Single but Not Alone: Adoption Brings Family Life to Unmarried

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.

As single parents, they face special problems.

One of them is explaining to the child that unlike most of his peers, he has no father (or mother); another is arranging for child care, a problem they share with all working mothers.

“But what worries us all,” said Hope Marindan, 46?year?old mother of two adopted sons, a 2½?year?old MexicanAmerican and an 8?month?old of Tlingit Eskimo origin, “is who will take care of the child if anything should happen to the parent.”

Single parents in Washington were jolted by the reality of this problem when one of them, Joan Doniger, was killed recently by an automobile. Her two adopted daughters, a 5?year?old Korean (whom Miss Doniger saved by throwing from her hands when the car struck) and a black, aged 2, were orphaned for a second time in their brief lives.

Miss Doniger's will placed them with an older married sister, a working woman whose own family is already grown. Wills, in which the children are left with two?parent guardians, and high insurance, so that the children will not be burdens to the guardians, are precautions that most single parents take.

But guilt does plague these single parents when their children ask. “Why don't I have a daddy?” A 41?year?old New York woman lawyer admitted in talking about her 2?year old daughter that “my conscience does bother me; I love her, but it is not the best decision in her interest.”

To compensate for the lack of a spouse, single parents seek extended families, whether relatives or friends, so that their children can have uncles and aunts if not fathers or mothers.

Miss Marindan rationalizes her situation by noting the increase in “natural” single parent families through widowhood and divorce.

“It seems quite possible to me,” she observed, “that losing a parent through death or divorce might often be considerably more traumatic for a child than not having one to start with.”

But perhaps the greatest problem of single parents is finding the children they covet. Although there are no laws that prohibit single parent adoption, prospective single parents claim they are discriminated against because of age, sex, religion, race, nationality—but mostly because of traditional attitudes as to what constitutes a proper family. As birth control and legalized abortion have shrunk the reservoir of available infants, they must compete with the more socially desirable married couples for even the hard?to?place older, handicapped and transracial children.

For some, the task has been easier than for others. Glenda McNeill, a professor of social work at Catholic University, read about San Diego's efforts with single parent adoption in 1965. Then 37, she applied to the District of Columbia's human resources agency, which had never before awarded a child without blood ties to an unmarried person. She obtained an 18?monthold girl in December, 1966, and five years later adopted a 3?year?old girl.

Miss McNeill had an easier time than most prospective parents, possibly be cause she is black, as are most children available for adoption.

Two white male college teachers had no success with the Washington agency. A 41?year?old man was denied a hearing because his single status made the agency suspicious of homosexual tendencies. The other man, 35, who had taught in ghetto schools and is godfather to several black children, was rejected because he is white.

Both men eventually found a sympathetic hearing with Lutheran social service agencies. The older teacher adopted a 7?year?old Sioux Indian boy from South Dakota about 18 months ago; the younger man's application is currently being processed.

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Because of religious obstacles, Kathy Sreedhar, a 37?year?old Jew, flew to India, homeland of her deceased husband, to search for a daughter. Authorities there refused to give her a child because she was American, but she finally found 11?month?old Anita in a Catholic orphanage in Bombay, and brought her to the United States under the nonpreferential quota.

Kathy was lucky that the Indian quota was undersubscribed because the United States Immigration and Nationality Act discriminates against single parents, permitting only a “U.S. citizen and his spouse” to bring in foreigners under age 14 without quota restrictions.

To get around these legal obstacles requires imagination. Marjorie Margolies, 30?year?old television reporter for the National Broadcasting Company in New York, two years ago sponsored her 9?year?old Korean daughter, Leeheh, as a student and a year later adopted her.

Miss Margolies admits that “I could not take a child hard to place because of hemophilia or other illness; but race or age are not problems.”

Her criteria are shared by other single parents who, because they work, do not have the time to devote to the emotionally disturbed or chronically ill.

Ironically, it is to find homes for these children that adoption agencies have revised policies against awarding children to single parents.

Mrs. Peg Weingarten of Washington's Family and Child Services said that five years ago the agency made it a “positive policy to find homes for hard?toplace and transracial children.” A spokesman for New York's Division of Adoption Services said that “what has driven us to accept single parents is that some older children need a father or mother figure and we are unable to find couples willing to take them.”

Faced with the reluctance of agencies to aid them, almost half of the 10 single parents interviewed adopted. infants on the “gray market” through lawyers and doctors, paying the natural mother's medical bill, normal legal fees and transportation costs to pick up the child.

As the men tend to adopt boys, so the women adopt girls, “for logistical reasons,” and to provide the child with an appropriate sex image.

In addition, to create a more normal family life, most parents have or are trying to adopt a second child. Marjorie Margolies, in fact, has just returned from Vietnam where she found seven children she said were available for adoption. She plans to adopt one and is seeking potential parents for the others. (Leeheh's two older brothers, now 13 and 15, have also been found and Miss Margolies is trying to find parents for them).

Adopting has changed the life?styles of these single persons.

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In order to earn more money, Glenda McNeill, who had been a social worker, became a professor of social work. She owns her own home, sends her daughter to private school and dancing classes, and pays for a part?time sitter. Hope Marindan got an M.A. in Government and then switched from secretarial work to management analysis.

In spite of their newly acquired de??endents, single parents are sanguine about marrying. They believe their opportunities are enhanced by a commitment to family life. As an added benefit, their children have become a way for them to meet other single parents—the widowed and divorced.

Actually, some female single parents are not that eager to marry. One, a woman psychologist, asserted that marriage should be separate from the need for children. “In terms of child?rearing, a spouse is not always a plus,” she said.

She and others view themselves as the reverse of the married woman who, at 40, when her children are grown, casts about for a career. Their attitude is, “I have done everything I wanted to do; now I decided to have a family.”

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