Thinking Out Loud

I feel so differently about adoption, biological reproduction--assisted or accidental or somewhere in between--and parenting in general than I did before we adopted.

We never had the "gotta hava babee!" fever, but we did just sort of think "baby? huh, sure that would be fun (for us)."  Now I find my skin crawling at anyone who thinks of baby procurement as being about the parents almost at all.  It just really bugs me when people want children because children will meet some need of theirs.  But where the heck is the line behind being overjoyed at the idea of a child in your life and wanting a child to meet some need of yours?  It's a fine, fine, fine line.  It's not like only grim, unemotional people should be parents.  Obviously not.

And it seems that babies always start by somebody just wanting one.  And I am pretty convinced that wanting a baby is always a selfish thing.  It's never about the baby.  Especially when the baby isn't born yet.  And that's obviously okay.  We don't look kindly on the "rescue" model of adoption either, do we?  Besides, that really turns out to be all about the parents too--how heroic and sacrificing they are, right?  (If you are wondering who "we" is, I guess it's self-defining.)

I mean, I definitely start feeling this way after getting into it with people about various ART things.  I am starting to really chaff at the notion that questioning the ethics of certain reproductive decisions, based on how a child born of those decisions--and the adult she will someday become--will experience them, is automatically judgmental of the person making the decisions and therefore, de facto bad.  (Sorry, long sentence.  I don't even know what I just said.  You're getting unadulterated stream-of-consciousness, here.)

But it's not just ART stuff.  It's more the attitude that ART accentuates that underlies so much reproduction, whether you conceived on the first try or you had medical interventions for 4 years and finally went to Khazakstan.  It's the attitude that babies--however you get them--are commodities to be "gotten" at all.

I'm also annoyed at the attitude of entitlement from straight people, that babies are somehow a natural right and if they don't come easily, equipped with the best parts of each partner, the would-be parents are being denied a part of themselves they ought to have been able to take for granted, like tehy take their very bodies for granted.  Why would anyone ever take the ability to make a baby for granted?  That is so far outside of my worldview I am breathless in the presence of that entitlement.  Yet I know it's really common.  It just is what people expect.

And this Madonna thing?  Talk about entitlement!  You know, if she wants that child so badly; if she really is bonded with her; feels like her mother, then why doesn't she set up house in Malawi for 18 months?  That's all they wanted from her when they denied the initial request.  Now the bio-dad is involved which complicates it, I know, but initially, it was 18 months of residence.  I mean, how many residences does Madonna have, anyway?  How much skin off her nose would it be to add a hut in Malawi?

But this stuff just has nothing to do with the people who are minors (or embryos, for that matter) when it all goes down.  It's all about the adults and what possession of these minors will mean for them.  And I'm just getting fed up with that.

I don't want to give embryos rights.  That's not my point.  My point is that we ought to be thinking of what these people will be facing when they aren't our little doll-babies anymore, but are live, grown, human beings who want to know who they got torn from in Khazakstan or Malawi or the south side of Chicago.  Or to meet their gestational surrogate.  Or dealing with "existential debt" as some donor-conceived adults are now calling the burden of having to be grateful for their very lives to a protocol they now want to challenge and change. (Found this term in "Voices of Donor Conception: Behind Closed Doors: Moving Beyond Secrecy and Shame" ed. Mikki Morrissette.)

I guess listening to a lot of adult adoptees at the conference last month got me headed down this path.  But it's also a parenting preoccupation of mine to worry about making sure I always think of my children as future adults with their own agency and their own questions and their own values, which will in all likelihood, overlap, but not completely match mine.  I want to be able to look those adults--equals--in the eye and know I did everything I could to make it as right as I could for who they would become, not just to please myself or gratify my craving for a baby.

Anyway, this probably makes very little sense, but I'll publish it and you let me know.

Comments

[Allie]

Being a parent changes your perspective on these things, I'm sure. I know it has mine. Mind you, I suspect that that may also be growing older too.

I have never assumed that our children would agree with the all the choices we made wrt their creation. But once choices are made they are real and impossible to tease out from our lives. I don't think we can, any of us, expect our parents not to make (or have made) mistakes. All we can ask is that they did what they believed to be best in the place they found themselves.

My partner and I weren't desperate for a baby really but we did want to be parents. We tried to make the choices we though best for any resulting child(ren) at the time. Did we get it right? Who knows. I do agree with much of what you have said but, in the end, the best we can do for children is be the best parents we can in the circumstances we find ourselves. Sometimes our choices will have been the 'wrong' ones for our children. It's messy. But that's life.

[Judy]

But you're right, Shannon; most people want children because that meets some need(s) of theirs. It's very nearly or is ingrained, this biological response to wanting to reproduce, to have a child/children. Yes, perhaps more so for straight people, from childhood on up with the little song:

Judy and ___
sitting in a tree
k-i-s-s-i-n-g
first comes love
then comes marriage
then comes _____
in the baby carriage.

The doll babies we get to play with, the maternal instinct reinforced from an early age.

I'll admit that I first went the route of ART, but nothing that went outside just using what my husband and I had; no donor whatever. Donor was sort of like 1/2 adoption to me so why not just go for the full adoption was my thinking -- if that makes sense?

I don't know. We made the choices we did at the time we did and obviously we can't (and that's not even a fair thought/question at this point, really) undo them so we do the best we can for our son now.

If any of that makes sense.

- Judy

[Jody]

For me, these conversations are always complicated by the contact I've had with thoughtful, careful people who make decisions that I would never make. Yes, I do want to talk about the ethics of it, and no, I don't think that challenging the ethics means that I am being disrespectful of those who make a variety of choices. But at the same time, most of the ethics are abstract for me. I didn't do IVF. I didn't do donor gametes. I didn't use a surrogate. I didn't adopt. I find it personally challenging to talk about abstract concepts while people I respect are living the realities.

Maybe I just want everyone to like me. Not the best impulse for deciding what to write.

I think it's crucial to keep having these conversations. I think ART in the United States is an unregulated frontier, and that needs to change. I think that people making decisions need to consider the rights and desires of their future children, and not assume that the story they bring to their parenthood will be the story their children carry forward. I think that adoption has specific lessons to teach us about anonymous gamete donation and we are past-due time on learning those lessons. (Then again, you don't have to wander very far into the world of adoption to realize that plenty of adoptive parents haven't heard the news, yet, either.)

I think the entitlement piece is very, very tricky. When we couldn't get pregnant and my eighteen-year old cousins were knocked up for the prom, I wasn't thinking about the gay and lesbian couples I knew who also couldn't get pregnant. I was thinking, damn it, what is wrong with my body, that I'm having [hetero] sex and it's not working? Why are people who don't even want babies getting pregnant, when I've been trying for years and it's not working for me? And that still doesn't seem like an irrational expectation. Hetero sex is fairly tightly connected to reproduction, from a biological point of view.

If you haven't read "Waiting for Daisy" yet, I recommend it (even though I found the references to "my new friend Ayelet and her husband Michael" irritating beyond words). Peggy Orenstein does as good a job as I've seen at showing how otherwise thoughtful people can plunge down the rabbit-hole of IF treatment, and find themselves crossing lines they never would have crossed before the process began. As someone who had lines, but who is humble about what would have happened if we'd pushed up against those lines, and grateful that we didn't reach that point, I always ask the questions about "how can we make ART more ethical" as a subset of, "how can we help people lay out and remember where their own lines are, in the midst of a process that by design seems to push you past them?"

[Pollyanna Sunshine]

I think this is a really tough one. Doesn't everyone go into parenting motivated at some level by personal desires, if only the desire to be a parent, to have a unique relationship with a child? As you point out, the notion that we go into parenting out of a totally selfless desire to do what is best for the child (most obvious in the "rescue" model of adoption, but arguably in the "you should be so grateful that I brought you into this world and sacrificed so much to give you the best" attitude that so many of us have gotten from parents, perhaps especially those who felt they didn't fully and consciously choose to start parenting at the time or under the conditions they did). The choice to enter into any relationship is always at some level "selfish," but it also creates requires that we sometimes (often, usually), put someone else's needs ahead of or on a par with our own. And the responsibility to put the other person's needs first is infinitely more profound when we choose to enter into a relationship with a vulnerable person who doesn't have the freedom to choose to be in that relationship with us.

In short, yes, I totally agree with you that a lot of the discourse about adoption, ART, and parenting in general seems to be focused on the needs, desires, and "rights" of the parents rather than the needs and rights of the children, and that that is really creepy. At the same time, I don't think we can totally ignore that the desire to parent is, for many people, extremely profound, and that such "selfishness," as long as it comes with an accompanying sense of profound responsibility (and, ideally, the knowledge and perspective to consider deeply what those real needs are--which, in the case of adoption, is something that is currently undergoing significant change as we have more access to the voices of adults reflecting on their own earlier experiences), is not a bad thing.

[Johannah]

I’m looking at this from the perspective of my lived experience- and that means adoption, not ART. My wife and I wanted to parent. I don’t think you’re ever going to have families created without that initial desire- no matter how adult-centric it may be. Children, especially babies, simply don’t get to decide on who their parents will be.

In our case, my wife and I felt a bit ambivalent about the sheer number of isms we’d be handing to a child who joined our family. To start with, any child of ours would be the Jewish child of lesbians. Then add to that the complications of how they joined our family. We felt a bit preemptively guilty about dropping all of that on an unsuspecting kid’s head.

Our solution was to go the route of foster-adopt and to request children old enough to have some say in the matter. We figured that children five and up would be able to express some level of opinion about joining our family.

But then you get to those fine lines Jody mentioned, and despite what we’d written on our forms the first child with whom we were presented was a beautiful little boy, fifteen months old, and legally free for adoption. And we hit several of those lines all at once. Honestly, we were tired of waiting. That was definitely a piece. And they showed us his picture. And while we knew they’d find an adoptive placement for him- legally free at under two is rare in foster/adopt- there weren’t exactly lines out the door for a seriously drug-involved biracial little boy. And we felt kind of skeevy about cherry-picking children. We didn’t think we should be making the choice and so we had pretty much said that we’d accept the first child presented to us. And we adopted him. And four years later, we can’t imagine life without him. And we do our best to make our choices respect who he will be- knowing they may not be choices he will agree with.

For example, counter to many other people’s decisions, we do tell his adoption story freely. Because he is as wonderful as he is, he serves as an excellent object lesson. And it may not be fair to him, but we want the word to get out that it is okay to adopt children who were born dependent on drugs. We want people to see the beautiful children who come out of the foster-care system. We do talk to him about this, but he’s five. Right now, he wouldn’t care if we talked about how often he poops. Actually- he’d encourage that one. And when he does care, we’ll stop telling his story. But the reality is that it won’t prevent it from being known by those around him. They will have already heard the story, and they won’t forget it just because he’s done talking about it. Right now we justify this saying we are trying to contribute to a world where he, and others with his story, are more easily accepted, but the reality is that this does cross the boundaries of his privacy.

I wanted to add in a piece about my experiences as a foster-parent and working with parents whose children are in foster-care and unplanned pregnancies, but I’ve written three paragraphs and deleted them, so this is clearly not something I can write in a comment on a post. So- my take is that parenting is very complicated and, done well, full of ethical questions that each parent must answer for him or herself.

[Shannon]

See, now I feel both better and worse. On the one hand, writing this here is largely preaching to the choir, and leaves me just as frustrated about the 90% of the population that doesn't really get these things. On the other hand, it is an utter relief to come over here and get reminded that you folks do get it.

It isn't that people can't embark on just about any baby-making plan with their heads and hearts in the right place, it's that most people just don't.

I feel like however fine the lines, my blog audience (the part of it that has made itself known to me, anyway) is on the proper side of that line, most of the time, and when we (if I can include myself in my audience) aren't, we're filled with thoughtfulness about what it all means and how to best mitigate it.

[Brittany]

I don't know...I have to think that almost every instance of becoming a parent has something to do with a personal desire. Even unplanned pregnancy. When I had an unplanned pregnancy at 17, I guess it was my personal desire to have that baby that kept me from either having an abortion or choosing adoption. I'm sure many people would call the desire of a 17 year old to keep that baby and parent it selfish or irresponsible. I guess I'm pointing out that this debate on wanting a child to fulfill our own adult needs could be used a lot of ways. But your point is very important and we should all think hard about it, particularly in the world of adoption.

[Lindsay]

Thank you for this post - it speaks for what myself (and many other donor-conceived adults) have been saying for years.

~Lindsay - 24 year old DC adult

[anonymous for this]

My husband really slammed me with this one. I've forever been saying I want a big family, house full of kids, etc. etc. I have an overly-romantic notion of big families with no first-hand experience. He came from a big family with not enough space, time, or financial resources and has insisted that we only have as many as time, money, attention, and space allow. I think sometimes--sometimes, and I want to be clear this isn't always the case--family formation takes the kids for granted. I don't think it's necessarily about an adult's desires VERSUS a child's needs. I think that the adult, desiring to raise a child, has to simultaneously consider what life will be like for that child from every angle the parent can possibly examine it.

So I think it's less about the particular form of family formation (I'm among the very few people on the left end of the social spectrum that actually thinks the Duggars are doing alright, with obviously well-cared-for children and tons of love and people to care for them; but dude--the Jon and Kate + 8 family makes my skin crawl) and more the care with which the decision is made.

Lots of kids would be lovely, but my husband reminds me of the cost of an ideal to the smallest participants when their real needs aren't taken into account.

[Elise]

Of course wanting babies is all about the parents, if it wasn't then the human race wouldn't go on. That's why they are so cute and soft and sweet-smelling; so they survive their first few weeks as soul-sucking parasites. Biological reproduction is the default, it just is, and wanting that is 100% normal. I think that there is a danger to over-thinking this, humans have sex to reproduce. That it can also be done without reproduction is a side benefit. Adoption is not the same and never has been, because adoption should be all about the child, someone who has adrift in the world and needing a replacement family. That want-to-be parents are confused about this is also natural because they haven't gone through that new parent transformation where the reality of caring for a child has sunk in. Anyway, just my stream of consciousness reply.

[Shannon]

But the big complication in adoption, is that often enough, the child isn't adrift and in need of a replacement family. Rather, given the huge pool of people wanting to adopt, such children are sometimes produced for the system. And that's because prospective adoptive parents (and their allies and/or exploiters as the case may be) are more concerned about those adults than they are about the children involved.

[Elise]

I take your point completely regarding producing children for adoption, I was referring to the "root need" in baby lust versus that in adoption. The ethical issues regarding adoption are so murky, I honestly don't know what to do about it.

[Shannon]

Murky, ingrained, and commoner than not. It's frustrating.

[sster]

I'm sorry, Elise, but "baby-lust" can be entirely separate from the desire to procreate. I am at least one of three people for whom this is true. But I do agree that adoption itself, as a practice, has to be about the child. Otherwise we have, as Shannon remarked so well, a system whereby children are produced for parents rather than parents for children already in need.

For people like me, the "root need" was parenting. Only when adoption didn't work out for us did we turn to pregnancy.

[Emma]

I like what Elise said.

I also would add that one of the main contributing issues to this murky mess is the obsession with motherhood (and parenthood in general, but especially motherhood) as The Path for an adult woman. There is an assumption that every girl will grow up to be a mother, and that any woman without a child of her own is unfulfilled, and/or there's something wrong with her.

Without changing that, I can't imagine that we can change much else. People who can't have bio children of their own will be desperate to have children some other way if the message they've been receiving all their lives - and are receiving louder and clearer all the time while they try to conceive/adopt - is that they'll be miserable until they're mothers.

[Pollyanna Sunshine]

shannon, it may seem like you're preaching to the choir here, but I do think these are points worth making. I know my perspective on these issues has developed a lot in the couple of years since I've been reading your blog and other sites and resources that it has pointed me to. But yeah, I think the more you can raise such issues for broader audiences like strollerderby, that is a really good thing. I think you do this really well WRT specific issues all the time on strollerderby, and I hope that thinking out loud and hearing back from this chorus might help you figure out some new ideas for ways to frame these topics for different audiences.

[Sara]

I agree that these issues need to be discussed, but I think that it's very important to be careful with your tone and assumptions when you are trying to communicate with people with very different perspectives and life experiences. I have been reading your thoughtful posts about adoption for years, and have learned a lot from them. However, I think that your writings on ART tend not to display the kind of thoughtfulness and deep understanding that so permeates your writings on adoption, and that the reactions that you are getting on Strollerderby may be a result not only of defensiveness on the part of people involved with ART in some way, but also a result of the reader’s perceptions of your lack of compassion with the issues that they’re facing.

For example, why is it offensive to you that some people are upset by a dysfunction of a major organ system? That's what physiological infertility is. It’s not some heteronormative social construct. The biological function of one’s reproductive organs is to reproduce. The inability to do so is a dysfunction. Is it really unreasonable that someone would take the proper functioning of their body for granted and be dismayed to discover that in fact things were not as they had assumed? Obviously there are no guarantees in life, and many people suffer much worse medical problems, but that doesn't mean that physiological infertility doesn't involve a real loss for at least some of the people that experience it. And while obviously reproduction is very tied up in social constructions of gender and sexuality, grief over infertility is not a uniquely female or heterosexual experience. Some of the members of my first-ever infertility support group are lesbians who had to use IVF to achieve pregnancy (or who have failed to achieve pregnancy after using IVF) because they were physiologically infertile (in addition to being socially infertile). While obviously I can’t claim to have insider knowledge about their feelings, my friends in this situation certainly seem to be just as upset about their physiological infertility as straight people. Obviously you don’t place any particular value on your own body's possible ability to conceive, gestate, or lactate a child, but does that mean that it's wrong or offensive for others to do so, and to mourn the loss of that ability? If you think that it's actually wrong to value pregnancy, lactation, or genetic parentage then is it really surprising that you have difficulty communicating effectively with people who do value these very things?

And is it such a bad thing that people REALLY want children? While I agree that being desperate for a child doesn’t mean that you will be a good parent, it also doesn’t mean that you won’t! Perhaps if your family hadn’t been formed with such relative ease, in the manner and time of your choosing, you would have experienced some of this desperation yourself eventually. Who knows?

I do agree with much of what you’ve said here, including: a) the fact that Madonna is behaving in an arrogant, selfish, and disrespectful manner, and b) the fact that it is very important to keep in mind that our children’s thoughts and feelings may be very different from our own, and that we have the absolute obligation to be respectful of the feelings that they may have in the future when making decisions now.

I suggest that if you want to communicate effectively with “general” audiences, you might first start by acknowledging (to yourself and others) that other people love their children just as much as you love yours. If the discussion is framed as “how can we help prospective parents to make the choices that will be best for their families in the long term,” rather than “how can we keep selfish people from making bad choices,” I think you might find that you get a different reception. Allie said it very well: “I do agree with much of what you have said but, in the end, the best we can do for children is be the best parents we can in the circumstances we find ourselves. Sometimes our choices will have been the 'wrong' ones for our children. It's messy. But that's life.”

[Shannon]

Sara, some days I'm just overwhelmed with "selfish people making bad choices." I was at a conference two weeks ago full of people grievously harmed by selfish people making bad choices and it definitely put me over the edge.

I am kind of weary of restating that I have nothing against infertile people AS infertile people. I just think the level of self-centeredness (and lack of class-consciousness) on a lot of IF blogs is sometimes quite shocking.

My family was hardly formed with relative ease in the manner and time of my choosing, by the way. I am currently well past Plan B for life.

As for my writing on ART not matching my writing on adoption, agreed. But I do think adoption has an awful lot to offer the ART world if folks wanted to hear it, which it really seems they don't, most of the time.

I read a statistic that 85-90% of donor conceived children are not told they were donor conceived. That's absolutely unconscionable.

I don't think people love their children less than I do. But I do think people can be lazy when it comes to looking difficult facts that may affect their children in the eye.

[Sara]

I hear you. It must be hard not to drown in the pain after an intense experience like that conference.

From what I've read, parents of donor-conceived children are much more likely to disclose the involvement of a donor now than they were even a few years ago. The numbers vary, but some surveys say that as many as 50% of donor-assisted parents of young children say that they plan to tell the children. We'll see. There's room for hope.

I think that you must read different infertility blogs than I do. My impression is that infertile people are not any different from fertile people in terms of class-consciousness or self-centeredness. They're just less fertile.

As for being well past plan B for life, I hear you there too. I think I'm up to about Q. I wouldn't take A back if you paid me, though. I hope that you feel the same way.

[Anne]

I agree with the poster above who pointed out the danger of overthinking reproduction. I'm straight, had fertility issues and was lucky enough to get pregnant without ART. I chafe at the idea that wanting my body to be healthy and reproduce properly and being profoundly sad about the fact that it doesn't is "entitlement". It's sadness about having a medical condition, compounded by the emotional element of family.
To boil that down to some kind of mercenary desire to make a child into a commodity is to misunderstand the sadness that people feel about infertility. Sure, some people may be inelegant in using words to describe that feeling, but everyone that I know who has adopted or used ART is coming from a caring place. And gives the child that comes to them tremendous love. I haven't met the straw man who wants to "buy a child".
It's nice that you and your partner didn't feel the ache of infertility or a strong desire to have a child before you adopted, it's great actually, good for you. Sadness sucks. But other people do feel profound pain about infertility and that is okay too.
It's not that I don't have concern about the rights of the child, it's just that the hypothetical child that my husband and I desired to have is merely hypothetical. Our desire was selfish, most desires are selfish. I can't deliberately reproduce without having "self" involved.
Once that child is born, however, I firmly believe that he/she has rights to knowledge of his/her lineage and method of conception (if ART is involved). Donor sperm, donor embryo, surrogacy can be done well and with ethics, in my opinion. Full disclosure and access to information is the key, I think.

[Kami]

I am here via Dreams and False Alarms. I have only read this post and think I follow it.

It is hard to predict how an not-yet-conceived-someday-adult will feel. We know how we feel very well. I am concerned about my DE baby - will she be healthy (icsi is only 12 years old, ivf only 30), will she be happy? Will she be ok with our choices?

I don't know, yet I chose to do it anyway because I desperately wanted to be pregnant again (our first child died) and I didn't want to face not having that.

FWIW, I found a known donor because I thought it might be important to our child. She will also always know how she was conceived.

Thoughtful post.