quibble about excerpt from "being adopted, the lifelong search for self"

.......A third option, keeping the baby, is barely discussed in these political debates. While we don't aim to address the adoption-not-abortion issue in this book we can say that based on recent psychological research, adoption is probably a better solution to an unplanned pregnancy - from the point of view of the child's eventual adjustment - than is keeping the child in a birth family that doesn't want her. International research has compared the development of children reared in a variety of settings, adoptive families,institution, foster homes or in birth families in which the mothers had originally planned to give up their babies for adoption but changed their minds. In one such study, Michael Bohman, a psychiatrist at the university of Umea in Sweden, and his colleagues studies the development of Swedish children raised in what Bohman called "ambivalent" homes - children whose mothers had registered them for adoption but the subsquently changed their minds. Bohman compared these children with children who were adopted at birth, chilren raised in permanent foster homes and children living in the community with their non-ambivalent biological parents. At the age of 11, the non-adopted children in biological homes showed the lowest rate of emotional and behaviouoral disturbances, followed by the adopted children. But the most disturbed were the children raised in foster care and, significantly, the child raised by biological parents who had originally considered putting them up for adoption. This finding goes against the conventional wisdom that the biological family, no matter how unwilling it is to keep a child, is always better than any alternative. A similar conclusion was reached by Henry P David, a pyschologist at the University of Maryland, who looked at the legacy of being "born unwanted" in a slightly different way. David studied children in Czechoslovakia born to mothers who had twice been denied abortions by government authorities. Children raised by the "resistant mothers", he found, were at an increased risk for emotional and behavioural difficulties, minimal brain dysfunction and academic underachievement. Even in young adulthood, they suffered reduced life satisfaction, less job satisfaction, difficulty in love relationships, increased criminality and other problems. But even though being adopted is better for a child than is being raised in an ambivalent home, foster care or an institutuion, it is not perfect, it carries complications and difficulties of its own. Because of the long tradition of viewing adoption as a solution to many problems, when professionals and lay people have had trouble accepting the possibility that the solution itself could at times be a problem. But we believe that knowing about the complications that can be expected will help adoptees, their parents, and the professional community better deal with them as they arise"