On July 11, Republican candidate George W. Bush announced a series of proposals for moving the nation's child welfare system in a more adoption-friendly direction. The initiative, which received wide media coverage, raises the prospect that adoption will become part of the ongoing debate between the candidates and push Democratic candidate Al Gore to put forward some proposals of his own. Healthy competition between the candidates to come up with the most promising adoption program could help push the nation along the path to significant improvement in our troubled child welfare system.

Bush's proposals make sense, as a general matter. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. He would increase federal support for efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect, and for family preservation and reunification services. We do need more support for families to enable parents to nurture their children appropriately, to prevent child maltreatment and to protect families against inappropriate removal of children. But it's important to distinguish between those forms of family support with promise, and those with a record of failure. Research indicates that early intervention programs, such as intensive home visitation, are more likely to be effective than the kind of family preservation and reunification programs which kick in only after children have been victimized by serious maltreatment.

Bush says that he will strengthen requirements relating to criminal records screening for prospective foster and adoptive parents to ensure safe homes for children. It is important that child welfare agencies pay more attention to the quality of homes in which they place children. But the key here is to push child welfare agencies to recruit prospective parents from a broader pool, rather than continuing to insist on placing children with people in the same ethnic group, in the same geographic area, and in the same socio-economic class. And while recent criminal convictions can obviously be relevant to parental fitness, Bush's statement that he will seek to exclude anyone ever convicted of any felony goes too far—this would eliminate from consideration many who might make perfectly good parents, solely because of an unrelated conviction in their long-ago past.

Bush's emphasis on adoption is promising. Children need and deserve a true home, and long-term placement with official non-parents rarely serves their needs. But his proposal to increase the adoption tax credit from $5,000 to $7,500, while helpful to families interested in private adoptions, would do little to promote adoption of the children languishing in foster or institutional care. These public adoptions are usually very inexpensive, if not free, and indeed are often subsidized.

There are some programs which would help abused and neglected children move more swiftly into permanent adoptive homes, and our next President, whoever he is, could do much to promote such programs. Under concurrent planning programs, child welfare agencies simultaneously work to clear the legal and bureaucratic path for the possible future adoption of children removed from troubled homes, while making efforts to reunify these children with their families. Then, if reunification turns out not to make sense, the child can move immediately toward adoption, ideally with the same parents who have meantime been serving as foster parents. In cases where it is unlikely that a child will ever be able to return home, programs to expedite the termination of parental rights enable child welfare agencies to bypass reunification efforts altogether in favor of finding an adoptive family.

Bush cites a record on adoption as Governor of Texas that provides some reason to trust that he would help move us forward on adoption reform. He claims leadership credit for changes in Texas that have speeded up adoption finalization, limited unwed fathers' ability to thwart their children's adoptions, allowed for relatively rapid termination of parental rights in cases of severe abuse, neglect or abandonment and allowed the courts to use drug addiction, sex crimes and parental imprisonment as grounds for terminating rights. He claims further that as a result of these kinds of changes, more children have been freed for adoption, more have been placed in adoptive homes and children spend less time waiting for adoption. Let's hope that Al Gore steps forward to compete for the award for the most genuinely adoption-friendly candidate of this election year.

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Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, and the author of Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative, and of Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Production, both published by Beacon Press in 1999.