregnant teenagers, to determine if adoption is an appropriate course.

“They have to lay it on the line and say, ‘Look, this is where you are in life, you have a child here, maybe you have an abusive partner.’ Those people on the front lines need to raise all of the issues and talk to the male and to the female,” he said. “It’s essentially doing what a caseworker should be doing, assessing the environment around that individual and what is in the best interests of the child. Is that asking a lot of caseworker? Yes, but it should be a part of the matrix.”

“Is it not sometimes best that we intervene early in the process before you have some sort of tragedy?” he said. “We are not going to be cowed by the PC [politically correct] police in not providing all of the options that can be addressed to protect children.”

Digre agreed there are many people who want to adopt children. But he noted they do not always want to adopt the children who are available. It is uncertain what would be in store for children of a new stream of low-income women, many of them minorities, who chose to place their offspring for adoption, he said.

The county deals mostly with children who have been removed from the home and placed in foster care because of abuse or other severe mistreatment. About 274 families have completed a screening process and are waiting to adopt children. The county is looking for homes for about 183 children, many of them special needs cases. Only about 29 children came to the county in the last 12 months from parents who decided on their own to give them up.

Most such adoptions are handled by private attorneys or adoption agencies. According to state adoption officials, about 2,000 independent adoptions are brokered each year statewide.

Digre cautioned that any suggestion of adoption on the part of case workers would have to be couched in the greatest sensitivity to avoid the charge of coercion, especially when dealing with young women and those who of necessity are dependent on government aid.

“Adoptions around the country have been thrown out because mothers have claimed they were under duress or coerced or deceived,” he noted. “We have some kids in our system and we make it known to them that adoption is a choice, but we have not told them they should consider giving up their child because of their circumstances. The idea is really something that needs very careful development because the whole concept of child welfare is you work to strengthen the (family) relationship.”

Some child welfare advocates offered a more scathing assessment of Wilson’s proposal. Eli Lefferman, director of adoptions and foster care at the privately run Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services characterized the governor’s recommendation as “dangerous.”

Lefferman said it is wrong to suggest that women be encouraged to consider giving their newborns up because of what “is possibly a temporary emergency” in their lives.

“Adoption is a serious piece of work, a lifelong decision, not something until you get back on your feet,” said Lefferman--whose agency assists in 220 adoptions a year.

But chronic financial problems motivate many women who opt for adoption, said David H. Baum, an Encino attorney who specializes in adoption matters and is president of the Academy of California Adoption Lawyers.

“I’d say in most of the instances in my personal practice, most of the young ladies I meet cannot provide financially for their children. It’s not for the want of love, but a perception on their part that they cannot provide what the child deserves,” Baum said.

Glendale lawyer Harold L. Myers, who has handled nearly 10,000 adoptions during his 35-year career, praised Wilson’s proposal. He estimated that there are as many as 10 sets of potential adoptive parents for every child available for adoption.

With open adoptions now popular, it’s not so much that a birth mother is losing a child as that she is “gaining a couple of good adoptive parents,” Myers said. “The governor is doing his job. The natural mother needs that encouragement--someone speaking out to them.”

Tom Owenson, president of St. Anne’s, a private residential home for pregnant teenagers and young mothers in Los Angeles, agreed and said government and the media should work to rid the stigma surrounding adoption.

“I happen to be an adoptee, reared by warm and loving parents, but kids today don’t see it that way, certainly the population we deal with sees it differently,” he said. “Adoption is viewed by young people today as a dirty thing to do to a young baby.”

Owenson’s assessment was buttressed by some women on welfare--including many older mothers.

“I’d be offended to be told that I should consider adoption,” said a pregnant Sonya Brown, 33, who was relaxing Friday afternoon at the downtown Women’s Center on Los Angeles Street. “I’d tell them to go to hell.”

Brown said she and her husband, who works as a cook, hope to move from the downtown hotel where they now live after their baby is born this spring.

“I’m very worried about raising a child in a hotel. But they have programs to help you get Section 8 housing,” she said. “It’s going to be difficult. But I’m going to love my baby.”

A few miles away, 38-year-old Darlene Jennifer was waiting inside a Beverly Boulevard office of the Department of Public Social Services to clear up a paperwork problem that has delayed her monthly $212 General Relief payments.

Jennifer is expecting twins in a few months. Their father, Jesse Abner said, “We wouldn’t consider adoption. I want to raise my own kids. I’ve raised three grown daughters already,” said Abner, 53, a car detailer.

Jennifer said she also would be unwilling to consider adoption. “These are mine,” she said, touching her belly.