These comments from Allie are a scathing rebuke to adoption in the U.S.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the difference between even Britain's social safety net (which is shrinking) and ours and how even in Britain, our children would likely be with their first mothers. When there are "very few babies available for adoption" in a country and that country also happens to give housing and a paycheck to single mothers until their kids are 16, it ought to be a heads up to a country with throngs of children in the foster system and enough "babies available for adoption" that we are exporting them to Europe.
Giving the children of the poor to the rich is no social safety net.
Sara also mentions a key problem with using a tax credit to publically support adoption. The people who need the most help with adoption costs aren't going to have enough tax liability to recoup the costs in a credit later. Besides, you still need the money up front, which can be difficult too. This is why tax breaks of all kinds are such a stupid way to help people besides the solid middle class. Politicians love the solid middle class though, so here we are.
A couple of weeks ago I said that if the world were the place I'd like it to be, I might not be a parent.
The thing is, I know my children needed Cole Mom and Mama Shannon under the circumstances of our current system. Thus I have no qualms about adopting them. We didn't contribute to a market in babies through our adoption because the babies we adopted aren't the kind that are "in demand." I don't feel at all defensive about how our family came to be.
And yet, I'd really see these circumstances changed, even at the cost of having never met my children. Why on earth do I feel that way? Ironically, because I love my children so much that I'd sacrifice being their Mama Shannon to change the world to treat women like the women they'll grow up to be with justice and compassion.
Of course, no one has arrived to offer me this choice, so it's a moot point. But I think it speaks to the conversion experience some adoptive parents have after they bring their children home. Once you are deeply in love with a child whose life has been negatively impacted by social circumstances out of the control not only of that child but of the child's blood kin, you are seething with righteous anger that the world would treat your child and her people so badly.
Anyway, that's how it has been for me and some other adoptive parents I know. We cared about these things before. In some ways, caring about them led us to the kind of adoption we chose. And yet, the personal, parental connection does trigger a mama bear response that is different from any political or moral commitment I've felt before about these issues.
What I don't understand--and I mean that sincerely, I just don't "get it"--is why so many adoptive parents (barring birth family abuse histories) don't seem to feel these things.
Coincidentally, Third Mom is on about this one too, this week.
