Sster Asked a while ago:
A call to my fellow adopters: how about a post in the next day or so about what brought you to adoption and what ethical/moral/political/personal battles you have had to wage surrounding that decision?
I am a bit late to the adoption discussion that's been zooming around, prompted mostly, I think by Dawn's Big Adoption Roll of the last two weeks.
I have blogged a lot about this topic already (there's a lot on the old, pre-adoption blog linked at left, and if you choose "adoption" under topics, you'll find a lot here, too) but just to clarify, I'll respond to Sster's specific questions.
What Brought Us to Adoption
Since we are two people of the female variety (at least in the technical sense) we had to choose between various types of ART and adoption. We liked adoption best of all the choices. We didn't care that much one way or another about pregnancy and genetic connections (only one of us could have that anyway). And I've been thinking while reading some of the various adoption bloggers out there this week, that like so many of them, I just felt drawn to adoption for the same unnameable reason some other people are drawn to pregnancy and birth. I think Dawn mentioned that, and Sster did, and that's me too. I have been thinking of adopting since I was about 14 and it just seemed like an obvious choice. Cole felt the same way. Something in her had always kind of just assumed that some day she would adopt. We didn't really even consider ART in any serious way. We tossed out sperm donor suggestions mostly just for fun, but never even got serious about asking the guys.
As for the altruism question floating around, I honestly didn't have a shred of "save a baby" reasoning behind my interest in adoption. I don't know if Cole did. If so, not much, because she never mentioned it. I have had the thought "why go bothering with sperm donors and pregnancies when there are already kids who need families?" That's pre-adoption naivete, because once you get into it (domestic adoption anyway) you realize there are at least enough families for the newborn babies available for adoption and perhaps more than enough (Dawn has been trying to work this out and coming up not quite sure, but it looks like the families and babies at least break even). Still I wasn't thinking that the babies who "need" families necessarily needed me per se. I just thought that if I did decide to parent (I decided not to for a very long time) that adoption would be a sensible--almost efficient--way to go.
So it was kind of vague, our decision to adopt. Both of us just mostly assumed that's what we'd do. Then some friends came over for dinner and talked about their research into adopting (after giving up on insemination) and it tipped us over the edge of deciding to parent in general. The next day, I got on the web and found a good agency and started a blog and the rest is history.
Ethical/Moral/Political/Personal Battles Re: Adoption
Well, there's this little thing about being queer... Waiting for Nat was a lot about the political battles and just documentation of what it takes for a couple of lesbians in a fairly gay-friendly state to adopt. So I can hardly address all of that here. But moral, ethical, personal?
Personally, it was just a no-brainer, as I mentioned above. So that was easy enough. Ethically, once we narrowed down our adoption options and came up with a transracial, open adoption, we had to do some thinking and reading. We knew all along that we would go ahead with the adoption, but we also knew that there are people who disapprove of such adoptions, and that some people we really respect disapprove of those adoptions. So we would need to sort that stuff out.
I think it's really tough for domestic transracial adopters (where transracial adoption=white people adopting black children) because on the one hand, we're sort of not politically correct in adopting transracially, but on the other hand, how much would we suck if we refused to adopt a baby on the basis of race? Transracial adoption is an on-going task of sorting through the racial-ethical quandries that riddle American society. It's a verb, not a noun. It means taking on a future in which we are often going to squirm for one reason or another, never mind rage furiously on a regular basis. It isn't just that we're taking on the racism that our daughter will face, it's that we're taking on the discomfort of facing our position within white supremacy routinely. Frankly, white people in the U.S. can choose to avoid facing the injustice of their own privilege when they aren't in a space to deal with it (and many, as we know, are pretty much never in that space), but having white privilege while raising a child without it forces the dramatic race dynamics of our society into relief on a daily basis.
Frankly, I don't think there's a pure moral or ethical way to have children. Having children by birth may be easy, mindless, even happily accidental for some, but that doesn't make it naturally moral. I think that however much we are ultimately willing to sacrifice for them once we have them, children are a selfish thing to seek in the first place (and there, I agree with Dawn, though some took issue with her on that). So I guess, I don't know why adopters should be held to a higher standard of ethical scrutiny than anyone obtaining babies through any other method. I'd consider it baseline ethics to make sure the child I would adopt has not been stolen from its parents, for example. But if I was straight, married, fertile and "TTC," as they say, I would consider other things baseline ethics--making sure I'm not passing on any awful health conditions, making sure my partner is fully aware of and in agreement with what's going on, etc.
How to go about obtaining a baby was really more a matter of "fit" than of discovering the perfect ethical means. The problems and challenges and blessings and joys of transracial domestic adoption just fit us. For others, various levels of ART fit, or China fits or Guatemala fits or fostering fits.
This is probably not entirely satisfactory to Sster, who wanted a bit more guts on the page (well, screen) I think, so here is my deepest, darkest, most gutsy adoption confession (I think it falls into the moral category):
One reason adoption fit for me (and I speak only of myself, not Cole) is that a main focus of my religious/spiritual faith is the concept of hospitality and welcoming the stranger. This is a pretty central concept in Judaism and later, in Christianity, and later yet, in Islam, so it's not any profound thing I made up. I am just exceptionally taken by the idea. It seems like something that flies in the face of the messages we get from capitalism to fear the stranger, to huddle together in the smallest, most homogeneous groups we can find and build big gates with guard towers all around them. I just think that reaching out to strangers, trusting the unknown and inviting it into intimate relationship with us is a consumate way to live in faith in something much better than anything we could ever buy or control on this mortal coil. Adoption fits right into that picture for me. I guess any baby is a stranger, even one that grew in your body for nine months, but something about adoption seemed even more like "hospitality" than parenting in general. Going through the adoption process felt like asking God for a surprise gift. I didn't know what it was going to be, but I knew it was going to be really great (and duh, look at her!). The lack of control that bugs lots of adopters to death felt right to me. It felt appropriate to give up control and cast my hopes out there and see what would come of it.
Another "moral" aspect of adoption that fit for me is the idea of nonbiological kinship. The concept of "chosen family" is very important to queer ethics. Lots of queers lose their blood family when they come out and the ability to make family of the people you love and who love you is central to queer culture. Ironically enough though, I really learned about chosen family at the knees of my own straight parents. They were geniuses at it. I grew up surrounded by throngs of aunts, uncles and cousins who had no blood ties to me whatever. We informally fostered children from these families, these families gave us groceries when one of my parents lost a job, my father gave them jobs at his stores when they lost theirs. So adoption? Of course that's a legitimate way to make family. Maybe even a favored way in my family.
And that's it. That's the extent of my moral claims about the decision. But the thing is, I don't think this means you or anyone else ought to adopt or that I'm better than anyone else who doesn't adopt. That's a backwards way of thinking about it. I think of adoption as a positive thing. It's my way to gleefully live into my values. Maybe someone else gleefully lives into her values by riding a bike everywhere and thus showing love to the planet in a way I don't, by driving my (squirm) SUV (but it's a small one! and I didn't buy it! and I feel guilty every second of every minute of every day for driving it!). I am not a better or worse person than a non-adopting bike rider. It's just that adoption is something I not only can do, it's something I can do with joy and gusto. Someone else maybe can't do it, or can't do it with joy, and so, shouldn't do it. I, on the other hand, suck at bike riding, and I can't stand the cold.
Dawn said (at some point in her avalanche of writing on the topic) that in a perfect world, adoption wouldn't exist. Well, maybe. The kind of adoption we did would not exist, to be sure. Nat was available to be adopted by us because of a plethora of injustices and crimes that built up and exploded in this historical moment. From racism to poverty to race-inflected poverty to medical moralism and paternalism to...you name it. Every ism you can think of was probably critical in getting Nat into our arms.
But that doesn't mean that refusing Nat would have been a more moral choice for us. At that little split second in time, taking Nat was the right choice, I'm convinced.
But that's sort of drifting into new terrtory. You are getting the culmination of my rambling thoughts on this topic while reading everyone else and then blogging about something Completely Different, so I apologize.
Perhaps it would help me focus if you would plop a few questions below. What lacks clarity here? What do you want to know more about? Or maybe you are sick of this topic and would like to know what I'm serving at Nat's baptismal brunch, Sunday?
Lay it on me. We aim to please.
