by Art Moore

About the author: Art Moore is a contributor to Christianity Today.

Angelica Hubbard’s six-year odyssey—from a Los Angeles emergency room, where she arrived eight weeks after birth with broken bones and brain damage, to the security and nurture of her adoptive family—reveals in stark detail how the foster-care system can harm as much as it helps.

“Over the past 20 years a whole state of limbo has come into existence where no judgment is made, where the child is neither fish nor fowl,” says Patrick Fagan, senior fellow in family and cultural issues at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “He’s neither, as it were, the proper child of his parents who are raising him well, nor has he...