Apparently, I heard the question wrong. Probably because the question I answered is more common and I'm used to getting that one. But here's some clarification from paragraphein:
For me it's not a question of ethics, it's a question of adoption itself.
I didn't realize that was the question, because it would never occur to me that the answer isn't obvious. My family is worth any amount of pain and complexity. I love my family. I love my children. The give me untold joy every single day. I am a great parent. We have a terrific family. The pain and complexity that would be a part of my children's lives--regardless of who adopted them, whether they were adopted or not, whether they grew up in the foster system--is something I am more than willing to help them navigate, teach them to understand and grow through and simply be here to comfort them when it is too overwhelming.
I do not discount any pain or complexity of adoption. In fact, my understanding of adoption's difficulties increases every day as I live it out. Would I go back and do a single thing differently with regard to my family-building choices? Never. I would do it all again. I may yet do it again (adopt) and if I do, it will be a situation with yet more pain and complexity because I am beginning to feel that as far as ethics go, the less desirable a child on the "adoption market," the more ethical the adoption (as a rule of thumb).
No matter how complex, how paradoxical, how painful, there is no way anyone will ever convince me that my family is not a gift--a gift to each of its members and a gift to the world in general. Yes, I am including my children's first family members in that assessment. I truly believe that placing their children with my partner and me was the best option available among a few pretty bad options for my children's mothers. (Okay, maybe not with my partner and me specifically, but with people like us--adoption in general, open adoption in general, adoptive parents with our philosophy of family more specifically--we aren't the only ones on the planet.)
Life is complex and painful and riddled with messes we couldn't have anticipated. Parenthood is complex and painful and riddled with messes. Any kind of family is a big disaster waiting to happen. Am I wrong here? Look at all the disfunction and difficulty in families everywhere--all kinds of families. To choose to become a parent is to invite, on purpose, suffering into your life.
Adoption doesn't have a corner on the complexity and pain market. It may have a rarer type of complexity and pain, since it is not common compared to biological family relationships, but if avoiding complexity and pain were on my agenda, I'd have to retire from life. I don't even know where I'd go to do that.
And much as I agree that lots and lots--perhaps even the majority--of adoptions are unnecessary, there are adoptions that are the best available option for the people involved. If some folks at least, didn't feel adoption's particular complexities were something they could handle, where would these people be?
I realize that too many people assume that every adopted child is a child saved from some terrible fate--even death. And I realize that is actually true only in a small minority of cases. In fact, that is a caveat here at Peter's Cross Station--adoption is very, very rarely about rescuing anyone from anything.
And yet, I do believe that adoption is needed. I do believe that work as we might to reduce adoption, to encourage and support women in crisis pregnancies to raise their babies, those women deserve the option to place their babies in adoption as truly as they deserve (and I fervently believe they do) the option to terminate a pregnancy.
Asking me why I would be willing to adopt in spite of the complexity and pain of adoption is, I feel, like asking a young, single mother why she would keep her child instead of placing it for adoption. That path has complexity and pain too. But a mother is a mother. Her child is her child. And that's my answer too.
