Another Thing About Adoption
I’m a little uncertain how I feel about it when I put up something like I did, and then people say, “Oh, this has made me choose not to adopt, thank you!” Because I still believe in adoption, and for some kids, it’s their best hope, their second best option now that the first best is gone. I sympathize with workers who want to hold back details, because here they have this kid who needs a chance, and these parents who could be so good for them, but the parents might balk if they knew how hard it was going to be, even though the worker knows they could and would do it if this child was already in their home, or if this was their biokid.
The thing is, adopting a child means accepting a new burden into your life, but that burden is more than the child. Adoptive parents must accept ethical burdens as well. Adoptive parents must accept that by adopting their child, they are likely contributing to the same system that damaged their child. And there’s just no way around that. A TRA mother I worked with once put it this way: to become the parent your child deserves, you have to come to realize that in the world you want to raise your child in, and the world you must now work to create, you would never have been their parent.
Some parents can accept this very gracefully. Some of them do so horribly and abusively. Some of them start horrible and end up wonderful. But that’s what makes adoption so different from having a biokid: you are making a lifetime commitment to another human being, but you are also making a lifetime commitment to the way that human being came into your life. You can’t separate adoption from the ethics that created it. A good adoptive parent is a parent that doesn’t shirk that burden. Some parents can’t manage that, and they really shouldn’t adopt. If they get talked out of it, that’s better for them and the kid they could’ve hurt. But some parents can take it, and are too afraid to try, because it may be the first time they’ve confronted the overwhelming burden of lesser evils, impotence, and institutional, state-sanctioned abuse. Their privilege gets punctured, and they have never had to imagine a life without that privilege. They don’t necessarily know, at first, that it’s possible.
Anyway, my last adoption article got linked on a post at Shakesville. The whole thing (including comments) is a good read, but I thought this commenter hit on the head my ambiguous feelings about convincing people not to adopt. Emphasis is mine.
…adopting from the foster system offered a way to ensure that a parent was not lied to or coerced to place their child up for adoption, but reading your article, it is the first time I realized that that system can also be highly problematicI can only tell you what we figured out eventually: All adoption is highly problematic.
One of our first experiences that revealed this, once we had the approval to adopt, was turning down a referral from a public-private partnership source. The caseworker was jazzed to find a potential adoptive family that could take this newborn home from the hospital. My wife asked why the child needed a family, caseworker said: The mother has two older children and no way to transport her family, we talked to her about whether she can raise this baby given she can’t afford an infant carseat, she said she’d look at the parent book, and it’s your lucky day!
I had to throw up, and that was before I knew what it would cost my kid to be removed from her bio family. It’s hard. Parenting is worth doing, but any adoption is a hard road for your child. Assuming you go all-in, the hurt and pain of the child’s loss only becomes clear after it’s too late.
Adoption is natural, and may even be a part of our species’ blueprint for survival*. But our culture creates a real freakshow at the intersections of race, class and slut-shaming. And that is the corner where adoption is located.
So, the voice of one experience: There is no ethical way to adopt, but that doesn’t make it the wrong thing for you to do. Refusing to participate in this particular unethical system doesn’t feed the kid whose foster parents lock him out of the fridge, or prevent the 5th child the family can’t afford from being sold into slavery, or attack the racist, sexist systems that make a 26 year old woman of color with 2 years of college genuinely disadvantaged in her efforts to feed three kids.
Adoption is not a development program, an anti-racism initiative or a post-facto contraceptive. As long as you don’t confuse it with any of those things, you have a chance at keeping your eyes open to what’s in front of you.
*’Mother Nature’, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She studies bonobos and has made a not-too-successful career out of drawing conclusions about human evolution from how we differ biologically from them.
Trackbacks and Pingbacks
- A Brief Introduction to Adoption
Comments are closed.
This is interesting as it reminded me why I want to work in the state sector, that may seem like a long bow to draw but this
“because it may be the first time they’ve confronted the overwhelming burden of lesser evils, impotence, and institutional, state-sanctioned abuse. Their privilege gets punctured, and they have never had to imagine a life without that privilege. They don’t necessarily know, at first, that it’s possible.”
Seems damn right, that to be useful within the system you have to distrust it, you have to be working towards a world where your job doesn’t exist because it is being down by so many aunts and uncles and freinds and brothers and the rest of the community who has stepped up…..
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
That comment was one of the most painful things I’ve read at least in the past month, but, as with just about anything you write, it was painfully necessary. Thank you for choosing to share it with us.
I’m only 22, so I’ve got years and years to go before I finalize my decision on whether or not to adopt, but this blog has been invaluable in helping me consider all the ramifications of such a decision. So, once again, thank you.
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
Keeping tabs on this whole conversation has prompted me to think about how we conceive of parenting in general and how parents of all stripes assume that by raising a child, they own that child’s story. The child doesn’t have the right to tell it themselves: “ummm, I didn’t exactly experience my life that way…in fact there was a whole lot of pain in my childhood that you were sort of but not entirely responsible for and I, and I’m beginning to recognize the ways in which this makes adulthood challenging for me” and the parent is like “SHUT UP I GAVE UP EVERYTHING (18 hours of labor blah blah blah) FOR YOU.”
For example, my mother did some pretty heinous, abusive stuff to me as a kid, not “social services is taking your child away” kind of stuff but “child is terrified to look adults in the eye and has attachment issues” kind of stuff. There were reasons why she did what she did, namely, she was suffering from a mental illness, for which she thankfully got treatment later in my life. During my teenage years, I would sometimes try to talk about what happened when I was younger, and that attempt to tell my story would get overwritten by the story of what a difficult kid I was.
It was only very recently that a truly amazing thing happened and my mother and I were able to talk about this and she more or less said “Yeah, that happened to you and it was awful. My mother did the exact same thing to me, and I swore I wouldn’t do it to my own children, but I did, and it sucks. I know it probably effects you now still, and I’m so sorry about that. I love you.” Ultimately, it’s the ability to be honest about this stuff that makes me feel like I’m less likely to perpetuate the cycle of abuse with my own kids, but no doubt I’ll have plenty to apologize for when they’re 20 too.
I think that what most people need/want is permission to see their parents as flawed human beings who may have fucked up terribly but are still worthy of love, which is, for some reason, so much better than trying to see them as selfless saints or martyrs. The fact that all adults are deeply flawed doesn’t mean that NO ONE should ever have/adopt children (though some probably shouldn’t), just that whatever the parenting situation, we need to acknowledge where shit is fucked up (due to the social/familial/economic factors that make physical and emotional abuse widespread and make adoption part of the picture) and try to make it better. A big part of that is remembering that parents don’t own their children or their childhoods, and adult “survivors” need to be allowed to talk about how their experience affected them.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
– Would that my mother reached the level your mother did! Instead, all I ever get is “You need to get over it. Why are you still upset about stuff that happened years ago?” and “YOU were hurtful to ME too! I still have some of those journal entries!” (er, why? I wrote that stuff down so I could process it and let it go and forget about it. Why would you a) snoop around in MY STUFF and b) hold on to really hurtful things just to, idk, blackmail me?)
It’s true, parents everywhere need to sit down and realize that their children are PEOPLE, with needs, wants, hopes, dreams, and experiences that need to be told instead of silenced. Unfortunately, it seems precious few have received the memo.
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
Thank you for your original post that was linked from Shakesville, as well as the two follow-ups. The comment you quote from Phoenix Rising was directed at me, and I’m very excited that I have finally found a space that exists to have those conversations.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Hello, Harriet, I read your blog regularly, though I don’t comment – but this event was forwarded to me recently. I don’t live in the area, so won’t be able to attend, but it sounds like this artist is discussing a lot of the things you’ve been talking about here, and I thought you might be interested.
Thank you for the good work you do.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
Thank you for writing this. When I have spent time thinking about how my (me: white woman) adoption of my black daughter intersects with racism, privilege, poverty (I’ve written about it on my blog) some people really appreciate it, but more people tell me I’m over-thinking things, that my daughter’s adoption is an unmitigated good thing. It’s not; it’s a good thing with a big black hole of heartbreak at its core. Neither of her birthparents wanted to give her up. We fought her birthfather for almost two years to be able to keep her. I don’t think we were wrong to do that (besides our own love of her and heartbreak at the thought of losing her, we were afraid that if she went to her birthfather, that would mean her violent, drug-addicted birthmother would regain access to her). But I don’t think we were entirely right, either. It’s refreshing to hear someone else say that these kinds of things are part of the burden you keep carrying when you choose to adopt, because I hear so often that I should just lighten up and be happy. I am happy. My daughter is the light of my life. But this is heavy shit; I can’t lighten up.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
Um, yes there are ethical ways to adopt. There was nothing -absolutely nothing unethical that occurred in the adoption of my daughter. I know many adoptive parents who have participated in adoptions that I have absolutely no qualms about. While it can be overwhelming and disheartening to live in a world where adoption is necessary, adoption is often a powerful force of good that is not lessened by the fact that there was pain involved for all parties.
Like or Dislike:
2 
1
: I agree that adoption can be a powerful force of good, and that that good is not lessened by the fact that there was pain involved. However, I also think that the pain involved isn’t lessened by the powerful good. They co-exist, permanently, and are equal parts in making up the whole of adoption.
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
Yes, you and I are in perfect agreement about that. You and I are also in perfect agreement that there are many ethical issues with the way adoptions are done. However, there are ethical ways to adopt. There are ethical adoptions.
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
: I’m going to have to tell you what I’ve told a bunch of other people in this discussion: if this isn’t about you, don’t make it about you. If your adoption was all awesome, then I’m not talking about your adoption. If the fact that a lot of adoptions are fucked-up, or my opinion that the entire adoption industry is an ethical nightmare, doesn’t have any effect on your good adoption, then it doesn’t have any effect on your good adoption, and you don’t have to be a part of this conversation that doesn’t have anything to do with you.
For adoption to be a necessity, something has already gone wrong. And that shit isn’t ever ethical. Parents who are without the resources to raise their children — and relinquishing their children to parents with more resources — is an unethical state of affairs from the get-go. Transferring children from one parent to another based on a huge nexus of privilege that one parent has and the other doesn’t is an unethical state of affairs. And that state of affairs is bigger than the individuals involved. The privileged parent can be the awesomest person in the world, but their ability to access an available child is still predicated upon a clusterfuck of unethical privilege. It’s not a lapse in ethics that’s all about the adoptive parents, the biological parents, or the adoption agency. It’s a lapse in ethics for all of us that tolerate racism, sexism, the tremendous gap in wealth, who do not educate ourselves on our own privilege and use it for good. By the time we’ve reached the point of kids getting transferred around based on privilege, adoption is likely the best solution, the most ethical solution, but that’s come after a string of massive societal failures.
I don’t know the circumstances of your adoption. I’m not really interested in learning more, because, like I said, it doesn’t appear to be the kind of shit I’m addressing here. But I do want to say that I, personally, don’t trust the perception of people who assure me they are 100% of anything. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve heard adoptive parents tell me their adoption was perfectly ethical, only to see their agency get drawn up on child trafficking charges the next week. I fully believe that they thought everything they did was ethical, based on the information they had at the time. But to get where they got, they already had to believe that there was something like a purely ethical adoption out there, and that they were going to be the ones smart enough to get it. What I’m saying in this post is that adoptive parents have to understand, from the get-go, that there isn’t such a thing as a purely ethical adoption. The existence of our current, American model of adoption itself is already unethical, because our current, American model of adoption is based on an entire dissolution of families, and involves the movement of children from the oppressed to the families of oppressors (and oppressors can still be plenty nice people — I, white middle-class girl, am one). There is nothing okay about that, and there never will be. But the fact that it’s all fucked-up doesn’t mean that there aren’t still children who need families in the meantime, so adoptive parents need to understand that that’s what they’re getting into: they’re perpetuating a fucked-up system for the welfare of a currently needy child, and they have to take responsibility for that, because the child had no say in it.
I’ve learned to suspect any assurances without qualifications, because there are no assurances when you’re dealing with poverty, racism, sexism, and the lives of human beings. You can say that you have made the best decisions possible, and at this moment in time, you think they were all the right decisions to make. You will never find me arguing with that. But that’s not my definition of ethical, because my definition of the ethics of adoption is bigger than you and your family, or any individual family. My definition of ethics is about the entire foundation of adoption itself. You can have good things grow on a rotten foundation, but that doesn’t mean the foundation isn’t rotten. You may have had the most ethical possible adoption, but that adoption was still situated within an adoption industry whose entire existence itself is completely unethical.
Like or Dislike:
4 
0