| 摘要 | Of the more than 25,000 children in foster care in New York state, some 3,500 are waiting to be adopted. But legislation that passed the state Assembly and Senate in June could make it much harder for these children to find permanent homes.
Introduced by Bronx Assemblywoman Latoya Joyner, the Preserving Family Bonds Act would let birthparents whose rights have been terminated by the court apply to visit their children. They would be entitled to a hearing to argue that their continuing contact is in the child’s best interest. The Legislature has yet to send the bill to Gov. Andrew Cuomo ’s office for his signature.
Termination of the relationship between children and birthparents is a tragic and radical action, but it’s never undertaken lightly. An investigation is launched any time someone contacts a child-welfare agency to report that a child is possibly being abused or neglected. If the agency determines there is imminent danger, it has the power to place a child in foster care, though in most cases the accusations aren’t substantiated or the child is deemed safe.
If a child does go into foster care, parents are offered a variety of services—addiction treatment, anger management, parenting classes—to hasten reunification. Hearings will occur every couple of months to determine whether it is safe for the child to return home. Under federal law, if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months, a state must file a petition for termination. Because family courts are overwhelmed with cases, it generally takes longer. Once a petition is filed, several court hearings will take place over at least a year—usually more—before the parents’ rights are officially terminated.
If a child is subsequently adopted, the state waits another two years before completing the adoption. New York offers among the longest paths to permanency from foster care of any state in the country, with foster care lasting 30 months, on average. The national average is 20 months.
Dawne Mitchell, the attorney in charge of the juvenile-rights practice at the Legal Aid Society, which supports the legislation, told the New York Law Journal that “long-standing relationships with family members cannot simply be erased without detriment to the child,” She noted that “the ability to maintain family ties can provide children in the child welfare system with the sense of security they need to develop healthy attachments and thrive.” In most families, that is true. But those children whose parents’ rights have been severed typically come from homes that are so deeply abusive or neglectful that they often need an entirely new set of attachments to thrive.
Bill Baccaglini, president and CEO of the New York Foundling, one of New York City’s oldest and largest foster-care and adoption agencies, says he hopes Gov. Cuomo will veto the bill. “It will make adoptions . . . very, very difficult. If an adoptive parent ever thought that birth parents—after having their rights terminated—would have the capacity to come in and out of court to press for visitation, I’m not so sure I’d find adoptive families I so desperately need.”
In many cases adoptive parents do arrange with birthparents for some kind of contact after an adoption is completed. “Some adoptive parents are glad to agree to those conditions, and that’s fine for them. Where they have not, it is a very bad idea to adopt a presumption of enforcing such a long-term obligation on unwilling adopters,” notes Walter Olson, an adoptive parent and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
The legislation presents serious logistical concerns as well. What if an adoptive family wants to move across the country? Would the courts be able to prevent them? “Adoptive families are real families and deserve the full rights of other such families unless they have agreed to some other arrangement,” says Mr. Olson.
In a letter to Gov. Cuomo opposing the bill, the group New York Attorneys for Adoption and Family Formation explained that the law may also violate the due-process rights of adoptive parents. In 2000, they point out, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar Washington state law.
Finally, given how overburdened New York’s family courts already are, it’s hard to imagine how the system would handle an influx of petitions by parents who essentially want to relitigate their years-old cases. According to a 2013 report by the New York State Bar Association, more than 715,000 cases were filed in state family courts in 2011, and more than a quarter were pending in 2012.
Mr. Baccaglini is sympathetic to the intent of the law because he, too, is in what he calls the “family-reunification business.” Everyone from family-court judges to foster parents to child-welfare caseworkers to guardians ad litem would like to see children stay with their biological families. But the blind belief that children are better off maintaining this connection in every case will result in fewer children finding safe, permanent and loving homes. |
