by Kristin Luker

About the author: Kristin Luker is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Advocates for adoption as a solution to childbearing among unwed teens ignore a number of inconvenient facts. For example, most infertile couples seeking to adopt are white, and most of them wish to adopt only healthy white newborns. (An estimated half-million children are living in foster care, but there is little political pressure to make these children available for adoption, because they are the wrong color, the wrong age, and the wrong class.) But white teenage mothers—who in 1992 accounted for about 60 percent of teens giving birth out of wedlock—are more likely than black teenage mothers to marry after the birth of a child and to be living with the father...