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

Shirley Wilder was 13 and pregnant in 1973 when her lawyer filed a class-action suit challenging New York City foster care system, which allowed the Catholic and Jewish charities who played the largest role in the system to place children according to creed and convenience, not need. In 1990, with that case is still in the courts, Nina Bernstein set out to track Wilder and the child she had given up. Bernstein takes the reader behind the scenes of the foster care system, revealing its frustrations and failures through the lens of two people's lives.