Adoption and Social Injustice

[marydell]

I find that I'm sometimes uncomfortable when I talk to other adoptive parents, and this was true even before I actually was a parent--I'd meet people in training, and I would feel alienated by their attitude.  Not all of them, but lots of them.  I'm finally beginning to understand why.

We're not better people than Charlie's birth parents.  I don't mean that in an abstract way.  We met them, we're getting to know them through regular emails, and they're really good people. 

Adoption is not about better or worse parents: it's about resources.  Money, education, time, family support, culture, civil rights, confidence, even love -- these are resources, and some people have enough of them for a child (or for a particular child), some people don't.  And sometimes people who do have enough resources think they don't, and end up helplessly regretting their decision; sometimes people who don't have enough resources think they do, and the child is the one who suffers.  Adoption is not about justice, or deserving.  Every day of my life, I'm so happy that I'm Charlie's mother.  And every day, I'm sad for him and for his birth parents because they couldn't be a family in the way they would have been, if the world was just a little different.

Some of the adoptive parents I've met, and also some people that I talk to about our adoption, believe that children are adopted by the families that they "really belong to," and they don't have a good opinion of birth parents, except for maybe praising them for "doing the right thing." Like God goes around depositing babies into families that don't deserve them and can't raise them, and then sends the deserving parents to take them away.  And the only bad part is if the undeserving birth parents mess up the process by, like, taking time to consider their choice, or hoping to maintain a connection to the child.  Like being unable or unready to parent makes you a bad person.   Even in situations where someone has a child taken from them because of abuse, the outcomes are so different for rich abusers than for poor abusers.  If you're poor, nobody helps you to turn away from the precipice. 

A lot of kids need to be adopted; a lot of infants need to be adopted.  And that's a tragedy, borne of injustice. I have met some adoptive parents who realize this. I wish we all did.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

If it's about injustice, then it's about justice. Just not about desert. I think you're mainly right otherwise.

[boxofdelights]

I am glad to hear that Charlie's birth parents are good people.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think most birth parents are good people.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

people keep telling me what a good thing i'm doing, how awful things are in ethiopia for kids.

i dunno. here, godot will get a mother who fiercely loves him, regular dependable meals, and aikido lessons. there, godot would have family who looks like him and loves him and he'd know history that contained him. the socioeconomic injustice part means that he will be better off with me. in that whole not dying young sort of way. but i am not doing this to do anyone a favor. i am doing this because i want a baby.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah, precisely. For us it was "I want a baby; how can we ethically get one?" Orphan adoption from a country that has a clear economic or social problem makes the best sense to me, and it's what we tried first (China, as you know, which didn't work out b/c so slow). Taking one child out of a situation isn't fixing the larger problem but it's fixing most of the problem for that child, which is what we have the power to do. And when enough of us do it, it starts to help fix the larger problem, in some cases, by focusing the eyes of the world or the country-of-origin on the problem.

When we decided to try adopting domestically, we opted for mild special needs--adhd, prematurity, drug exposure--not because we're trying to do good, but because we wanted to be certain that the baby would benefit from being with us instead of someone else. We want to feel at least a little bit entitled to parent. We're far from perfect but we're open minded and our extended family includes a lot of relevant experiences for that stuff.

So yeah, it boggles my mind when people say it's really nice of us to adopt Charlie. Nobody who meets him says this, however, and usually people who have seen his picture don't either, unless they're perfectionist douchebags, which is always worth knowing about. You'll find once your baby is with you that people are less inclined to see him as a charity case and are more likely to go "oh, cute baby!" and then shower you with racist assumptions about his origins. :)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I learned about some of these complexities alongside my sister, when she adopted a baby from Guatemala two years ago.

It was unpleasant to discover that some people prefer to seek an international adoption because they have fantasies that birth parents in developing countries are free of social pathologies; they place their babies for adoption because of poverty and deprivation for which they bear no moral responsibility, and not because of any of the sordid problems and complications of domestic birth parents, whose poverty is morally suspect.

It was even more unpleasant to discover putatively anti-racist critiques of international adoption which were based on the identical premise: that birth parents in developing countries only place their babies for adoption because of problems stemming from wealthy nations' imperialism and oppression, and not for any of the commonplace reasons why some US parents find themselves unable to raise their own children.

Interestingly, my sister's daughter's birth mother placed her child for adoption for precisely the same reasons that Michael (my husband) was placed for adoption when he was an infant: she was a teenager, unmarried, unready to parent, living in a socially conservative area, and had no access to abortion. Guatemala, Mississippi, exact same situation.

[goddess32585.livejournal.com]

I decided long ago that any children I raise will be adopted/as an aunt, probably through co-habiting with their parents (we're into co-op/intentional living). So I'm looking forward to reading about your perspectives :)

[amilyn.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this, for knowing this. I was adopted as an infant in a closed state-adoption in the US before Roe v Wade (as was my husband and his siter and my younger brother, though he was a smidge after Roe).

You sound like the kind of wonderful, compassionate, welcoming, understanding adoptive mom I was (and am) lucky to have.

Charlie is a lucky kid, to have great adoptive and birth parents, all of whom are involved and consider themselves part of one another's families.

My favorite non-fic book on adoption is Joyce Pavao Maguire's The Family of Adoption. She talks about adoption from practically every angle. It's hard to explain to people who have not lived in families of adoption that adoption, by its nature, is a family born of grief instead of love. The love is certainly there, and adoption is by no means inherently negative...but the origins for all parties is some kind of grief: the adoptive parents almost always are grieving for the biological family they had thought they would have, the biological family grieving for the family they cannot keep, the child for the sadness of all and for the loss of the family that would-have-been, everyone wishing they could make it okay for everyone else...

Beautiful things can and do grow from this point of origin, and the grief does not have to overwhelm everything, is not the driving force of all of what those individuals and relationships and families are and have. But it is the seed...and it is nigh impossible to explain that to folks who are sold on families of adoption being either "specially arranged by god SO CUTE!" or "second-best" or worse or even the "Well, but it's the same thing, right?"

Thank you for thinking about this and sharing it.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Hiya, thanks for sharing your story! I am fortunate to have been able to talk to a birth mom who is a relative of mine, as well as reading a lot of blogs, before we started our adoption process. That's been a big influence in how we've done things and how we approach it.

Thank you for the book reference, I will look for it! Are you familiar with The Girls Who Went Away? It's about the era of closed adoptions, and is unbearably sad, so I have to read it in small doses. But it's a very good read.

[amilyn.livejournal.com]

Yes. That book is amazing and sad and is what I want to shove into the faces of everyone who thinks abortion should be illegal again so that everyone can place their babies in those "better" adoptive families with those parents who "really want" a child (which is not to say that parents seeking to adopt do NOT really want a child...it's just the emphasis on the "really" that annoys me).

"Dear Birthmother" is another good one.

And my icon is my newborn son's head surrounded by my hand holding my 10 1/2 month-old daughter's hand and my birthmother's hand as Elf meets brother Ben.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's great about your icon, and that your birthmother has gotten to know you and your children.

Yeah the notion that a woman should go through pregnancy and birth and the grief of placement because someone else "deserves" a child makes me totally crazy.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

As the child of an adopted son, I really was touched to the point of tears by this post. It takes a lot of strength to see so clearly.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thank you! any credit for me having a clue goes to a lot of generous birth moms who have talked or blogged about their experiences, starting with a relative of mine who placed her baby in a closed adoption 35 years back. Seeing it from that side of things certainly gives a different perspective.