Adoption: A Study of the Incidence of Feeding Difficulties Among Infants Placed Pre-adoptively During 1960 by the New York Foundling Hospital in Homes Having One Adopted Child

Background of the Study. The placement of an infant in an adoptive home is perhaps the most optimistic step we take in social work. Because an adoptive placement affords a caseworker a situation of maximum control, the planning of it offers at once limitless opportunities and the weightiest responsibilities. The infant’s natural mother, if she is emotionally healthy and able to benefit from pre-natal and post-natal casework services, sees adoption as a positive plan which will guarantee her baby his right to be loved, wanted and accepted. For a well-adjusted, happily-married, childless couple, adoption opens up all the golden vistas of raising a family. For the infant born out of wedlock, adoption is perhaps his only chance of a normal life. Consider his alternatives: returning to his mother’s family where he will be forever labelled illegitimate and the constant reminder of his mother’s sin ; living with his mother independent of her family and isolated from contact with then), supported by public assistance or her efforts to be breadwinner and mother at one time; growing up in foster care, belonging neither to his natural mother nor his foster family, his security constantly jeopardized by the possibility of his foster mother giving up care or requesting his transfer