The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care

"In 1973 Marcia Lowry, a young Legal Aid attorney, filed a controversial class-action suit that would come to be known as Wilder, which challenged New York City's operation of its foster-care system. Lowry's contention was that the system failed the children it was meant to help because it placed them according to creed and convenience, not according to need. The plaintiff was thirteen-year-old Shirley Wilder, an abused runaway whose childhood has been shaped by the system's inequities. Within a year Shirley would give birth to a son and relinquish him to the same failing system.". "Seventeen years later, with Wilder still controversial and still in court, Nina Bernstein tried to find out what had happened to Shirley and her baby.