Nobody's Children

Nobody's Children is an intense look at child welfare policies on abuse and neglect, foster care, and adoption. Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the nation's leading experts on family law, challenges the accepted orthodoxy that treats children as belonging to their kinship and their racial groups and that locks them into inadequate biological and foster homes. She asks us to apply the lessons learned from the battered women's movement as we look at battered children, and to question why family preservation ideology still reigns supreme when children rather than adult women are involved.

Bartholet asks us to take seriously the adoption option. She calls on the entire community to take responsibility for its children, to think of the children at risk of abuse and neglect as belonging to all of us, and to ensure that "Nobody's Children" become treasured members of somebody's family.

Elizabeth Bartholet, author of Family Bonds (Beacon / 2803-7 / $17.00 pb), has been a professor at Harvard Law School since 1977. She writes, lectures, and consults widely on issues involving child welfare, adoption, and reproductive technology. The mother of three boys, two of them adopted from Peru, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.