WASHINGTON — “Adoption agencies,” the single parent said bitterly, “play God, and would rather give babies to a couple even though one?third of present marriages end in divorce. My situation is stable and known, which is not true for a divorced parent, often living on $120 a week.”
The speaker, who prefers to be anonymous, is a 50?year old unmarried woman, a Government economist who adopted her daughter, now 2½ years old, privately when agencies did not respond to her requests.
According to Karen Mitchell, head of the Council on Adoptable Children, which lists children available for adoption from agencies, there are 50 single men and women in the Washington area who, seeing matrimony pass them by, decided not to be deprived of parenthood as well (Estimates of single parents nationally and in such areas as New York are not available; one problem is that most figures include stepfather' adoptions of children of women they marry.)
Mrs. Mitchell characterizes single parents as “strong psychologically,” able to overcome the social pressures against single parent adoption (including such suspicions as that the adopted child “is really their own, born out of wedlock”).
Generally, the single parent is female, in her late thirties, has several brothers and sisters, and is a professional earning at least $12,000 a year. She adopts not out of loneliness but, as a male professor said, “out of a sense of fullness,” a desire to love. She sometimes rejects male suitors who feel put out that she chose a child rather than them.