There are roughly 6 million people in the US who have found their families through adoption. Of these, the overwhelming majority have been served well. Moreover ICA has led the way for this method of forming families to gain some measure of consideration if not full scale acceptance in foreign countries. Transracial adoption has contributed to changing attitudes about what constitutes family and community in the US.

We have excellent agencies that have facilitated adoptions with a record of respect for all concerned, avoiding abusive practices. Let's find them, highlight them, and insist as a community that all children be served this way.

Given the serious consequences of our work, we have to understand that language matters, and that we have to get it right.

Let's get rid of the phrase "adoption as a last resort". The UNCRC, and the HCIA each has a list of options precisely because they were all needed to serve children in need of families. With regard to HCIA implementation, the principle of subsidiarity has been misunderstood, or misinterpreted, to mean that the enumerated options in these conventions have to be tried sequentially and proven to fail before the next item on the list can be pursued. Despite the fact that a legal analysis of the convention shows that it does not preclude concurrency planning, the last resort view of ICA is being codified in new adoption regulations. What it means in practice is that one cannot be criticized for not pursuing this option; there is counterbalancing pressure to demonstrate that a child in need has been placed in a loving permanent family.

It is time to have a new rallying cry-and that is to bring the considerable body of child welfare expertise to bear on a movement to insist on "first choice, best choice". We know from child development experts that the first three years of life are critical to healthy brain development. Indeed, delays caused by neglect, malnutrition and abuse in these years are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. We also know enough to know what risk factors-parental drug use, incarceration, teenage pregnancy are inconsistent with successful parenting. There are risk factors in every society. In the US we have provisions in federal legislation that allow us to opt-out of subsidiarity when a child is at risk of abuse, and to ensure that efforts are time-limited , so that the child has a better chance of finding a permanent family.

Pretending that reunification is always the first, best solution to finding a parent for a child in a world where a woman's choice to bear a child is rarely her own, or that the US is the only country with a racist undercurrent and children are never abused in their birth families or country of origin is na•ve at best. Defining our goal as permanency, and not family, is a cynical attempt to justify the group home concepts that are the bread and butter of many NGO's. It is a concept promoted by its beneficiaries-a conflict of interest that is rooted out in other professions.