Over at Dawn's, a conversation about adoption is going on largely between first mothers and adoptive mothers, but also some adoptees, infertile-but-not-adopting women, and others. And it is fabulous as conversations over there can be. You probably already know all about it. I was only just made aware because I have been shamefully blog-absent of late.
Anyway, I wanted to address some of the issues coming up over there on this blog, because I have a lot to say and because I feel a bit outside the mold of many adoption assumptions that fly around (reasonably, since the assumptions are based on majority experience) there. Better to give my thoughts their own space and not muddy things over there too much.
What a lot of the talk seems to be boiling down to is, "who in her right mind would adopt, if she knows how messy and unethical so much adoption is?" And there are subtle but real accusations flying about entitlement in adoptive mothers (yes, mothers and not fathers) who come to adoption via infertility, and how that entitlement perhaps blurs morality when adoption decisions are being made.
I find it interesting because A) I'm not infertile and B) although sometimes queers who parent or want to parent are accused of having an entitled (more often, the term "selfish" gets used) attitude, I didn't come to parenting out of an innate drive or burning desire, but more of a second thought after lots of pieces of my life fell into place in ways that would make parenting possible and perhaps desirable.
So I find it difficult to enter that fray of "infertile women are so sad that they can't have babies that they become viciously capable of stealing the babies of others." Maybe. I have heard women talk like that. You may remember that commenter on Strollerderby who said as much in so many words, last month. But I don't identify with that feeling and I don't feel defensive about adopting because "baby at all costs" was never part of my psyche.
I did learn a lot (though not nearly as much as I know now) about ethical problems in adoption before I adopted, but seeing as that burning desire was not blinding me, I don't have that excuse to have continued with our adoption.
So why did I, upon learning that adoption is fraught with ethical paradoxes, go ahead and do it anyway?
Partly, the answer is that I did it in a way I thought was as ethical as possible, and I've talked about that a good bit on this blog, though not for a while. Let me know if you want to hear more about it. Right now I want to focus on the other part.
Life is full of ethical paradoxes.
I can't think of any part of my life that is not an ethical paradox--my legal marriage (okay, only in two states, plus a half-dozen foreign countries, but still) in spite of my belief that legal marriage is immoral; my choice to live in more housing than I really need when others die of exposure in a sub-zero winter; likewise my overuse of hot, potable running water in my half-hour showers every morning; my choice to shop at Whole Paycheck even though they don't have a unionized workforce and fly in my organic grapes from thousands of miles; almost every parenting decision I make is full of shades of gray. That includes the decision to become a parent and the decision to adopt. Had I decided to give birth, that would have had its own set of paradoxical ethical challenges, as it would have required medical intervention and donor (or purchased, depending on my decisions) gametes.
The fact is, we can't keep our hands clean in this life. As far as I'm concerned anything short of "sell everything you have and give the money to the poor and come follow me" is a compromise. And I can hardly judge anyone else's tough decisions, given my own set of complexities.
Sometimes I hear from readers here and I get the impression they think my adoptions (or the agency we used) are perfect examples of perfect ethics. They are not. They are tangled and messy. You will not find a perfect agency or a perfect adoption, you will only be able to do the best you can to find an agency that's doing the best it can in an imperfect world full of truly screwed-up priorities and injustice.
I decided a long time ago that I needed to stop trying to keep my hands clean. Not because I wanted to give up on the ideal, but because it is impossible to keep your hands clean, and trying for that is a waste of energy. Do the best you can, then forgive yourself the rest and get to work making the world a better place. Instead of trying to keep my hands clean, I decided I would instead try to inhabit a space of resistance. As long as one is engaged in resisting, one is at least tossing something on the side of balance with all that mess that we humans live with.
We all have things we personally feel we couldn't live with. Then we have things we are willing to struggle through. Then there are the things that come up without warning or time to think and we do the best we can. I made my adoption decisions--in cooperation with Cole--based on the information I had, and the things I decided I could and couldn't live with. I could live with open adoption. I couldn't live with figuring out how to do the right thing by a child from another country and culture who had no notion--and probably never would--of who her first family was. This is not because domestic adoption is better than adoption from China. It's because given the ethical mess that both of them are, I felt I could live with and deal with one better than the other. Thank god there are parents who feel differently about that, because that's what the kids they adopt need.
Here's a story. Once our homestudy agency offered to show our profile to an expectant mom who was white, carrying the child of a Black, secret boyfriend. She had two (white) children already, but didn't want to raise the biracial one. Because of race. She wanted the baby to go away and be kept a secret from her friends and family. We said no thanks, don't show her our profile. We didn't feel up to dealing with the kind of specific pain that child would be facing. We didn't want that overt racism in our family (birth family=our family), even if we weren't in touch. And we wanted to be in touch.
Did that baby go on to be adopted? Yep. Under those circumstances. Will someone have to deal with that child's pain? Yep. Our hands are not clean just because we're not doing that particular job. But we didn't want that particular job. We have our hands full with our own adoption complications (and yes, they are legion).
Anyway, I've said before that not adopting does not keep anyone clean from the unethical aspects of adoption. In fact, the aspects of our adoptions that are the most ethically problematic are very large societal issues of racism, poverty and lack of healthcare access. We are no more culpable for those than anyone else in our socio-economic position, whether they adopted or not. Our children would not be living happily ever after with their loving mothers if we had not adopted them. In fact, not many of the children our agency places would be "saved" from adoption if the prospective parent supply dried up. I do think that might be true of the kinds of adoptions done by other agencies. I think far fewer healthy, white babies would be available for adoption, were there not a long line of monied prospective parents out there.
But now I'm getting off the topic I intended to stay on, so I will go to bed.
Bottom line: you can't stay clean in this life. But sometimes you can thoughtfully choose your messes.
