Forgotten choice: adoption is a rebuke to single-parenting and abortion, and the liberal media will have none of it.

SCHIZOPHRENIA, thy name is adoption! Here are some of adoption's multiple personalities, as judged by media depictions over the past 2 years:

-- Polls show adoption in the abstract to be almost as popular as motherhood itself, but some leaders in media and academia still pin a scarlet letter on adoptees.

New York Times editors who automatically delete demeaning references to minorities or women allowed one reporter to emphasize that an alleged multiple murderer was adopted: "Though experts were careful to say that adoption was no indicator of criminal tendencies, they noted that a number of serial killers like David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, had been adopted."

-- Studies conducted by the Search Institute and other organizations show adolescents adopted as infants doing as well psychologically as their non-adopted peers, but critics of adoption proclaim that every adopted baby has experienced a "primal wound" that can lead to extreme behavior.

One of the early signs of adoptee distress is colic, articles tell us. When patting her baby's back an adoptive mom should say, "You must feel really sad, you must feel really lost. You miss your mother. You've lost something very important, and I understand." Expect to see a New York Times story noting that colic is no indicator of future criminal activities, but a number of serial killers have had it.

-- Although most adoptions work out very well, television's sewer talk shows feature not only freaky perversions but tortured birthmothers describing their regrets about placing children for adoption years before, and teary teens describing their desperate efforts to locate birthmothers who preferred to remain hidden.

Impressions from such shows, along with those left by all the tug-of-war stories about Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, lead to a typical teen perspective described by Mary Beth Style, formerly of the National Council for Adoption: "They think it inevitable that they'll change their minds, that there will be a battle, or that they'll be miserable their whole lives if they place for adoption."

That perception forms the biggest barrier to adoption today. Adoption is popular in opinion polls and among politicians who can gain the benefits of baby-kissing without the danger of infant counterattack via spit-up. Adoption also has become a way for some proponents of abortion to retract their horns and suggest that they do feel others' pain; Hillary Clinton mused about her desire to adopt, someday, and one of her newspaper columns noted that she and Mother Teresa "differ on some issues" but agree on the need to promote adoption.

Adoption is unpopular, however, among those who are the decision-makers: fewer than 2 of every 100 unmarried pregnant women choose adoption. The enemies of adoption are single-parenting, which still receives special economic support via the welfare system, and abortion, which receives special legal privileges through judicial fiat. Adoption is squeezed out.

Most attempts to spur adoption so far have been either inconsequential or even counter-productive. During the past three years "National Adoption Month" (November) and "National Adoption Week" (around Thanksgiving time) produced not much more than some cute human-interest features, such as those depicting "adoption fairs" in which older children messed up by foster care are paraded before potentially welcoming adults. Such events may help some children to find homes, but what does a teen mom think when she sees children displayed -- "Check their teeth, honey" -- in this way?

Other press articles have been snide. Jeanne Beach Eigner of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote on November 21, 1994, "This is National Adoption Week. The good thing about this is that nobody's telling you what to adopt, so go ahead and adopt anything you want. Some disgusting habit, for example, since there are so many of them available these days. If you feel like thumping something, it's also National Bible Week." On November 20, 1995, Miss Eigner was at it again: "This week is National Adoption Week (we're assuming they refer to the adoption of children, not habits or noms de guerre). And it's National Bible Week . . . ."

Let's get serious -- and getting serious first means defining the problem correctly. The new adoption tax credit for adoptive families is good and fair, but the main adoption bottleneck is not a lack of potential adoptive families. Two million couples are waiting to adopt, and infants of every skin color or level of disability can be placed.

The key problem is the supposed superiority of the two major alternatives to adoption. Abortion seems to convey an immediate benefit: It makes the problem disappear. (And don't worry about death or post-abortion regrets that may grow more severe as time goes by.) Despite last years' welfare-reform bill, single-parenting still conveys benefits. Adoption, on the other hand, is altruistic -- life for a child and a gift to an often-childless couple -- but it is also inconvenient and embarrassing, especially when compared to abortions done in secret. Teenagers generally ask not what they can do for others, but what others are thinking about them. Is it any surprise that adoption is usually ignored?

Until thirty years ago the better options for unmarried pregnant women -- marriage and adoption -- held their own. From 1965 to 1973, however, Washington overrode state and local preferences and installed a bad choice, single-parenting, as a fundamental economic right, and a homicidal choice, abortion, as a fundamental legal right. Those preferences are still largely in effect, even though numerous research studies show that single-parenting is socially, economically, and psychologically destructive, but adoption of infants overwhelmingly works out well for babies, birthparents, and adoptive parents.

It is time, therefore, to look at four ways to give adoption once again a fair chance to increase its popularity among the young decision-makers:

First, in the short run, compensate (slightly) for governmental support of the two bad alternatives by providing governmental support for the two good alternatives. As long as governmental welfare still plagues the poor, at least it should promote marriage ("wedfare") rather than discourage it. Another discerning approach is that pushed forward by Sen. Dan Coats (R., Ind.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.). They have introduced legislation to provide pregnant women with vouchers for maternity home services.

Such legislation would lead to more women entering maternity homes and more adoptions. Young women in such homes typically take classes concerning all their options instead of reacting to single-parenting pressures from friends. For example, 230 out of 575 babies born at a ten-year-old Kansas City maternity home known as The Light House --40 per cent -- have been placed for adoption.

Second, the long run goal should be to eliminate support for the bad alternatives. Instead of constantly raising the bridge by expanding government, lower the river. Replacing the welfare system with community-based approaches is essential. Adoption will be aided further if we defund Planned Parenthood, pass parental-consent laws and other protective devices for unborn children, and eventually add to the Constitution a pro-life amendment.

Opposing bad choices in the culture generally also is vital. If the belated liberal criticism of single-parenting that has become common in the past three years is combined with the belated liberal questioning of abortion that has recently emerged, adoption becomes the logical alternative. All cannot be sweetness and light; for adoption to flourish, the other alternatives need to become shameful once again.

Third, we can transform the system as it affects older children by eliminating the incentives to shuttle them from foster-care home to foster-care home and rip their hearts out in the process. No child likes to think that he may be here today, gone tomorrow, but close to 100,000 children have flopped around in foster care for over seven years. A $10-billion foster-care industry created and supported by government allows administrators and social workers to feather their own nests as they keep children from having one of their own. The financial incentive for government bureaucrats is to maintain children in foster care; managers who place all of their charges in permanent homes lose funding.

Young people can be saved physically and emotionally if parents who abandon or repeatedly abuse their children face termination of parental rights in six months, and the children then are placed in permanent adoptive homes within thirty days following termination. That is doable as long as there is zero toleration of adoption delays because of race or ethnicity. There are plenty of adoptive homes for children up through age seven; only after that, when children have been in foster care for years and suffered emotional lynching in the process, does placement become sticky.

Fourth, we should transcend the current system by radical deregulation of the entire infant adoption process. While hundreds of thousands of women have abortionists kill unborn children who are half a year short of birth, hundreds of thousands of husbands and wives who want to adopt a child are frustrated. Markets exist to bring together buyers and sellers; one reason for America's 1.5 million abortions each year is a refusal to let the market work in this situation, due to legitimate concerns about baby-selling and racism.

Why not slash through the red tape and allow adoptive parents (without criminal records) and birth parents (with ample counseling) to arrive at arrangements they choose? Problems evidently will emerge, but joys far greater will abound. Why not get government out of adoption entirely by privatizing adoption services so that children who are abandoned or abused come under the care of particular religious or community organizations that are willing to serve them, rather than becoming wards of the state? Why not stipulate that a mother who produces a cocaine-addicted baby is by definition an unfit mother?

Examination of these and other questions will push political leaders far beyond the relatively easy matter of tax credits, and journalists beyond the easy feature stories about adoption fairs. To put hard questions about hard lives on the front page, a congressional-appointed national commission on adoption and foster care would be useful. Commission members such as Bill Bennett, Colin Powell, and others who have stressed their support for adoption, along with well-known adoptees such as Dave Thomas of Wendy's, could meet with experts such as Conna Craig of the Institute for Children and Eloise Anderson of the California Department of Social Services. Together they could survey the dark terrain of today's schizophrenic adoption policies and attitudes, and then light candles that would not readily be blown out.