ABSTRACT
The history of adoption is the history of hard-to-place children. Adoption agencies historically have attempted to equate a child’s individual characteristics with those of the intended adoptive parents: “A child wants to be like his parents . . . parents can more easily identify with a child who resembles them ... the fact of adoption should not be accentuated by placing a child with parents who are different from him.” 1 Not only were similar physical, and at times intellectual, qualities seen as important components in adoptive criteria, but identical religious backgrounds were defined, at times by law, as essential. 2 Thus the battle of transreligious adoption preceded the movement toward trans-racial adoption, and it was not until the conceptual and pragmatic acceptance of transreligious adoption occurred that transracial adoption could, and did, develop.
