Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/090792/09079928.000

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                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 59

Adoption Fever


The battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow spotlights the
triumphs and traumas of large adoptive families

By RICHARD CORLISS -- With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York


    Late last year Woody Allen made history. The epochal
event was not his affair with Soon-Yi Farrow Previn, an adopted
daughter of Allen's companion Mia Farrow. That sort of escapade
is common enough in the long, tawdry life of this planet. But
on Dec. 17, 1991, in the Surrogate Court of the State of New
York in Manhattan, Allen became a separate but equal adoptive
parent of Moses and Dylan Farrow, whom Mia had previously
adopted. Each adult was given parental rights. Never before in
New York, and perhaps in the U.S., had an unmarried couple been
allowed to adopt a child. "As far as I know," says attorney Paul
Martin Weltz, who devised the arrangement for Allen, "it's a
first."

    Because the court did not write and publish a decision,
the magnitude of the case was not immediately appreciated.
Reporting on the custody battle over Moses, Dylan and the
couple's biological son Satchel, last week's tabloids trumpeted
the more lurid aspects of the rumpus -- such as the offer by
Farrow's lawyer to show the court a sheaf of "pornographic"
photos that Allen had taken of Soon-Yi -- before Judge Phyllis
Gangel-Jacob sensibly called the two stars into her chambers and
told them to shut up. But the December ruling has consequences
beyond the front page. It sets an implicit precedent for
unmarried couples, including homosexuals, to adopt children.
Notes Weltz: "Any two single individuals, whatever their
persuasion, can now say, `Look, you did it for Mia and Woody.
Therefore do it for me.' "

    At the time, Weltz had ambitions no greater than to
legalize the care of two children in a solid, if unconventional,
family. "It was the happiest day I ever had in court," he says.
"A wonderful event. The judge gave the kids lollipops." But ask
Weltz how he feels now, after the family has been riven by
charges of betrayal and abuse, and he sounds like a morose King
Solomon -- one who cunningly offered to split a child in two
only to hear both putative parents say that was fine with them.
He muses, "I knew not what we had done."

    This may be cold comfort, but when it comes to having
children, nobody knows what is in store. For biological parents,
kids are a roll of the DNA dice. Adoptive parents face greater
risks, for their children carry a knapsack of genetic and
cultural imponderables. Yet there are couples who heroically try
to create a home, a family, a rich life for orphans from the
U.S. and, increasingly, the Third World.

    The glare is on these families now because Farrow, who
adopted three children when she was married to Andre Previn and
added four more as a single mother, has been accused by Allen
of manipulating and abusing her kids. "I hate to see large
families get tarred with that brush," says Californian Bob
DeBolt, who with his wife Dorothy adopted 14 disabled children
and was the subject of a documentary that won an Oscar in 1978.
"We can't generalize on large families any more than we can on
family values."

    Experts estimate that about 5,000 U.S. couples have
adopted five or more children. Barbara Tremitiere, a consultant
on child-welfare issues (and the mother of 15 children, 12 of
them adopted), knows of several families that have taken in more
than 30 kids. Rutgers University psychology professor David
Brodzinsky observes in these parents "a tendency toward
missionary zeal -- a reaching out, in a spiritual or religious
sense, to those more needy." Many of these parents are children
of the '60s who adopted Asian kids instead of the most wanted
Gerber babies. "They were committed to causes," says Tremitiere.
"And this is a very great cause."

    There are looming worries. "In multiple-child placements,
children can get lost in the shuffle," says Brodzinsky, who adds
that adopted kids have a higher incidence of learning
disabilities. And as has been alleged with Farrow's children,
they can get into trouble with their adopters, their siblings
or the law. But adopted children in large families are no more
likely to be delinquent than biological kids from small families
-- a fact that indicates the beneficent power of adoptive
parents' love.

    Couples who keep adding to a large family are called
gatherers. "These people have big hearts," says Debra Smith,
director of the National Adoption Informa tion Clearinghouse in
Rockville, Maryland. "They think, `One more plate on the table
is not such a big deal. We have something to offer, and the
child needs us.' " Farrow fits the definition. "But she's not
a baby snatcher," Tremitiere says. "If she were, she'd have 50
kids and not just 11. She's very selective in the children she
puts into her family, so that they fit in age-wise and with
handicaps that she knows she can be of help to." Farrow has
recently taken in Tam, 12, a blind Vietnamese girl, and Isaiah,
an American crack baby. "Mia herself had polio," says
Tremitiere, "so she's tuned in to children with physical
difficulties."

    Any modern parent could turn Tolstoy's famous maxim on its
head and say, "No families, happy or unhappy, are alike." But
as Judge Gangel-Jacob ponders the evidence to determine whether
Mia is a fit mother and Woody any kind of a father, she may
conclude that the Sesame Street brood of Farrow's is like every
other family. Only more of them. And more so.