Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative »

Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor at Harvard Law School. Her first book, Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Reproduction, was called "brilliant . . . an intelligent and passionate exploration of the legal, racial, and psychological issues" by The New York Times Book Review. The mother of three boys, two of them adopted from Peru, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"An extraordinary book. Chilling, inspiring, and utterly convincing, it creates an ironclad case for the adoption solution."
-Sylvia Ann Hewlett, coauthor of The War Against Parents

"Bartholet sounds the alarm on the savage consequences the child welfare system has on so many children and challenges us to confront the reality that substance abuse . . . is the culprit in most cases of child abuse and neglect. Everyone who cares about our nation's most vulnerable children should read this book."
-Joseph A. Califano, Jr., president, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University

"Blood and race remain the over-riding factors in determining the future of suffering children. This should be required reading for those who look on adoption as the last resort."
-Mary McGrory, Washington Post columnist

"Bartholet is a passionate crusader on behalf of children, and brings to her subject vigorous, clear-headed prose and the moral authority of her professional dedication."
-Ann-Janine Morey, Chicago Tribune

"Bartholet issues a strong challenge to the child welfare system to facilitate adoption of children who have been abused and neglected.All people concerned about the healthy development of children should read Nobody's Children. I highly recommend it."
-Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

"The way we treat abused and neglected children in this country remains a national scandal. Bartholet challenges the priority placed . . . on keeping battered or neglected children with their families or racial group, and makes a strong case for increased use of adoption."
-Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum (ret.), author of the Multiethnic Placement Act

"A disturbing look at how the lives of 'America's modern-day orphans' are sacrificed for the often unrealistic goal of keeping troubled families together. . . . The author makes her case intelligently, fearlessly, and exhaustively."
-Kirkus Reviews

Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor at Harvard Law School. Her first book, Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Reproduction, was called "brilliant . . . an intelligent and passionate exploration of the legal, racial, and psychological issues" by The New York Times Book Review. The mother of three boys, two of them adopted from Peru, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. He is also a contributing editor of IntellectualCapital.com. - Randall Kennedy

It is inspiring to see an intellectual join passion with knowledge and focus them effectively upon an important social problem. That is precisely what Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard law school and an expert in family and civil rights law, has done. For a decade, she has been on a crusade to better the predicament of parentless children. . . . .

Bartholet has now written a book, Nobody's Children, that deepens her critique of the way our society fails orphans and children who are abused or neglected by "parents." I put parents in quotation marks pursuant to one of the main lessons of Nobody's Children-that "true parenting should be defined more by social bonds than by blood." In Bartholet's view, parenting consists of nurturing a child. She resists endowing an individual with the honorific title of parent simply because that person sires a child or gives birth to it. [She argues that] the blood tie alone should be viewed as an insufficient predicate for parenthood, especially when adults seriously neglect or abuse children that are presumptively "theirs." When adults do these things, Bartholet contends, their parental rights should either be terminated or suspended and reinstated only if they show convincingly that they are apt to rehabilitate themselves forthwith. Children, Bartholet convincingly argues, should not be condemned to dangerous, dysfunctional homes once it is clear that putative "parents" cannot, in fact, parent. Rather than waste public resources and precious time on doomed efforts at "family preservation" where there is no realistic family to preserve, she advises administrators and legislators to free neglected and abused children more readily and quickly for adoption. . . . .

One need not agree with all that Bartholet writes . . . to feel admiration and gratitude for her analysis of the dismal situation in which all too many American children-our children-are stuck. She has distinguished herself nobly as a caring, combative and insightful public intellectual.