Elizabeth Bartholet This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. www.intellectualcapital.com

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   Published on: 9/2/2000   Last Visited: 9/2/2000

   Elizabeth Bartholet : The Children's Advocate
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   Intellectualcapital 8/19/99 : Kennedy : Elizabeth Bartholet : The Children's Advocate
   
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   Elizabeth Bartholet : The Children's Advocate by Randall Kennedy
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   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.
   
   In 1991, Bartholet wrote a law-review article, Where Do Black Children Belong? The Politics of Race Matching in Adoption, that has become the leading source of scholarly authority for those who challenge the deeply entrenched policy of preferring to place children of a given race with adoptive parents of the same race. Five years later -- after elaborating upon her ideas in a book, Family Bonds, countless editorial pieces, numerous debates with opponents and ceaseless phone calls and letters to members of Congress -- Bartholet helped enact a federal law that prohibits race matching.
   
   Redefining parenthood
   
   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.
   
   What are parents roles. What are parents roles.
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   But 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 immediately 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 should be 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.
   
   No regular reader of a major newspaper can claim to be ignorant of the problem Bartholet addresses. Periodically, reports on egregious cases make it to the front pages and momentarily intrude upon our complacency.
   
   We have all read about the tragedies in which officials declined to intervene even when parents proved unable, over a course of years, to place the most minimal needs of offspring ahead of drug addictions. Or the searing episodes in which officials returned abused child to parents who subsequently killed them.
   
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   According to Bartholet, at least three million children a year are subjected to serious forms of abuse and neglect.
   
   For the children
   
   To better the situation, Bartholet urges three general initiatives. One is raising the general standard of living amongst those at the bottom of the American socio-economic hierarchy.
   
   The social toxins of poverty clearly play a role in the incidence of abuse and neglect cases.
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   According to Bartholet, children from families earning less than $ 15, 000 per year are more than 22 times more likely to suffer maltreatment involving demonstrable harm than children from families earning more than $ 30, 000, and they are more than 44 times as likely to be neglected..
   
   In the present political climate, however, there is little likelihood that public or private forces will intervene in any major way to redistribute resources downward.
   
   A second initiative Bartholet recommends is enlarging the pool of prospective adoptive parents. Adoption, she argues, is often the best of the available alternatives for children who have been subjected to abuse or neglect. Foster care, though useful on a short-term basis, lacks the security and consistency children need to flourish. Kinship care often places at-risk children dangerously close to the same social problems that facilitated their abuse. And institutionalized care lacks the loving touch that frequently emerges when adults seeking to adopt solemnly promise to become the parents of a parentless child and then demonstrate their commitment.
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   Here I think Bartholet errs badly. Nothing she writes gives me confidence that a massively enlarged child-welfare bureaucracy will perform the tasks she envisions with sufficient intelligence to allay sensible fears of excessive intrusion and poor judgments.
   
   After all, much of Nobody's Children is a persuasive critique of child-welfare bureaucrats. Those are the people enraptured by the stupidity of race matching. Those are the people obsessed with family preservation at the expense of abused children. Those are the people who have, time and again, failed to craft policies that advance the best interests of children. Given that dismal record, it will take more of an explanation than Bartholet provides to convince me of the wisdom of enlarging their jurisdiction and lowering the threshold at which they can intervene into the most intimate sphere of our lives.
   
   One need not agree with all that Bartholet writes, however, 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.
   
   Related Links Kennedy wrote a piece on interracial adoption for IC in February 1998. IC associate editor Danny Glover examined The Ethics of Baby-making earlier this year. Our sister site, Policy.com, pondered in-vitro fertilization and other beginning of life issues in May. The Health and Human Services Department's Children's Bureau offers information on adoption, child abuse and neglect, and other relevant topics. Bartholet authored an article titled Race and Adoption, and it is available on the home page of Pact, An Adoption Alliance. Visit the Family & Parenting channel of VoxCap.com to research related issues in depth.
   
   What are the pros and cons of the three ideas of Bartholet's that Kennedy outlines in his article? What makes a person a parent? How much emphasis should foster-care and adoption policies place on family preservation"? How much time, if any, should neglectful or abusive parents be given to change their lifestyles before losing their children.
   
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