Electronic Adoption

THE FAMILY

It lasted only 15 minutes, but Isabel and Joseph Garrett will undoubtedly remember it as the best TV program of their lives. The Garretts, a Negro couple seeking to adopt a child, were seated in the Buffalo offices of the Erie County Children's Aid Society. On screen, they saw a video-tape recording of Amy, 2 1/2, also a Negro, who had been given away by her mother at birth, raised in a foster home, and was now up for adoption in Wilmington, Del.

Observed by the cameras in a high school TV workshop, the little girl leafed through picture books, ran, jumped, laughed and turned somersaults. "Boy!" exclaimed Mrs. Garrett. "She's just what the doctor ordered."

By the following weekend, the Garretts were in Wilmington for the face-to-face meeting with their prospective child. At second sight, it was still love.

A day later, the Garretts drove back to Buffalo with Amy and all her possessions--a suitcase load of clothing, three dolls and a Teddy bear.

One-Way Mirrors. Amy Garrett was the first child to be chosen through an intriguing new adoption method. Video tape promises to eliminate much of the potential trauma of adoption procedures while making it far easier for agencies to unite prospective parents and children from different parts of the country. It was Norman W. Paget, 45, executive director of the Erie County Children's Aid Society, who thought of employing video tape in adoption after watching the instant replays used for televised pro-football games.

Some children, especially if they are handicapped or are older than one year, are rejected by adoptive parents at their first direct meeting. To minimize such disturbing experiences, agencies often give couples their first view of the child through one-way mirrors or arrange "accidental" meetings in the park. These devices assume that the parents and child live in the same area, and even then are by no means surefire: many a ccuple, emotionally on edge, blurt the accidental-meeting game away in the first sentence.

Moreover, in the case of the Garretts, the Buffalo agency had no child available who seemed well matched to them, and Paget had to call on the clearinghouse services of the year-old Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA) in order to locate a likely girl. She proved to be in Wilmington, 390 miles away. By viewing the video tape, the Garretts saw Amy more vividly than they could have through any number of snapshots and verbal descriptions, made the trip south with virtual certainty of success. Paget would like to see his method become a two-way proposition that allows older children up for adoption to get a videotape look at their prospective parents.

The Garrett video-tape showing was private, but most "special needs" children--those who are older, have handicaps or come from racial minority groups--are so hard to place that the Los Angeles County Department of Adoptions has taken to broadcasting their availability on commercial TV. Since October, the department has shown 64 such children on a once-weekly quarter-hour segment of Ben Hunter's Matinee, a program of old movies interspersed with talk. Result: up to 35 phone calls immediately following each show and 34 of the children adopted, including a two-year-old boy with eye trouble, a one-year-old girl with club feet, and a two-month-old Filipino-Chinese-Hawaiian boy.

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