"Supply and Demand"

This comes from the NCCPR blog (scroll to 2/11/08 entry), commenting on a multi-state study (click here to read it, free registration required for full report). My comments can't add much to this analysis, except to say that I see the infants as commodities element of dependency cases frequently, and up close and personal. From the blog:

Of all children entering foster care in 2004-2005, fully 20 percent were infants. No other age group, not even children aged one to two, represented more than seven percent of all children entering care....Among children who enter foster care before their first birthday, only 28.6 percent return home. Another 9.5 percent exit to relatives and 30 percent are still in the system after turning one. In contrast, fully 24 percent exit to adoption....[ed: This means that for infants, the rate of termination of rights is nearly equal to reunification, if not more depending on the results for those still in the system after turning one]...It’s hard to believe that parents of infants are inherently more abusive and less capable than parents of children of any other age.

Here's more:

I can imagine child welfare agencies claiming that all this is just because infants are more vulnerable – so someone who can be a good parent to a 12-year-old might not be a good parent to an infant. But children aren’t exactly self-sufficient at 18 months – yet even by that age, child welfare systems are far more prone to return a child to birth parents. Among children aged one to two years old 40.5 percent return home and only 13.6 percent are adopted.


So the real answer is as obvious as child welfare agencies are desperate to deny it: Supply and demand. Infants are, by far, the most marketable of commodities in child welfare. There is far more likely to be a “nice” (translation, affluent, white professional) couple - people like us – anxious to adopt, so it’s much easier to take them away forever from parents who are “unfit” – translation, poor, minority and so, presumably, nothing like us.

And, of course, the federal government will pay the child welfare agency a bounty of $4000 to $8,000 for every finalized adoption over a baseline number. There is no comparable incentive for returning that adorable infant to her or his own parents.

In the United States, as early as 1999, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did an excellent series on the propensity of one county in Western Pennsylvania to rush impoverished infants out of their homes and into the arms of affluent adoptive parents who sometimes had connections to the county’s child welfare and court systems. [ed: Oh, I have stories!. Yes, that happens in Florida]

If child protective apparatuses tend take on the look and feel of a for-profit industry, the "bounty" for finding attractive adoptable babies is among the least defensible of the profit centers. Do your jobs well, dependency defenders.