Why Adopt?

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.

Comments

[Allie]

Excellent post. Thank you.

[Journeywoman]

This was an excellent post. Thank you so very much for it.

[Abby]

Longtime reader, first time commenter coming out of the woodwork because this is a truly remarkable post that really hit a chord with me. I'm not an adoptive mom (although might be some day), but struggle with the same ethical/moral quandry that you discuss. I agree wholeheartedly and you express it so much more clearly than I've ever been able to wrap my mind around. Thank you for this post!

[zoe]

Thanks for the great post, it gave me a lot to ponder. My partner and I are currently trying to conceive, but have made the decision that we will try for a year, and if not successful we'll move on to adoption. Or even if we are successful, we may have one and adopt one, as we are in our late 30's. We haven't really looked too much into the adoption avenue yet, and hadn't even considered there may be shady ethical dilemmas.

[paragraphein]

This is an interesting post Shannon (I mean this sincerely... the part about not being able to keep our hands clean no matter how hard we try is very thought-provoking).

That said, I'm not sure it answered the question that I THINK Joy is putting forth and that I know I am wondering. Because... for me the question isn't "Why adopt even in an unethical system?" but rather "Why adopt at all?"

Why invite all this pain and complexity in, on purpose? Because the pain and complexity is there even if it is (somehow) done 100% ethically.

For me it's not a question of ethics, it's a question of adoption itself.

Is this making sense?

[Tonggu Momma]

Thank you. I found you via Margie's shared posts. Again, thank you. I've been struggling with this a lot lately, especially since we are in process again (waiting for referral - China).

[Elise]

My husband and I are just starting down the fertility treatment road. If it was up to me, I would skip trying to conceive and pursue adoption instead but he's not there yet. Just as much as I have a physical and emotional desire to give birth to my husband's child, I have a deeply rooted instinct to ensure that any child that I parent by way of adoption actually needs me to be his/her mom. I've done a lot of research about adoption and have come to realize that a) I'm not currently qualified to raise a child of color and b) I'm only comfortable with domestic, open adoption. Honestly, I think all those people standing in line for 3+ years to adopt from China so they can get a child with no paper trail to the birth parents need some counseling. It reminds me of that book Children of Men in which infertile women dress up cats and dogs in baby clothes and push them around in strollers. True desperation to have a child leading to delusion (in the case of China, turning a blind eye to to the facts about the adoption system).

My big wish for my hypothetical future children is that they feel loved and self-confident. How could you feel either knowing that your parents willfully hid your truth from you, or possibly purchased you? I just couldn't bring that particular injustice into my family.

But I do understand what you are saying about shades of gray in adoption ethics. I just think that there are a lot of people who are not truly faced with an ethical paradox but are blatantly choosing to look the other way to get what they want.

[AlisonG]

Paragraphein, that's the question I heard Joy asking too: why would APs choose adoption if it's so painful and messy and filled with loss?

I can add my perspective because I came to adoption by choice, not infertility.

(It's funny that Shannon notes the absence of reference to fathers in this discussion, because my husband was the one who really wanted a child, and really wanted to adopt. I might have stayed childfree if it had been up to me.)

My short answer is basically Shannon's: You can't avoid pain and drama in this life. But sometimes you can thoughtfully choose your drama.

Having kids (whether through pregnancy or adoption) is already a big invitation to risk and drama. For me the big decision was not about adopting, but about having kids period.

We were partly drawn to adoption because it seemed less about our desire to procreate, and more about giving a home to a child who needed one. We wanted to connect with another culture and country (our children are from China). We felt we had the resources and support in our community to handle our kids' needs (cultural, emotional, medical). We like a challenge. We like to do things differently and question the status quo. Neither of us were attached to having babies that shared our genes. I wasn't attached to giving birth and breast-feeding.

In short, we felt ready and willing to take on the particular pain and difficulty of interracial adoption from China.

This answer doesn't really touch on the ethical side of adoption--we know more now and probably would have done things differently (in fact, I know we would--for our second adoption we switched to the Special Needs program for ethical reasons). But that is basically why we chose adoption even though it makes our lives and our children's lives harder and more complicated.

And as with everything, the pain is mixed with joy.

[Sadie]

I understand where people are coming from here-- and I'm glad these questions are being asked. It's important.

That said, no one can give me a good answer to this: my daughter was laying in a hospital bed for 3 months with no parents. Where was she supposed to go?

We were not supposed to go get her, and build our beautiful family to the best of our abilities out of a fear for somehow getting our hands dirty?

[AlisonG]

After a little reflection, I think my comment comes across as self-congratulatory, because I forgot to mention two other big reasons why we adopted:

Ignorance and privilege.

We didn't _really_ know what we were getting into.

And we have tons of privilege on our side, which contributes to the ignorance, and also makes us think we can handle anything.

No doubt we will get our come-uppance. Now that we've met our kids, though, I don't think we'll regret our decision. They're worth it.

[Julie]

Thanks Shannon. As you know, this is something I struggle with as well. I appreciate your continued discussion!

[PhoenixRising]

Alison said a mouthful, that wasn't a response to Sadie, but is as good a reply as I've got.

Leaving my child laying in the road wasn't going to fix the structural problems that got her laying in the road.

But picking her up out of the road in a conscious way, and engaging at both the personal and political levels with how she got there, is what I needed to choose in order to feel that on balance, we did something good.

Unlike Shannon, I get pretty tired of gently and politely pointing out that the problems adoption doesn't solve, for abandoned children in developing countries and US cities, are also not solved by attacking adoption as not a solution to the world's problems. If you'll excuse me, duh.

It's just tiresome, all the people who need to tell me that I didn't fix anything by bringing one child into my privilege--the inequity is still there. Because I didn't know that adopting one child didn't change anything.

While I choose to behave as if the privilege of raising this child means that I'm more connected than other privileged people to those problems--that's a choice I make constantly, flowing from the choice to adopt rather than birth a baby. Those problems are now part of my family, but that was my choice.

In fact, I'm not more responsible for solutions to poverty and pervasive sexism and racism than those who have done nothing at all about those problems, except disapprove of privileged white people raising children born to impoverished brown families. I am not more culpable in my child's abandonment or the structural issues that led to it because I decided, in the presence of other options, to engage at the most personal level possible.

[Lisa V]

Shannon this is a brilliant post.

One of the things that I thought of when the "why adopt if you know about all the pain, etc." is that I didn't REALLY know about it. I imagined it, I wrote in a journal at the time that I suspected that the happiest day of my life was likely to be the worst of my child's mother's life. I assumed it would be a huge sacrifice so that she would have a different live.

But I didn't really have much information about adoption loss. Hell there was no internet when I adopted. I wasn't handed books with dissenting point of views to the popular adoption mythology.

I assumed my child would wonder about her life with her first family, but for the most part I would be a good enough parent to make up for those fleeting thoughts.

In short, I plead ignorance and privilege as well.

My child wouldn't have been lying in a bed with no one to take care of her. She would've gone home with her parents. I have no idea if her life would've been better or worse. I really don't. I don't know if the loss she experiences was worth it. We dont' have a crystal ball.

Everyone's lives have turned out in ways we are mostly happy with. It could have been the same way had adoption never taken place.

Whatever compromises all of my daughter's parents made when making decisions for her, we can't change. We can only be accountable and listen to her if she needs us.

[Kate]

Thanks for that, Shannon. My "selfishness" is the typical selfishness of the queer parent - parenting (in my case via giving birth) even though I can be pretty sure my queerness will make my children's lives harder. But, we name as "selfish" or "difficult" or "ideologically complicated" things that are out of the norm. It's not ideologically complicated to walk past a homeless person into your nice warm house because more or less everyone does it.

[Andy]

This is a most wonderful essay. I hope you don't mind, I took the liberty of providing a link to it in our forum group for discussion here:

http://adopttalkcanada.com/forum/index.php

[mama d]

Brava.

[Johannah]

My wife and I went into adoption from closer to Shannon's perspective too- we weren't infertile except in the way that two women can't get one another pregnant on their own. We were young enough to try getting knocked up and young enough to have done so two or three times if we wanted our first kid to have siblings.

We did, obviously, want to be parents, and we would have felt it as a real loss if we were not able to be parents, but we were not obsessively baby hungry either.

After much discussion, despite knowing about the ethical quandaries (although, not as well as we do now)we felt adoption was the right path for us.

After examining all the options, we took the path we felt had the fewest ethical problems. We went through our state's foster-adopt program and requested children over five and in a sibling group. We were open to a wide variety (although not all) special needs and circumstances.

Doing this, we felt we were on the right side of ethics- not clean, but choosing the least poor option- We specifically requested children that were "hard to place".

Our real dilemma came when we were offered our first placement. He was fifteen months old. A single child. Hispanic. Comparatively healthy (vision problems, born with significant heroin dependence, six month minimum global delays). Had lived in a single, good, foster home since birth minimizing the likelihood of attachment problems. And our problem was, do we adopt this boy, knowing he'd quickly find other adoptive parents, and knowing that the children we originally signed up for (not a specific child, but the category) would be in for much longer waits?

We debated, and we adopted him. And he is the light of our life. And so is the little girl we adopted next who came with far more ethical problems. And so is her biological brother who came to us at birth a year ago and will be returning to their mother in a month or two.

Our kids do not have an easy row to hoe. But us choosing not to have adopted them wouldn't have made their lives any easier.

And while adopting them does not change the poverty and racism and other social ills that broke their families in the first place, we are trying to raise them, and work ourselves, to repair those hurts in the world- or at least our community.

This does not give us clean hands, but it does make a compromise we can live with.

[Alexandra]

Thanks for this post Shannon. We've been contemplating IA for over a year now and were close to signing with a homestudy agency when we started to listen to the whisperings of potential child trafficking/unethical adoption practices. We spent two months tracking down many people who had been misinformed by "ethical" adoption agencies, and State Department officials and realized that with the popularity of the program (we were looking into Ethiopia), these types of practices were likely to being exacerbated, particularly with infant adoption, which is what we were interested in pursuing. We finally decided that we couldn't at this time be part of that infant adoption program, but rather wait until our current child is older, and adopt an older child through IA or pursue domestic adoption alternatives. It was one of the most heartbreaking decisions I have yet had to make.

Several posters have said something along the lines of "if we hadn't adopted our child, they would have perished." I think that that is true. But I also think that agencies use horror to promote adoptions. At the end of the day, not adopting leads to specific children languishing in the system, but it also often forces families to stay together and corrupt adoption agencies to shut down (again, IA only, not domestic). Other ways of ensuring that specific children find better outcomes - support orphanages, support poverty eradication programs, support training skills for young adults. I struggle with how to balance knowing what we know about adoption, with building our family through the addition of children who need families. It seems true to me that the most ethical way to do that most often seems to embrace the "least desirables" - children of color, older children, sibling groups...the list is long, and the demand for children different than who are currently in the system is high.

You are right in that every choice we make from what we eat to what we wear to who we interact with, is steeped in the potential for ethical/unethical pitfalls and revelations. I think recognizing those problems in something as primal as our family and children is very, very difficult.

Still navigating adoption ethics,
Biogirl

[Alice]

Thank you, Shannon, and thank you to all of the other people who have posted. (johannah especially - you remind me of another Johanna I worked with when dealing with a lot of kids involved with CPS, years back.)

My partner and I are hoping to become adoptive parents, through foster-adopt programs if possible, and these are issues I've been thinking about since that job and its crossover with CPS, all those years ago. While our adopting's off in the nebulous future for now (oh, Florida and your wacky laws prohibiting gays from adopting!), these questions aren't going to go away.

So, when people in our lives ask 'why adopt?' my answer is that it, with its muddy ethics and attendant pain and complexity, is the best choice I see for building a family. The racism, classism and discrimination embedded within DCFS (the new CPS) will certainly be painful to deal with (even from my privileged position), but like johannah said, it's a compromise I can live with. I know that that's not true for everyone.

These problems are here whether I become an adoptive parent or not, and it feels right to both address those problems *and* work to build a family with some of the children whose lives have been deeply affected by them. Given where our society is at the moment, participating in this way is what makes the most sense for me, even though I know it's far, far, far from ideal.

[Johannah]

Thanks Alice- I was afraid my comment had come across as unforgivably self-righteous. I'm glad you understood what I was trying to say! And I hope that you are able to end up with the family you are seeking. (I recommend Massachusetts by the way- it's wonderful to be fully protected by the legal system.)

[Alice]

Thanks, Johanna! I didn't find it self-righteous at all, but I can sympathize with how hard it is to explain the rationale for your decision without over-explaining!

While I would *love* to enjoy all of my basic rights up there in MA, we're pretty well stuck here due to my partner's job in academia. If we need to, we'll look into the process of doing a legal adoption in another state. I have no idea if that's even *possible* with foster-adoption (my guess is a huge NO), but there's a fortuitous looking court case coming up in FL that may make the point moot.

[Kohana]

I think that coming to the point of recognizing that there is no perfectly "clean" adoption, but that we decide whether to adopt or not, and then if we adopt, how to proceed as ethically as we can, is a really important development. Although I spent a massive amount of time researching adoption before we adopted, I really didn't begin to hear about ethical dilemas in adoption until after our son was home. (Most of my research was print-based and it seems like only recently has some critical print-based adoption material been released.) I went to the internet for support as a new adoptive mom and instead found a world that rocked me to the core. It has taken several years for me to realize there IS NO completely ethical situation where everything is perfect. If everything was perfect, adoption wouldn't happen. So rather than spending my energy on what could have been, or how to do it perfectly next time, I had to transition to focusing on how to do the best I can with the decisions already made. It's been a freeing transition. There are always pro's and con's; we just try to balance them the best we can.