The majority of children living in the United States child welfare system (and thus, living outside the care of birth parents) have already outgrown infancy. Nonetheless, even babies as young as a few days old may be surrendered by their biological parents.         

Not just any place may be deemed a safe haven for the purpose of refuge for abandoned children. Depending on the region, hospitals, emergency medical service centers (i.e. ambulance buildings), police stations, and fire stations may all serve as safe havens. Even churches may fulfill this role provided “staff” are present. Preferably, people will be on hand who can provide immediate medical care should something go wrong with an infant.         

Not just any caretakers may relinquish custody of a child to an appointed facility either. Safe haven laws differ with regard to which parents may surrender their children, if at all. While a majority of states offer some sort of procedural rules of abandonment of a child, a handful have yet to formally address the issue.

For those states that do expressly permit temporary care of children at public institutions, meanwhile, some (e.g. Georgia) only allow birth mothers to surrender their children at safe havens and some (e.g. Illinois) do not specify who may leave a child for eventual adoption.

In addition, not just any children may be handed over to safe haven facilities. A significant majority of states (over 90%) require that children be less than three months old, and a substantial subset of that majority states (slightly over 50%) that children may only be 14 days or older. 

Though safe haven laws of the states have their terms for parents to give up their children, parents may, in turn, have their own requirements, namely that their identity remain a secret and that they are not prosecuted for deciding to waive their custody of their child. Thankfully for them, most states build in some sort of provision that anonymity and immunity from criminality will be ensured by the safe havens that accept children. Nonetheless, this is not guaranteed in all states and may be rendered moot if parents are suspected of neglect or abuse.

Safe haven laws dictate that usually children will be handed over to a system of public care. Still, once more depending on the jurisdiction, there are procedures whereby safe havens can or must remand children back to their custodial guardians. Authorities may need to check if a child was reported missing before accepting him or her, or they may have to consult a birth father registry to see if a father might want to assume primary care of his biological child.

An obviously critical consideration of rules and regulations of American adoption is who may be adopted. Technically, in about half of the United States, even adults may be adopted. As regards child adoption policies in the United States in themselves, all states allow for children to be adopted.

There are qualifications in some jurisdictions, though. States like Indiana will only consent to adoption of children under 18. As for, say, Texas, a child must be explicitly cleared to be ready for adoption, and in Iowa, in particular, a child must live with a family for some 180 days prior to adoption.

An equally essential aspect of American adoption is what rights adoptive parents and birth parents should have. First of all, prospective adoptive parents must be given the rights to adopt at all. The child adoption policies of different states will assess different minimum ages for individuals to become eligible to adopt, whether this be 18, 21 or 25, and in some states, such as California, adoptive parents must be at least 10 or 15 years older than their prospective children, respectively.

Furthermore, American adoption as a whole is largely restrictive of gays adopting children, or at the very least does not openly support the practice. In fact, Florida and Mississippi have an explicit ban on LGBT adoption.         

State child adoption policies vary as well in terms of who can give consent for adoption/placement. In all states, birth mothers/married birth couples usually will have to agree to any transfers of primary care (all too frequently, the rights of “putative fathers” are not given the same weight as those of biological mothers).

If termination of parental rights is done by force, however, this decision will become a responsibility of a public or private adoption agency. Then again, half of the states have provisions in their statutes allowing children above a certain age to object to their being adopted.

American adoption law is thus fairly complex. With any omnibus adoption legislation unlikely to pass soon, this complexity stands to remain. As far as adoption reform is concerned, it seems revision of individual State child adoption policies may be the best way to effect changes in the short-term.

Prior to the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, domestic adoption in the United States was conceived much differently. Before then, preservation of the family through preservation of parental rights was often the most important consideration of state health and social services departments, even on occasions when that would potentially endanger the welfare of children. With the inherent risk to American children in holding to that policy, though, it was increasingly apparent that a new adoption act was sorely needed. 

With the signing of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, also known as the ASFA, however, somewhat of a revolution was brought about in the arena of domestic adoption. This adoption act saw a new conception of how parental rights should be addressed, as well as the institution of other reforms. At the same time, though, the ASFA was not above criticism at the time of its creation, and some contingents find fault with it even today. Some basic information on the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997:

As noted, where this adoption act engineered the most sweeping changes to American adoption policy is regarding the issue of parental rights. Through the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, the conditions for termination of parental rights were made less restrictive.

Potentially, within a year of allegations of abuse or neglect, biological parents may be stripped of their ability to care for their biological children and relocated to another household through adoption from foster care. In a manner of speaking, then, the ASFA can be seen as important step for domestic adoption in the United States in that it expresses a more firm commitment to the best interests of its children.  

At the same time, though, this adoption act speaks to one of the biggest interests of the states: more money. By amending provisions of the Social Security Act, the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 grants federal funds to states for their compliance with the letter of the law, to as much as $4,000 per adoption for numbers of foster care child placements higher than those of the previous fiscal year.

Thus, at the time of the ASFA’s passage, there was definitely an incentive for states to get as many children as they could out of child welfare. 

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 has been much celebrated for its attention to child rights and the plight of waiting children in foster care. Nonetheless, critics of this adoption act point to ways in which the system can be and has been abused. For one, the language of the ASFA is correct that preservation of parental rights should not be upheld in all cases, but by the same token, adoption by relatives and strangers should not automatically be considered to be the best solution, especially not to justify the intake of state funds. 

Some critics, in addition, think the deadlines for termination of parental rights contained in the Act are a bit hasty. After all, children may be placed into families temporarily through legal risk placements, so it is not as if living in child welfare and living birth parents are the only options. Whether the good of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 outweighs the bad is subjective.

At any rate, the ASFA has provided fodder for our national dialog on what is best for children in foster care, and therefore has furthered our understanding of the issues at hand.

For many Americans, it is hard to believe how far domestic adoption has come. The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, like many Federal laws on the subject of adoption, saw fit to amend the policies of past. In particular, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act addressed terms of appropriation for adoptive families by changing the language of Title IV (aid and services for needy families and foster care children) and Title XX (social services “block grants”) of the Social Security Act to make public funds more accessible to certain groups.

As for what groups were deemed eligible for Government-issued monies by the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, both children and families as a whole qualified for certain forms of relief. Some drew aid from the proverbial well that was Aid for Families with the Dependent Children (AFDC), while some families received financial breaks.         

Who exactly were children with special needs, though? Prior to the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, there was no adequate explanation. With its passage, however, the deserving segment of the population was finally given a codified definition. A “child with special needs” is defined by the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 as one who cannot be brought back to a home run by his or her birth parent(s) and one who cannot be placed or cared for without some form of assistance.

Of course, this is a critical notion for adoption law, but for recognition of children with special needs worldwide in general, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act was a big step forward for our nation.         

At the same time, adoptees of all walks of life were impacted by the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. An important clause in the Act demanded State Social Services departments make “reasonable efforts” to avoid breaking up families through foster care/adoption and return children to their biological parents when possible. In fact, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act levied an 18-month ultimatum on public agencies for them to determine where a child would be placed following foster care.

For what it did for children with special needs, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 is certainly admirable. Nonetheless, it has its limitations. Oftentimes, the reasonable efforts charge of the Act ran contrary to children’s best interests in that it sent them back to families in which potential for abuse was high. This issue would come to be revisited in future legislation such as the ASFA in the 90s, however.