Interesting congruence

[marydell]

The vast majority of people I encounter think that open adoption, particularly the kind with visiting, is weird.  Some of them find it disturbing or are even offended by the concept.

Two groups of people seem to instinctively get what we're doing and think it's the natural and right way to do adoption:  my polyamorous friends and my Muslim friends.

Poly folk tend to approve of honoring love where it appears, rather than putting boxes around it, and I've learned a lot about how to share from paying attention to how my friends manage it (I myself being the possessive type, not naturally one to share). 

As I understand it, in most versions of Islam a child with living family members can't be adopted, but can be placed permanently with foster parents.  So if you're infertile and Muslim, one route to building a family is to raise a friend or family member's child as your own--but they know their origins and keep their original family name.   My friend M has friends who did this--after they had 2 kids, they had a third baby to give to their infertile best friends. Their two kids were boys and the new baby was a girl, and they'd wanted a girl, so they went ahead and placed the baby with their friends and then had a fourth baby, also a girl, who they kept.  They're still best friends and everybody is happy.  So our open adoption seems sensible to him and my other Muslim friend, whereas closed adoptions strike them as weird.

Comments

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

This is a very interesting observation. I fall in the polyamorous camp, and did not know that about Muslim practice, but I'm pleased to have learned it!

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I am neither Muslim or poly, and I don't see why it would be offensive or overly weird. I can imagine a potential for unhealthy dynamics--parents vying for affection/influence with the child, etc.--but not any worse than in a bad step-parent situation.

What about the idea bugs people? Is it the assumption that people giving up their kids aren't fit parents, or something else that I'm not thinking of?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Usually it seems to come from old-fashioned "you should mostly just pretend the kid isn't adopted" sentiment--a baseline discomfort with the whole concept of adoption. Sometimes--not too often, fortunately, but I do encounter it--it's based on feeling that birth parents are bad people who deserve to be punished. A lot of people believe that relinquishing a child is wrong, and a subset of those assume that it's done for selfish reasons. Which is so far from the experience of every birth parent I've ever encountered that I just boggle at it when I encounter it.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I find people very strange sometimes.

Although I admit, as someone who's strongly considering adoption from foster care, I'm going in concerned about having any child I foster being taken away and placed back with their bio parents.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah, foster/adopt is a whole different thing, with some potential risks. But there are kids in foster care who are available for regular adoption--that is, the parental rights have been terminated so the bio parents can't take them back. In some of those cases you can do "semi-open" adoption, where you have contact with the birth parents but don't exchange full identifying information--useful if there is a serious problem going on.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

it's based on feeling that birth parents are bad people who deserve to be punished.

That breaks my heart.

[sanguinity]

Watching my brother grow up, it's pretty clear to me that defaulting to closed adoption is not so great a thing. My brother had already had one family go wrong, and he knew it. But he didn't know why it had gone wrong. Didn't know who that first family was, didn't know why he wasn't still with them, didn't know nothing. Those questions were always there, and they ate at him. And yeah, they changed the way he viewed our family: if some unknown thing had gone wrong with the first family, how is he to know that it wouldn't happen with this family, too?

I get the impression that the reason that closed has been the default in our society, is because traditionally adoption was not fully consensual. (By 'not fully consensual' I mean 'artificially limited slate of choices, with strong pressures toward adopting the child out'. The Pig Farmer's Daughter talks a bit about the societal constructs that were used to create a supply of white infants to white adoptive parents.) If the adoption process was not fully consensual, then there's always the threat that the birth parents might try to take the kid back, and society responded to that threat by closing the adoption process: once you've signed the paper, the kid is gone, full-stop. And yes, in addition to what I've said above about the effect on my brother of a closed adoption, I do think one of the strengths of the open process is that it makes issues of consensuality a lot more transparent.


I like the Muslim model, as you've described it; thank you for sharing that.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

You've hit on the central point here for me--consensuality. Closed adoption feels to me like it's difficult to make fully consensual. After the initial contact, neither set of parents can keep track of the other's feelings and needs. And the child, as you say, is left with this huge hole in their own story.

I wish your brother the best, and hope that he's found, or found out, the things he's needed to.

I can see how open adoption would make more sense in any culture that acknowledges larger and more diverse relationships than the isolated nuclear family. Which is most of them, really--but not mainstream American culture. It would also make sense in any culture that values deep negotiation in relationships--which is, unfortunately, very few of them.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

It's worse than you're imagining--in closed adoption there is no contact at all, initial or otherwise. The social worker takes the baby from the birth parent(s), and gives it to the adoptive parents, and never the twain shall meet.

International adoptions are generally closed, because the placement happens long, long after relinquishment, so the dynamic is different. But even in those cases, a lot of services are starting up that help search for and get information back to birth parents in the child's country of origin, because there is finally starting to be a realization that all the secrecy is weird and unnatural. Adoption has been going on forever, and the shame & secrecy is all a recent invention.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

In the ancient world, specifically Greece and Rome, most adoptions were open. Of course, you would not typically be adopting an infant (there are occasions where that would happen, but they are special cases). Adoption was specifically for the purposes of procuring an heir for your family name. The adoptee would take your family name and be entered into your citizenship subgroup as your heir. The adoptee would be male and adult (because you wanted to know what you were getting into). It was illegal to adopt a male if you already had an heir, because that would be cutting out the heir of your body. Rules got bent for political purposes, of course, but for the most part the above is true.

Because of that, the adoptee knew and was still in touch with his parents, but was taken into your family for the purpose of keeping the name going and preventing the possessions and land from reverting to the tribe or even to the state.

It's a very different mindset from modern adoption and whenever it comes up in class, students are fascinated by the differences. :)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think that's a big part of why closed adoption was popular for so long. The Girls Who Went Away is a good book about that era of adoption. (I'll look for The Pig Farmer's Daughter, it sounds interesting). But also closed adoption allows people to live more of an illusion, if they want to pretend or sorta-pretend their kids aren't adopted. That has thankfully gone completely out of vogue recently.

[sanguinity]

My write-up of The Pig-Farmer's Daughter. There were a couple chapters I couldn't read because they were too triggery/intolerable for me; you may or may not have similarly intense reactions. But even though parts were very difficult, it did a lot to explain the society that I see around me, which gave it a high value for me.


:: ...if they want to pretend or sorta-pretend their kids aren't adopted. ::

We never pretended, and my brother got disciplined by his teachers for not pretending. Because of course everyone pretended, so if you're not pretending, you're lying. :-(

[sabotabby]

Neither poly nor Muslim, but it seems very sensible to me.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

My parents adopted me in a closed adoption, but they were very, very open about my being adopted.

But I am very supportive of open adoption. I think it's awesome.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think nearly all adoptions were closed when we were kids, but the whole "doesn't know she's adopted" thing seems to have mostly stopped happening by the 70's, mercifully. All the adopted folks I know grew up knowing that they were adopted and feeling free to talk about it, and having access to whatever info their parents had about them. Formalized open adoption seems to be kind of a new invention, although prior to the 40's or so it seems to have been (informally) more the norm.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

The comment above about the societal institutions that came into being to produce a steady supply of white babies for infertile couples to adopt is very interesting to me, because it takes the facts I know (meagre as they are) and reshuffles them into an interesting and terrifying new shape, potentially.

If before the 40s adoptions were fairly open, and from the 50s for twenty years adoptions were closed and people pretended that their kids weren't adopted...what's the difference? What's the factor that brings that into play? Was it something about the postwar pressures to present that idealized version of American life, and if you couldn't actually have your own babies, you needed babies and you needed to pretend they were your own? Was there a shift in the way teenage girls were treated when they became pregnant as a result? Kind of awful that something that caused so much pain for so many people could have been at base an enormous machine intended to make Our Way of Life compulsory...

I wonder how much was a reaction to the pressures of the Depression that caused a lot of people to give up children they couldn't afford to feed? Often that seems to have been older kids, though, and sometimes even troublesome younger teens who were just kicked out on the pretence. Those kids knew why they were being given up and remembered their birth families...is it possible that in the wake of that, closed adoptions were thought to be kinder in some way?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Per Wikipedia's article on adoption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption#Modern_period), illegitimate births became much more common after WWII because of increased sexual freedoms. Meanwhile it seems that the model of closed, legally-sanctioned adoptions was introduced as an improvement on the "buy and enslave an orphan without actually adopting them" thing that was going on before WWII--yikes. Remember Anne of Green Gables? They wanted a boy orphan to help with the farm work.

With abortion being legal and sometimes even available, and with single parenthood having gained a lot of acceptance, the supply of babies--particularly healthy white babies, who are still in the highest demand--has become a lot less, which gives birth parents a lot more power to say what they want for their children--thank goodness. Parents of healthy white infants still have a lot more choices than other parents, unfortunately.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Hm; interesting.

I am suspicious of the idea that illegitimate births became more common because of increased sexual freedoms. I think that one would have to really look at the difference between illegitimate and teen-mom births, and figure out how much of the "increase" was due to subtle social pressures delaying age at marriage, resulting in what would have been legitimate births after rushed weddings being illegitimate births with boys or their families disavowing any involvement...

I am automatically suspicious of any argument that rests on "relaxed social mores" though. :)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Good point. There's an interesting article here (http://www.faqs.org/childhood/So-Th/Teen-Pregnancy.html) that talks about the history of teen pregnancy and the development of the concept of teens being "not adults/" too young to marry. But no correlatable stats.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

The idea of adolescence is fairly ancient, but has changed a lot--for one, girls get to be adolescents now too, which as that article notes, was not historically the case. :)

I think it's ignoring the effects of changing ideas about personhood on family law, though. Around the same time as suffrage and other human rights started to be of interest, there started to be a recognition that children were not their parents' possessions, which was the case legally for a really long time, and that outlook had a huge effect on child and family law, because often people couldn't express any autonomy until they reached the age of majority. (Hence that whole section of adoption law before pregnancy pretty much automatically emancipated a minor for the purposes of medical decisions.)

[raqs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's someone planting crap in Wikipedia. I can think of half a dozen 30s movies I've seen where the woman has a child out of wedlock. In fact the movie code adopted after WWII when we wanted to export movies to the rest of the world and convince them to adopt "great capitalist American mindsets" specifically started to control those types of plots BECAUSE they were so common. (Nudity and sex were also pretty common. Now let's ask why we don't see more of these broadcast any more. :-)

Freakanomics also has a great chapter on birth control and its connection to crime rates which seems pertinent. But maybe not.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Freakanomics repeats some crappy and not-well-derived "facts" about adopted people, as well as repeatedly doing the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc thing. I enjoy the parts of the book where he shows his work, but the ones where he makes assumptions about crime and abortion need more and better statistics, I think. It is an interesting hypothesis but he makes me crazy by presenting that and so many other hypotheses as if they are facts.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

The interesting part for me was that it became acceptable to admit that a child was adopted before it became acceptable to acknowledge that the child was probably available because hir mother was young and unmarried. Or maybe I'm remembering it wrong? I was a child in the 1970s, after all, so while I was readily aware of friends who knew that they were adopted, and literature for children talking about adopted children (both incidentally to the story and in that Very Special Episode way, depending), not much discourse directed at children was going to talk about illegitimate pregnancy. Do you remember Up A Road Slowly, by Irene Hunt? I read it when I was about ten or so; it looks to have been set in the 1950s/early 1960s. It took me YEARS to notice the part where the heroine's friend turned into a Girl Who Went Away after getting involved with the Very Bad Boy the heroine had lost and mourned after a timely interruption kept her from Going All The Way with him. Admittedly, the language was as oblique as you'd expect for a novel of its time directed at youthful readers, so I wasn't entirely clear that the heroine and the bad boy were on the verge of Doing It, let alone why the friend might have gone away "to visit an aunt" after a period of dating the Bad Boy. When I was ten, I could only reliably notice that characters were Doing It if they were in a novel for adults (say a mystery or spy thriller) and the author was more forthcoming about their intentions before a fade-to-black (Dick Francis) or, er, NOT (Ken Follett).

[notodette.livejournal.com]

Just stopping in to say I'm a lapsed Catholic and I think open adoption is the way to go (for me personally, that is). Others can obviously do as they wish, but I feel like a family unit is INCLUSIONARY, not exclusionary, which is where, I think, the biggest break in definition comes from.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I like that. (And I'm a lapsed Catholic too, woo, represent!)

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

Yes. This is why I really like the idea, too. Inclusionary rather than exclusionary.

[unhappytriad.livejournal.com]

Not disagreeing with anything that's been said so far, but I think another reason closed adoption became common is that it feels FINAL--not conditional. It implies that "Okay, this is our kid now and we're fully committed to him/her; not going to give him/her back or give up on him/her."

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Hm. I don't know that I agree, exactly--not all open adoptions have ongoing contact, although that's increasingly expected. The openness is in the birth parent's process of choosing adoptive parents, instead of having the choice made by the agency without the birth parents knowing anything about what happens to the child.

I think the main difference in finality comes from whether the arrangements are made before the child is born (in which case the whole thing is conditional on a final post-birth decision) or if it happens after the child is born (in which case there is no phase of "wait and see if this is really going to be our baby). Closed adoptions mainly are arranged post-birth, so they may feel more final in most cases, but there are post-birth open adoption arrangements, too.

[vass]

I guess I'm in the poly camp, although my polyamory is only theoretical at this point. It just seems more humane for the child, to know where ze comes from. And more humane for the birth parent(s), to know where ze's going. And on a purely practical note, it makes it possible to find out about family medical histories.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

Data point: I am neither poly nor Muslim, but open adoption seems like a great idea to me.