Sarah’s mother was an addict and a prostitute; as a newborn, Sarah suffered through heroin withdrawal. She was taken away from her mother in the hospital and given to foster parents, Joseph and Marjorie Procopio, a suburban Chicago couple who lovingly raised her for the next five years.
Then, in 1989, the birth mother and her boyfriend, who claims to be Sarah’s father, convinced a Juvenile Court judge that they were off drugs. Psychiatrists testified that Sarah was better off with the Procopios, and the little girl begged not to be separated from the only parents she had ever known, but the judge gave her to her birth mother. He, in effect, ruled that reuniting families-even if they had never lived together-was in the best interest of the child.
The Procopios, who were not allowed to visit Sarah, got considerable help from Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene. He chronicled Sarah’s woes in a series of poignant columns. His work drew the attention of former Illinois Gov. James Thompson and the current governor, Jim Edgar, who both publicly supported the Procopios. Last month, a three-judge panel of the Illinois Appellate Court reinterpreted the “best interest of the child.” They called Sarah, now 7, “a helpless child caught in the quagmire of the bureaucratie maze which we mistakenly call our child-welfare system” and ruled that Sarah must be allowed to visit with the Procopios while awaiting a new custody hearing.
Sarah’s case highlights the controversy over reuniting foster children with birthparents they barely know. According to the Child Welfare League of America, there are about 340,000 youngsters in foster care this year, up from 225,000 in the early 1980s. The league expects more than 500,000 children in the system by 1995. The increase is largely due to parental drug use. With so many children in foster care, it’s extremely difficult for agencies to conform to federal guidelines that mandate a plan for permanent placement within 18 months. Children go years without any contact with their birthparents. Like Sarah, they’re in a legal limbo-ineligible for adoption because their parents’ rights haven’t been terminated.
In February, the system’s abuses were laid out in extraordinary detail, when the American Civil Liberties Union brought a successful class-action suit in federal court on behalf of the District of Columbia’s 2,200 foster children. Court documents showed how “temporary” placements often went on for years, and how caseworkers continued to maintain plans to reunite children with birthparents even though they had not seen each other for years-or their whereabouts were unknown. Among the most heartbreaking cases: 11-year-old Kevin, who has always lived in foster care. At 8, he was suicidal and was admitted to a hospital. While there, says ACLU attorney Marcia Robinson Lowry, he climbed into a trash can and asked to be thrown away.
Ironically, the movement to reunify families began as an effort to help kids. In the 1970s, social-welfare agencies were accused of removing too many children from their homes simply because their parents were too poor to provide for them. Social workers began advocating what are called “family-preservation policies,” in which the goal is to keep as many families together as possible-and to keep children out of foster care. For families who just need a little extra help (for example, intensive counseling), family preservation works well. In West Haven, Conn., Deborah Hastings is in a family-reunification program while she battles alcoholism; she hopes to regain custody of her two daughters, who are in foster care. But child-welfare workers say they rarely have the time or resources to provide adequate help for these families. And, experts add, many families are simply not salvageable. “We send kids home to coke-addicted moms and their sexually abusive boyfriends,” says Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, whose office represents Sarah and 24,000 other abused and neglected kids in Chicago. “Some of these parents just don’t deserve their kids.”
Taking the children away isn’t always in their best interest either. Children are sometimes abused in foster homes, often because there aren’t enough social workers to supervise placements. In some parts of the country, there is a shortage of foster homes; children stay in temporary shelters.
Family-policy experts think the system needs a drastic overhaul, not just finening. Famed family therapist Dr. Salvador Minuchin advocates a system in which the natural parents are encouraged to maintain close ties with their youngsters while the children are in foster care. If the biological family can be stabilized, the child returns but still sees the foster family. Otherwise, the child would be freed for adoption.
Such reforms will probably come too late for Sarah and other foster kids. “It’s taken 15 newspaper columns and the efforts of two governors just to get a new custody hearing for this little girl,” says Greene. Thousands of other children are still waiting.
