Apparently The Cabbage Patch Kids Taught Us Nothing

As if these children didn't have enough grief?

WASHINGTON — US parents looking to adopt a child prefer girls over boys, and non-black children over African-Americans, according to a new study carried out by a group of economists.

The team from the California Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics and New York University studied five years worth of data from 2004-2009 culled from a website run by an adoption intermediary.

They were able to see which babies attracted most applications from adoptive parents, and how much the parents would need to pay to finalize the adoption.

They found that a non-African-American baby was seven times more likely to "attract the interest and attention of potential adoptive parents than an African-American baby," said Leonardo Felli, an economics professor at LSE.

But there was not a similar preference in favor of Caucasian babies over Hispanic babies, even though all the adoptive parents in the sample were Caucasian, Felli said.

The research also uncovered a unexpectedly strong preference in favor of girls, which were a little over a third more likely to attract the attention of adoptive parents than a boy, he said.

"With biological children, the literature shows that there's a slight but significant preference for boys over girls," said Leeat Yariv, an associate professor of economics at Caltech. "But in adoption, there's a very strong preference for girls over boys."

The bias in favor of girls and non-black children was seen across all categories of adoptive parents, and the gender bias against boys was even slightly stronger among gay men and lesbian couples seeking to adopt a child.

In other words: black boys are taboo. And what's with gay couples not wanting boys?