The Trouble with the Multiethnic Placement Act: An Empirical Look at Transracial Adoption

Abstract

In this study, the author brings an empirical lens to bear on the transracial adoption debate. She observes infertility support group meetings and conducts face-to-face interviews with a group of White, economically privileged, infertile women. She explores how race relations shape women's responses to infertility. She asks if women view transracial adoption as a viable way to meet their parenting needs, and she explores how women negotiate and renegotiate their understanding of race as treatment options fail and as they encounter a shortage of healthy White infants. The author's findings complicate several of the assumptions that underscored the dominant discourse surrounding the 1994 passage of the Multi Ethnic Placement Act (MEPA) and its 1996 amendment the Inter-ethnic Adoption Provision (IEP). Advocates of transracial adoption argue that the race-matching policies established by the National Association of Black Social Workers create placement delays. Grounded in a “best interest of the child” standard, the passage of the MEPA-IEP overturned race-matching policies and made it illegal to consider race, ethnicity, or national origins when placing children for adoption. In situating the transracial adoption debate in a discourse of reverse discrimination, advocates advance a simplistic picture of race and adoption–an understanding that, the author argues, is based on faulty assumptions. Her findings generate a more complex picture of race and adoption.