A long and detailed report out of Boston is grabbing the Madonna adoption story by the scruff of its neck and giving it the shake it's been needing.

With real-word sensibility, it follows a study paid for my the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, no lightweight in the world of research and development, to study the effects of family rearing on formerly institutionalized children.

Guess what? It's a really good thing.

The ongoing study strongly suggests that raising an abandoned child in a family setting is not just socially desirable but medically therapeutic to the child. Orphans given over to family care at a very early age -- ideally before age 2 -- are almost certain to grow up stronger, healthier, and smarter than those who remain in institutions.

Even more dramatically, the study has found that foster care -- or better still, adoption -- appears to actually undo some of the developmental harm done to children in state facilities. But the speed of placement, getting a child into a family before too much institutional damage is done, may be at least as critical as the quality of the new home.

"In almost every case, the sooner an orphan is placed with a family, the better off that child will be," said Charles A. Nelson, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and one of the lead researchers on the Bucharest Early Intervention Project.

The research was based in Romania, and although the situation there has improved dramatically since the Ceaucescu days babies continue to fail to thrive, "almost shriveling in size and intellect with the passage of days, weeks, and months."

Based on the study, which started in 2001 and is scheduled to continue through the end of the decade, Nelson and his fellow researchers are convinced that prolonged stays in even fairly well-run orphanages do extraordinary damage to the minds and bodies of children , especially if the institutionalization occurs during critical months of early development.

"A child placed in foster or adoptive care before the age of 24 months is going to have a higher IQ, a stronger body, and an all-around better chance in life than a child who stays longer in an institution," said Nelson, who also directs the lab for cognitive neuroscience at Children's Hospital in Boston.

Today, more than 8,000 infants each year are abandoned in Romania, a country that banned all international adoption in 2004, because," ... EU officials accused it of "trafficking" in infants earlier in the decade. A few corrupt adoption agencies profiteered by charging illegally steep fees to desperate American couples. But experts generally scoff at lurid reports of Romanian orphans peddled to pedophiliac rings or dealers in body parts. "These tales are mainly driven by anti-American bias," said Nelson."

Now, anti-adoption hounds, who may also be anti-American ... an angle I'd not previously considered ... are slamming this study as " sneaky science meant to justify international adoptions."

Read the article. Send the link around, and make as big a deal of this story as those who would remove adoption as an option would with one that cast it in a bad light.

If you can, send it to the Baroness and hope she chokes on it.