For children in orphanages or foster care there is no future. If having special needs they may face lifelong institutionalization, which in many countries happens under deplorable conditions--until the suffering is over through premature death. For those with no visible challenges who are not locked up, their fate is not much better, as in all likelihood they'll end up being easy victims of many human predators always on the lookout for human prey.

Any woman who has been to an orphanage to visit or pick up her future child or children may have been called "momma" by many little voices--because many little ones there were hoping for, and dreaming with, what for most kids all over the world is a given: a mother to hug them and take care of them.

Unbeknownst to many, there are no "unwanted children." Many would be surprised to learn that there are families willing to adopt children with very severe physical, mental, and developmental disabilities, with life threatening conditions and even terminal illnesses, with complex medical diagnoses, significant facial disfigurements, and very serious attachment and behavioral isssues. I won't deny that there are also those who before accepting a referral want to measure the head circumference of their future child (and I wonder whether they ever measured the circumference of their own heads), but on the other hand those with contacts in the Pro-Life and special needs adoption communities very well know that there are families moving forward to adopt children who in the eyes of most others would be deemed unadoptable.

Among those aforementioned groups, members become prayer warriors for each other's adoptions as well as for the waiting children who don't have a family yet. They celebrate when a waiting child gets selected to become someone's child. Many families become large--even mega-large. Children are well taken care of, all required post-placement reports are timely met, the kids' medical and psychological needs are promptly addressed, and milestones that doctors initially had thought impossible to attain are conquered after all. If you compare before and after adoption photos of the same child, the difference is striking. Not only the child looks much happier and much healthier, but in all likelihood is doing something that once it seemed he or she would never be able to even try..

Yet, quite often a willing family is deterred from the adoption of a child--neither by the child's needs nor by their own fear of being unable to meet those needs. On the contrary, it is their social worker who claims to have the authority to tell the family that "it's enough," that they won't be approved for one more child, or that they won't be approved for more than one or two children at the time. Conversely, there are families that were lucky enough to have good, compassionate, understanding social workers, got approved for the concurrent adoption of four or five kids--and are doing amazingly well.

If we come to think about it, what authority does any social worker have to tell a grown-up individual or couple that they cannot have any more children, or that they cannot have any more children "for now"? Quite often the argument workers resort to in order to deny approval for one more child is that it'd be unfair for the child or children who are already in the process of being adopted at that point. Do they realize what they're doing not only to the family, but also to the child in process as well as to the one that has to be left behind? The child who could not be adopted may never have another chance. As in Dickens' "Christmas Carol," don't those social workers ever travel in their dreams to remote corners of the world and even to underserved neighborhoods within U.S.? Don't they have nightmares in which those kids whose adoptions they refused to approve appear languishing in horrible institutions with less-than-human care, pale and malnourished like real ghosts with very little life left on this earth, slowly dying day after day? Don't they have nightmares of young people who are children still and are being driven into prostitution or forced to join a local gang?

And--what about the child being adopted, the one for whom the family did get approval? Did the refusal to approve for one more child make the adopted kid's life any better? Certainly not. Most likely the family will never forget about that other little one they were not allowed to adopt--and even if not willingly and perhaps not even consciously, they won't be able to avoid comparing. In straightforward words: by forcing a family to select between two children, all the social worker is likely to achieve for the lucky child is to be forever compared to the unlucky one whom the family may idealize from the distance--although that child will never know how very much he or she was wanted and loved.

In summary, the restrictive policy resulted in all losers with no winner.

In its Preamble, the NASW Code of Ethics states that "social workers promote social justice and social change with and on behalf of clients." Furthermore, it also states that "social workers seek to enhance the capacity of people to address their own needs." The primary core value of the social work profession is the promotion of social justice. It is not only in the Code of Ethics but also deeply ingrained in the very nature and purpose of the profession. By discouraging a client from adopting a child in need, or one more child in need, the principle of social justice is severely disregarded and torn apart.

Section 1.01 of the Code of Ethics is about Commitment to Clients, and is about the loyalty that social workers owe to their clients, as follows:

"Social workers’ primary responsibility is to promote the well¬being of clients. In general, clients’ interests are primary. However, social workers’ responsibility to the larger society or specific legal obligations may on limited occasions supersede the loyalty owed clients, and clients should be so advised. (Examples include when a social worker is required by law to report that a client has abused a child or has threatened to harm self or others.)"

From the text of the Code it clearly appears that in order to arrive to a conclusion other than the one sought by the client who hired the worker, the reason needs to be an objective one, one that would result in immediate and serious harm to someone. Needless to say, if a social worker is hired to prepare a homestudy report for adoption and in the process finds out that the prospective adoptive parent is a child abuser, the report should be negatve and the worker should advise against the placement of any child with the abuser..

But when it comes to "undertaking too much," it is not up to the worker, but up to the family, to know what they want and what their idea of happiness entails. People know whether or not they're willing to "tighten their belt" for the sake of welcoming one more child. They know whether or not the older siblings in the family really want one more little sister or brother in the home. They know whether their idea in anticipation of their early retirement is going every day to  the beach or going back to changing diapers.

That takes us exactly to the next section of the Code: Section 1.02, which is about self-determination, as follows:

1.02. Self-determination
"Social workers respect and promote the right of clients to self¬-determination and assist clients in their efforts to identify and clarify their goals. Social workers may limit clients’ right to self-determination when, in the social workers’ professional judgment, clients’ actions or potential actions pose a serious, foreseeable, and imminent risk to themselves or others."

The language of the Code of Ethics is clear: the danger should be "serious, foreseeable, and imminent." The thought that one more child  being added to the family, or more than one child entering the family at the same time may be "too much" is just a speculation, and certainly does not meet the requirement to allow any social worker to deprive a family from having one more child or to deprive a child from having a forever family.

There is something even much more unethical, much more unprofessional, much more inadmissible. It happened not only to our family, but to some other families that belong to different adoption groups. There are social workers out there who project their own unwillingness to expand their own families upon families willing to adopt. Once a social worker told me over the phone, "I have three children, and feel quite overwhelmed. I cannot understand why you want to have more than five." Despite that worker, now I do have more than five. Our own story shouldn't be part of this petition. Yet, I assure all of you that the tears shed by my elder mother, my three biological children, and me because of workers like that were more painful, more devastating than I can ever put in words--and the outcomes proved them wrong and proved us right. The photo is about myself in a foreign country holding a  little boy whom we desperately wanted to add as well but it was a social worker's unilateral decision that she'd approve the homestudy for no more than two children to be adopted concurrently. For anyone who may know us and may know the name of the agencies with which we're working right now, I want to clarify that there cannot be better agencies or better workers than them. They are among the ones who are truly for adoption--not against it!

Please think of the children who have the right to a family and a home. Please think that we're talking about precious and innocent human lives who deserve better than a life all alone. The motto of the Dave Thomas Foundation is, "If there is room in your hearts, there is room in your home." It sounds simple and easy enough, doesn't it? Why then do some social workers have such a hard time understanding that?

Thank you very much,

Lillian Godone-Maresca