June 12, 2008

Elizabeth Bartholet '65

On June 10, Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65, faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program, delivered remarks at a Washington, D.C. briefing on adoption policies. Responding to a study by the Donaldson Institute calling for changes to the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA), Bartholet argued that the adoption policies currently in effect were crucial to ensuring permanent placement of black and other minority children.

The briefing, hosted by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, came on the heels of the release of the Donaldson Institute report, which argued that the MEPA legislation, in both its 1994 and 1996 forms, has failed to increase the numbers of black children placed in adoptive homes. The Donaldson Institute is an advocacy organization aimed at doing research about how to improve adoption laws.

Drawing on her past collaboration with members of Congress and over two decades of social science research into issues of transracial adoption, Bartholet identified the dangers of returning to a pre-1996 version of the MEPA legislation—policies which she identified as resulting in children held in foster care "for months, years, and often their entire childhood, rather than placing them in other-race homes."

"It is that research, and that evidence, which I have followed over the years to date, that led me to the position that we needed MEPA in exactly the form we have it today, in order to protect black children from the devastating damage that delay in adoptive placement causes," said Bartholet.

Bartholet countered the Donaldson Institute report with evidence that transracial adoptions have been on the rise post-MEPA, and that this trend was likely to continue.

"The burden of proof is on anyone who, at this stage, when we are finally beginning to reap the rewards of this process, wants to roll the law back," said Bartholet. "The Donaldson Report has done nothing to meet that burden."