Like many of you, I read with interest the article Lesbian couple raises adopted children in midst of debate over gay rights in the March 31 edition of The Post. Judith Millesen, an Ohio University political science professor, is raising two adopted children with her female partner ' an arrangement that might soon be banned in Ohio.
Ohio House Bill 515, called the Adoptive and Foster Children's Protection Act
would prevent children from being placed in a home where a gay, bisexual or transgender person is present. Although the bill is stalled in the House, it is likely to become a campaign issue later this year.
Before I learned more about HB 515 and the state of children's services in Ohio, I had neutral feelings toward gay adoption and gay issues in general. Then, while doing research for this column, I came across the Web site of AdoptOHIO, the agency run by Ohio's Department of Job and Family Services.
If you're easily upset, I don't recommend visiting this site. It provides photo listings of some of the approximately 4,000 Ohio children eligible for adoption. Pictures of smiling infants and toddlers are accompanied by descriptions such as Curtis has been in foster care all of his life G? he is an adorable little boy that needs a permanent home. Long after I closed out the Web site, I couldn't get those images out of my head and began to wonder why anyone, especially pro-family Republicans, would attempt to block adoption of parentless children.
Human experience confirms the fact that government agencies do a terrible job of raising children. In the 1990s, American newspapers were filled with stories of Soviet-bloc orphans who suffered such severe neglect in state institutions that they exhibited behavioral and emotional disturbances years after being adopted by American families. Of course, the United States takes better care of its abandoned children than any of the miserable nations in the former U.S.S.R. ' but the American foster system is far from ideal.
I'm one of those pro-family Republicans, and I believe people who think like me should encourage adoption by any qualified adult ' married, single, gay or straight. When the law bars certain people from adopting, it necessarily follows that fewer adoptive parents are available. And when fewer adoptive parents are available, more children are sentenced to a transient life in a series of government-assigned foster homes.
Many arguments against laws like the one proposed in HB 515 are not emotional or even moral. Adoption has economic incentives. According to a report by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, children in unstable foster care situations often require medical and psychological treatment ' funded by public money. As of 2001, the government pays foster parents between $9 and $90 every day to provide for the children in their care. When a child leaves foster care and is no longer a ward of the state taxpayers benefit.
However, the strongest arguments in favor of broad adoption rights are moral. Everyone agrees that children have a right to be raised by families, not the government. Married, opposite-sex parents are ideal, but, as evidenced by the thousands of Ohio children still waiting to be adopted, they are not always available. Advances in fertility treatment have worsened the prospects for abandoned children, especially minorities or those with special needs. People who might have considered adoption in the past are now turning to fertility drugs, surrogate mothers and sperm banks to have babies of their own.
That's why gay couples who choose to adopt deserve to be celebrated, not denigrated as innately unfit to care for children.
By choosing to adopt a child from the foster care system, gay couples acknowledge that they can't bear their own babies, but are willing to raise children brought forth by irresponsible or absent parents.
They have rejected the sperm donors and surrogate mothers in favor of a child who may come from a less-than-perfect gene pool, and who may have suffered neglect or abuse. They could elect to spend their adult lives traveling, watching Sex and The City re-runs and indulging every selfish desire. But they'd rather spend the next two decades caring for a child to whom they have no biological connection.
No better definition of family values exists.
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Ashley Herzog
