Part of the problem could be that psychopaths reproduce often but don't take care of their children and they end up getting adopted out - and would be in trouble anyway.
I am not so sure about that. That may be, but the environmental factors would IMO be more prevalent.
If we talk about infant adoptions, then a typical adoptee born before Roe vs Wade would be a child of a teenage mother from a middle-class or a well-to-do family, whose parents, following the "moral norms of the society", pressure her to abandon the child and send her to a special hospital for unwed mothers to deliver the baby and leave him\her there. Up to 30% of those women never get pregnant again, even when subsequently married, according to Verrier's data, due to some sort of psychologically induced infertility. Their trauma is denied even more than the trauma of adoptees, and the point is, most of them didn't want to abandon the babies but had no other choice.
Seems like these days domestic infant adoption is shifting to low-income mothers who are persuaded by organizations such as Birth Right to keep the pregnancy rather than get an abortion, and are connected with the prospective adopting family. AS soon as this happens, there is pretty much no turning back for the birth mother. There are some cases when the birth mother renegs on the agreement because she just feels during the last months of pregnancy or even already in the hospital that she cannot give the baby up. It happened to a friend of mine who was going to adopt in this way. The most amazing thing is people's reactions in such cases: "that birth mother is irresponsible, how will she support herself and the baby". As if it is her duty, because of poverty and adverse life circumstances, to give her child to a family that is better off. International adoption controversies seem to have a similar spirit to them.
Then you have children who have been languishing in the foster care for before, or ever, being adopted. That would likely be the situation where the statement of "psychopaths abandoning their kids" would apply. But there we also have a lot of radical attachment disorder (RAD), which is like psychopathy, but learned as a result of prolonged obvious neglect. Very hard to separate it from any from genetic predisposition.
Here are some of the better primary sources I have come across. I’m still compiling my notes and figures and will share them but in the meantime here are a few.
the older studies tend to be more dramatic than the recent ones. Also, anything that concentrates on the prison population can be critisized on the grounds that, 1) they mix in the adoptees with negative foster care experience, and 2) there are overall a lot more well-adjusted adoptees, and if the whole populations (not just the prison populations) of adoptees and non-adoptees are compared, the difference may be insignificant.
Newer studies find that adopted children indeed have about twice more depression, anxiety and substance abuse problems that require contact with medical professionals, but overall the numbers are still small:
\\\http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1737667,00.html
\\\http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/05/05/adoptees-more-prone-to-mental-health-problems
The authors also note that the domestic adoptees tend to act out in disorderly conduct while international adoptees tend to internalize the conflict which causes depression and anxiety. They attribute it to genetic reasons and call the international adoptees "better adjusted". To me it's more like the replay of the "good adoptee" -"bad adoptee" false alternative:
In order to play what I call The Adoption Game, adoptees assume different roles. Some become the Good Adoptee, who is placid, obedient, doesn’t ask too many questions, and is willing to live "as if" born into the adoptive family. The Bad Adoptee is rebellious and acts out at home and in school. But here is the paradox: the seemingly Good Adoptees often feel like an impostor because of the secret thoughts and fantasies they are hiding from the parents. And Bad Adoptees, who act out early, sometimes reform, and become overly solicitous to the adoptive parents in young adulthood. For years after Lost and Found came out, adoptees would write or come up to me announcing: "I was the Good Adoptee"or "I was the Bad Adoptee." (\\\http://www.tapestrybooks.com/product.asp?pID=998),
and the reason that international adoptees may choose the "good adoptee" mode more often is that they, being foreign born, often had to deal with racial or ethnic minority issues and larger "fitting-in" challenges, on top of the adoption issues.
By adulthood the difference seems to diminish, as some researchers say -- or, at least, people don't use mental health services as much
\\\http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6523387/Use-of-mental-health-services.html#abstract
Here is another interesting quote that underscores individual differences and personal experience
\\\http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/9606/survey.html
Given the previously mentioned limitations, the overall finding was that the adult adoptees scored about half way between the General Normative Data and the Outpatient Normative Data on each of the test instruments. Specifically, on both the measure of distress and the depression scale, male and female adoptees scored about half way between the General Normative Data and the Outpatient Normative Data. On the measure of anger, the female adoptees scored slightly higher than the General Normative Data and the male adoptees' score was virtually the same as the General Normative Data. Taken together, the results indicate that adult adoptees tend to report higher levels of maladjustment than nonadoptees but they are by no means a pathological group.
Comparisons were also made between Nonsearching, Searching, and Reunited adoptees. For each test instrument, Nonsearchers reported the least maladjustment followed by the Reunited and Searching subgroups. This rank order Finding occurred for both male and female adoptees. Because of the previously mentioned shortcomings in this research, it is impossible to determine whether searching is a stressful process that contributes to the differences between search groups or if psychological distress motivates adoptees to search.
I propose for your consideration, that newborn adoption does not/should not automatically cancel the possibility/probability of bonding between mother and child.
If the adoptive mother is in a position to make informed choices, the adoptive birth experience can be shaped into an experience where bonding can indeed take place. Whenever possible, the newborn can be united with the adoptive mother immediately following the birth. The long list of healthy possibilities that exist, include bottle feeding the adopted newborn with breastmilk donated by another lactating mother.
I disagree with the basic spirit of this assertion. It carries the same problem of denying that the fact of abandonment has taken place, that the family ties were broken, and that the child has lost a family before finding another one.
These days, in infant adoption the child IS most often united with the adoptive mother right after birth. It is the adoptive mother and father who are in the hospital while the child is born, they are the first to get to hold the child -- and then take him\her away in two days, while the birth mother is patted on the back with, "you did good for your baby", and denied the very right to grieve.
The thing is, and it is the truth -- many, may be most people who give children up for infant adoption WOULD HAVE KEPT THEM if FAMILY PRESERVATION was a priority in our society, if they were given a little more support in hard times. Same in overseas, if poor young mothers were protected from soft-spoken baby-brokers.
My most heart-breaking experience while studying this topic last year was a yahoo!answers adoption forum post from a young girl in the US who was 4 or 5 months pregnant, and her question was, something along the lines of: "I have meager empoyment and no health insurance, I have no money for prenatal care or hospital labor, HOW CAN I KEEP THE BABY?" (if she were to give the baby away, the adoptive family would have paid for her health care needs) This is, supposedly, the richest -bleep-ing country on earth, and its young female citizen is asking, how can she KEEP the baby -- how she, plagued with poverty, can go against the default and KEEP her, not give away. This is crazy.
And the thing is, yes, there is financial aid and health insurance assistance available to a person in this situation, but -- good luck finding relevant information. All the social services government websites are very hard to search, navigate or decipher. Then you have to figure out where to go, what to bring, when you'll get anything. While Birthright or a similar service is the first entry in any phone book, and easy to find, and once you there, you will be helped.
IMO instead of supporting adoption facilitators (some of those organizations, btw, are religiously based and consider adoption in foreign cultures as part of their evangelization efforts) or making the process of transferring the child from one family to another smoother, we as a society should support family preservation by way of education and financial assistance, where applicable. I emphasize that we are talking about general idea behind infant adoptions, not other kinds of adoption and not about any specific cases of either.
