George Miller: “I have spent almost my entire public life trying to make it easier for children to be adopted and to try to find…”

“I have spent almost my entire public life trying to make it easier for children to be adopted and to try to find permanent placements for children in foster care. The tax provisions of this bill, the tax credit here will obviously be very helpful in helping those families defray the cost of adoption, which for all too many families is in fact a very real barrier to adoption. Madam Speaker, I am also happy with the changes that have been made. Unfortunately, they continue to be necessary on the interethnic adoption. I joined Senator Metzenbaum and others a couple of years ago to try to reduce these barriers and get rid of these barriers so that race would not become a barrier to adoption for those children. As was stated here, we have some 450,000 children in adoption, most of whom are looking for permanent placement. We know the impacts of permanent placement on these children. They do much better in permanent placement, in a loving situation, than bouncing from foster home to foster home where their interests very often are just simply not taken care of in spite of the hundreds of thousands of wonderful foster parents that take children in, sometimes in the middle of the night with little or no notice.”