Star-Ledger Is a Newspaper Based

¶ … Star-Ledger is a newspaper based in Newark, NJ. The article More prospective parents are seeking orphans from abroad was written by Judy Peet and was published on Sunday April 4, 2010. The social issue motivating the article is the issue of interracial adoption, focusing on white American families adopting children from Ethiopia and Haiti. Population change influences the situation in this article in two ways. The first is that the population growth rate in North America is relatively slow, and in many countries the growth rate is high.

This means that these countries have relatively young populations, with a high percentage of children to adults. When adults -- breadwinners -- are killed by events like famine and earthquake, a surplus of orphans develops. A subtextual issue in population change is with respect to the changing demographics of America. There is particular concern today for black children adopted into white families, but the families themselves express that the country may be headed towards a reduced importance of race, something that is reflected in America's shifting demographics.

The social issue is framed as both a problem and as an opportunity for society. There is a significant problem with orphans in nations that, essentially, do not have sufficient resources to feed and care for their own people. While this is a problem that leads to hard lives and suffering in those countries, it represents an opportunity for Americans to help those countries by taking on some of those orphans and giving them a better opportunity here.

In addition, the increased incidence of interracial families means that America also has the opportunity to begin to learn how to look past race, the same way that adoptive families have done in recent years after decades of focusing the adoptions on non-black children. The most important social policy response to this article is to ensure that the adoptions are carried out with the best interests of the children in mind.

In Ethiopia, Guatemala and other places, there has been accusations that adoptive children have been "harvested" from their birth parents, so this must be guaranteed not to have happened. Another important social policy response is to provide resources to white parents with adopted black children so that they can better understand how to help their children deal with the black experience in America.

If such adoptions are going to increase, the best way to address the social problems that can arise from white parents being unable to prepare their adopted children for the discrimination they may face is to educate the parents on how to help their children make their way in the world, given that additional complication. If I was a public policy maker, I would work with social.