The Adoption Debate : Child’s Beating Death Reheats Traditional-Independent Battle

The case seemed to defy imagination, as horrific detail after sad footnote continued to unfold about the death of a child and an adoption that never really was.

But the fatal beating here earlier this month of 6-year-old Elizabeth (Lisa) Steinberg, apparently at the hands of her adoptive parents, has also emerged as a grim symbol that has reheated a longstanding debate between supporters of traditional agency adoption services and advocates of the growing practice of independent, or private, adoption.

Adoption agency spokesmen charge that Lisa’s abuse and death Nov. 4 are gruesome proof of loopholes in an independent adoption system they say often fails to protect the interests of the adopted children. Defenders of private adoption reply that adoption agencies are anachronistic and jealous of the thriving business increasingly enjoyed by many independent adoption practitioners. The Steinberg case, they say, is a tragic example of child abuse that, as Bruce Rappaport of the Independent Adoption Center in Pleasant Hill, Calif., put it, “has nothing to do with adoption, anyway.”

Both Face Murder Charges

Brought to an ironic light as the nation observes National Adoption Week, the strange facts of the Steinberg case centered on 46-year-old New York attorney Joel B. Steinberg and his longtime live-in companion, former children’s book editor and author Hedda Nussbaum, 45, both of whom now face murder charges. State and county officials have failed to produce any evidence that adoption proceedings were completed for Lisa or for a second child, 16-month-old Mitchell.

But for opposing factions in the adoption arena, the controversy rapidly broadened beyond Lisa’s death.

“Basically this debate has been raging certainly for 25 years,” said Jim Brown, head of the adoption program for the State of California in Sacramento. Brown characterized the increasingly impassioned argument as involving “people more of a social services persuasion and people who advocate independent adoption who have each staked out views, largely stereotyping the positions of the others.”

Debate ‘Very Complicated’

“The debate gets very complicated, because historically both sides have made claims that go beyond the facts,” said Peter W. Forsythe, vice president and director of the program for children at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York and long active in issues concerned with adoption. “It’s easy to do that.

“I think it’s important to point out that banning private adoption would not have affected the Steinberg situation,” said Forsythe, who is also an attorney and an adoptive father, “because what Steinberg did was not an adoption.”

At the National Committee for Adoption in Washington, which represents 140 adoption agencies nationwide, Jeff Rosenberg, director for adoption services, said that the Steinberg case “does point the way for some real change in independent adoption.”

Attorney-arranged adoptions such as those of Lisa and Mitchell Steinberg bypass the preplacement screening that adoption agencies demand of prospective adoptive parents, he said, noting that no state licensing is required of lawyers or social workers involved in private adoption.

“I can’t walk down to the corner here and sell hot dogs without some kind of certification from the state or the city,” he said, “but I can walk down the street and arrange an adoption without being licensed.”

“That’s the agency argument,” said David Leavitt, an attorney in Beverly Hills who handles 200-300 independent adoptions each year. “The agency says, ‘We are licensed, we are qualified, we are better, everything else should be outlawed.’ ”

But increasingly, in Leavitt’s experience, “birth mothers avoid agencies like the plague.”

In a conventional agency adoption, a woman or a couple relinquishes a child to an agency, which in turn consigns the child to a couple it has interviewed and screened. The birth mother may see a list of potential adoptive parents for her child, but only in the case of a relatively new procedure, an identified adoption, will she know their exact identity.

Occasionally, because of delays in placement, the child may be sent temporarily to a foster home. But the procedure is considered final once the child is placed with the adoptive parents, since the birth mother has technically assigned rights to the agency rather than to the adopting parents.

In a private, or independent, adoption, on the other hand, a pregnant woman chooses a couple to adopt her baby from a list provided by an attorney, physician or independent adoption facility. In most cases, the pregnant woman meets the prospective parents of her child. Often, the adoptive parents are present at the birth. Medical fees and other fees are paid directly to the pregnant woman through her lawyer or her physician, not through an agency. Contact between the parties is generally encouraged, but finalization periods for these private adoptions vary from state to state.

A Growing Openness

The differences in approach, advocates of independent adoption say, mirrors a growing openness in society as a whole.

“In the battle between agencies and independent adoption,” Brown said, “fundamentally the independent idea, that is, personal dealings, personal disclosure, personal accountability, has at this point won. We are seeing more and more agencies doing those kinds of adoptions.”

Most pregnant women today who opt to surrender their children for adoption, Rappaport said, “just will not go for the old-fashioned, closed adoption where everything is kept secret, nobody’s name is exchanged and the woman has no power in choosing the parent.

“When these young pregnant women call up, they ask if we are an agency, and if we said yes, I think they would hang up, because they associate agencies with an old-fashioned image,” he said. “They want to know that when they sign that paper, their child is going to Jack and Mary, not to some institution.”

In fact, said Rappaport, whose “counseling-oriented” facility handles one to two adoptions per week, “that (traditional agency) system has played a major role in (pregnant) young people basically eliminating adoption as something they would even think of.”

Rappaport said that “in the last 25 to 30 years we have gone from 50-60% of single pregnant women choosing adoption to 4%.

“Today, of the millions of young people who get pregnant, one-third choose abortion; 96% of the rest keep their child.”

Supply and Demand

The result is an apparent paucity of adoptable infants in an era of increasing desire on the part of childless couples to adopt infants. While older, disabled, multiracial and other “special circumstance” children clamor for adoption, “healthy white” infants are in constant demand.

Agency spokesmen challenge as myth the notion that couples seeking infants wait years if they choose the agency route of adoption.

“That perception has been well-sold by many in the private adoption business,” Rosenberg said. “It really depends on where you’re at. Some agencies can place a healthy baby with a couple in a year. Others can’t place one for six or seven years.”

With no required screening or counseling, private adoptions, on the other hand, tend to proceed much faster. Sandy Lennington, an adoptive mother in Walnut Creek described how she and her husband waited seven years to adopt their first child, a newborn, through one of California’s major adoption agencies. Working through a private adoption service the next time, the Lenningtons got their second child, also a newborn, in nine months. When they again chose private adoption for their third newborn, the process took eight months.

In California, attorney Leavitt said, “well over 80% of newborn adoptions are private adoptions.”

A Look at the Figures

But adoption figures in general are shaky. To the amazement of many of those involved in the process, no central registry exists for adoption, although a survey in 1982, the most recent year for which there are statistics, showed 50,720 adoptions in this country. Of those, 19,428 were arranged by public agencies, including state and county departments of human resources and social services; licensed, private agencies handled 14,549, and independent adoptions numbered 16,743.

Rosenberg is not alone in considering this trend toward independent adoption a “dangerous sign.”

“In the last two years, my skin crawls when I think about some of the things that are going on in independent adoption,” said Sharon Kaplan, founder and director of a family-service clearinghouse called Parenting Resources in Tustin, Calif. In her capacity as a “soup-to-nuts” adviser on adoption and other “family-building” options, Kaplan said she sees about 100 families per month.

Money Under the Table

Too often, said Kaplan, who is the mother of 12 birth, adopted and foster children, “people aren’t being told the truth” in independent adoption. While it is illegal in every state to pay a woman for a baby, Kaplan said, “we still see money being passed under the table, babies being placed in inappropriate families.”

In Washington, Joyce Strom, deputy director of the Child Welfare League of America, said she worries that independent adoption bypasses necessary steps, particularly counseling and careful record-keeping.

“My sense is that this country is hellbent for deregulation and fast food, and maybe adoption is the one process in America that doesn’t have to be done in a fast track,” Strom said.

In the face of the Steinberg tragedy in particular, many who work with adoption and child welfare have renewed their cry for uniform adoption laws from state to state.

“I worry about not having some national policy,” said Kaplan. As first steps, she echoes many others as she calls for mandatory home studies that precede an independent adoption, mandatory counseling for pregnant women contemplating placing their children for adoption and “some kind of certification” for attorneys, social workers, physicians and others involved in private adoption.

“If we want to keep independent adoption around, we’ve got to pass some laws,” Kaplan said.

But the prospect, for example, of state licensing or certification for those involved in independent adoption, alarms some proponents of independent adoption. “If we had to operate under state law, we’d be too restricted,” Rappaport said.

Room for All

Brown, head of the California state adoption program that sees “somewhat over 5,000” children adopted through agencies and independent channels each year, suggests the world of adoption is big enough for all its advocates, agencies and independent practitioners alike. In California, Brown said, “there are several different things going on (legislatively). All have to deal with comparatively minor procedural aspects of independent adoption, with an eye toward making the playing field level for everyone.”

Certain “minor procedural abuses” need to be corrected in independent adoption, Brown said. “However, we believe there is definitely a place for independent adoption in California, and states that don’t have it are the poorer for it.”

What Brown predicts in California is a “transconvergence” of independent and agency adoption. “Just as a guess,” he said, “I think we’ll see another channel develop.”

“I don’t think you can point to agency or private adoption and say, ‘OK, if we did away with one or the other, that would do away with the problems,’ ” said Dawn Smith-Kleiner, founder of called Friends in Adoption, a support and education program in Pawlet, Vt.

Peter W. Forsythe, a veteran of more than two decades of adoption discussion, agreed. “Closing the door to one group or the other leads to the potential that some children will not be served,” he said. “For me, adoption is a service for children, and we get not only confused, but off the track when we look at it only from the perspective of the parents.

Adoption Sphere

“That may sound harsh, but we don’t run baby farms in this country, or shouldn’t. Parents should be seen as the resource, not as the client.”

Throughout the adoption sphere, concerns about the Steinberg legacy lingered.

“One thing that does concern us, one possible backlash of this case,” Jeff Rosenberg of the National Committee for Adoption said, “is that people might think that lots of people who adopt, or lots of people who adopt independently, are bad people, lousy parents.”

In truth, he said, “Most of the people who adopt are really good people.”