And now Marley and Suz shoot us right back into adoption territory!!
Not that I’m ignoring Joy, there’s a busy discussion happening in the comments to this post. But I’ve written so much of it before (that Pennie has a right to her decision, that I refuse to dictate how she or Madison should feel — good or bad — about the adoption) that I’m not up to writing it again. I understand, too, that the divorce anology is way imperfect but I think the parallels work — it’s a legal family decision made by adults that hugely impacts kids often negatively but is made without their input. Also it’s another place where adults tend to downplay how the kids feel about it. So that’s why I chose it.
Reading the comments did make me think more about the term “parent” and “parenting,” which segues nicely to linking up Thorn‘s thoughts on Shannon saying that open adoption can queer a straight family. While Pennie and I don’t co-parent (because I hold the legal reins in our relationship) I think she’s still a parent. I think that when she’s with Madison she does parent by definition. I mean if she’s a mother, wouldn’t she be a parent? She tells Madison to calm down or helps her pour herself some milk or wipes a tushie now and then. Plus she gave birth to her, which is pretty darn parental. I don’t know. The terminology sometimes makes me so tired. We get so hung up on what Pennie IS and what she ISN’T but there aren’t words to help people understand her place in our family and in Madison’s life that don’t have a whole lot of baggage.
Thinking today about the “queering” of our family made me think about how people sometimes say of a gay couple, “Wait, so who’s the husband and who’s the wife?” I feel like that’s what they try to do to Pennie — but who’s the real mom? On the Facebook relative widget, I have Pennie labeled as “My Daughter’s Mother” because that’s it, isn’t it?
(sigh)
Marley asked:
Why do facts mean nothing when working on “progressive” adoption legislation–or even talking to people about adoption. You can spew out a list of facts a mile long and all you get back is yabutt. If there is a response at all. Obviously people prefer their personal mythologies and you/we are “uninformed,” “uneducated” or plain stupid. And, of course, there are also agendas, which are sacrosanct. Adoption saves babies, for instance, and you’re just a baybee killer.
Marley, you answered your own question. Sacrosanct agendas and baybee killers. (sigh again) And being deathly afraid of queers of any stripe. There’s one way to be a family and that family can have one mom, one dad and a smattering of babies although one boy and one girl for best results. God forbid anyone screw with that. I DON’T get it — especially when adoptees and first parents are standing there saying, “BUT THAT WASN’T OUR EXPERIENCE!” Truthfully I am still naive as hell because sometimes I read Marley‘s blog and think, “You have GOT to be KIDDING.”
Now we throw up our hands in frustration and note that this makes for another smooth segue right into Suz‘s question:
Do you think women, infertile women, will ever come to realize that they dont have a “right” to take the child of another simply becuase they cannot have their own? Do they realize they are transferring trauma? Why do some women think they deserve a child and others dont? Is it true that as long as there is no “cure” for infertility women will be actively harvesting the children of others?
Well, I think this misses the mark. It’s true that “family building” drives the industry and that the people who generally want to build families are we infertile types but we’re all operating under these huge fallacies about parenthood and womanhood and motherhood. I mean, we’re all buying the same bill of goods that motherhood is the be all and end all if you can do it right (i.e., one mom, one dad, one of each kid) and that we are living lives unfulfilled if we don’t have kids. Couple that with a hard-driving biological urge and you’ve got some pretty fierce entitlement.
Plus for infertiles like me, you have a whole world telling us to never give up — your child is out there somewhere. (I think the infertility industry does a number on women, too.) And we all know that any serious issues with adoption are dismissed out of hand (look at Marley’s question) and so the whole issue is pretty loaded to tilt towards getting grabby.
Most individual infertile women I know (and I know a lot) are pretty lovely people just like anyone else and — other than some screwy ones online — I haven’t met any that are actively harvesting the children of others. I mean, most of us want to build a family through adoption and when we start down that path we’re operating pretty blindly. If we come across an unscrupulous agency or lawyer, it’s not always easy to tell. Plus we have a whole world telling us that adoption is grand (it’s the same world telling potential birth moms that adoption is the most unselfish choice they can make). And the adoption reform movement is still hampered by constituents whose education tends to skew toward caustic. But I feel like the internet has also made a stronger, more effective dialog possible and that with institutions like Ethica and the Evan B. Donaldson Institute there can be real change made.
I think it’s important to bring the discussion to people outside of the adoption world — to people interested in families and in women’s rights and in parenthood. I know that people outside the triad are interested because many of my readers (and most of y’all aren’t connected to adoption) tell me so. I also think that we have to work on the rest of the world, too, because you’ve got folks like Ann Coulter saying that single mothers can only raise strippers and rapists and murderers and it’s those views — far more than baby yearning — that makes adoption possible.
More of what Ann said on FoxNews:
HANNITY: Let me go to Ann. Let me go back to this single mother — this single mother issue here, because you make a pretty profound point that isn’t often made.
You know, I thought we live in a land of the free and home of the brave — brave. You have choices in life. You know, for example, if you decide to get in the back of a car, and you start making out with your boyfriend and girlfriend, and you start removing one article of clothing after another.
COULTER: Right.
HANNITY: This is a choice to get in the car. This is a choice to take off the clothes. This is a choice to have sex. You do it of your own volition.
COULTER: Right. And it’s a choice not to give an illegitimate child up for adoption, which is, I say, surprisingly, I think to me, an interesting statistic, is that adopted children rank better on every measure of well-being.
They don’t think about being adopted. Their parents don’t think about them being adopted. They have less use of drugs, less run away, less criminal behavior than non-adopted children.
And adoption is discouraged while legitimacy and single mothers are elevated as if they are, you know, the personification of selfless virtue.
She may be one of the most offensive people saying it but she sure isn’t the only one. The money from us infertiles may drive adoption but it’s our economic and moral damning of “inappropriate” mothers that keeps us supplied.
Ann Coulter isn’t getting paid by adoption agencies, she’s just steeped in anti-woman rhetoric and wants to create policy based on it. She’s not the only one.
Related posts:
[...] an interesting ongoing discussion over at this woman’s work pertaining to the discussion of who has the “right” to be a mother, infertility [...]
Paragraphein, I think it was Ruth talking about the difficulty of keeping ethics and reform in mind while in the midst of actively making adoption decision. I too thought that was a powerful observation, but it didn’t come from me.
And I totally agree that the issue of demand should be discussed, even though I don’t see that there’s much to be done about it policy-wise except not to cater to it. I’m with you on these statements all the way:
“At the same time, I am not sure it’s worthless to address the demand issue even at the point of just prior to adopting. There ARE women who will take it all in and listen and frankly, choose not to participate in the system, or choose to do their absolute best to do it ethically. That IS worth something. It is worth something to me that there are amoms who I’ve witnessed go from “me me me,” go from writing posts about “why does that teen in my street get to have a baby and I don’t? It’s not fair, she should be giving that baby up” to, eventually, embracing openness and talking to moms they’re “matched” with about their reasons for placing and supporting them to the point that the women parent! That is worth something!”
Question: Does anyone know why Australia has been able to make so much more progress on adoption issues than the U.S. has? Australia and the United States were more or less in the same place adoption-wise during the Baby Scoop years, but now we’re miles apart. Obviously there’s greater support for Australian families re: socialized medicine and other financials, but what else has happened there socially and legally that’s enabled their progress over the last 30+ years? What role do you think the presence of the Religious Right/rabid anti-abortion contingent plays in all this (since that’s one presence I see here that I don’t see there to nearly the same extent)?
This quote:
“The truth is that both sets of parents are “real.” During the developmental stages of early childhood, when a child’s thinking is concrete, an adopted child needs to understand that there are two mothers and two fathers, but there is only one set of, or one parent. The role of parent must be made clear and distinguished from that of mother and father.
A child, after all, clearly understands that there can be many mothers and fathers. People may have multiple grandmothers and grandfathers, a godmother and godfather, a stepmother or stepfather– and they may also have a birth mother and a brith father. In all adoptions, legal and emotiona, it is the roles, not the labels, that must be most carefully defined for the child.”
This doesn’t make any sense to me, but it is supposed to make sense to a child?
Okay, the thing that always frustrates me is that people fail to realize that whether they are solving their problem of an unwanted pregnancy or infertility via adoption, they are still using a human-being to solve that problem with.
Despite the fact of thinking that abortion really *is* the best answer to an unwanted pregnancy, I am struck by the old pro-life slogan. “It’s a Child not a Choice”
Oh and I know not all adoptees feel like me, some adoptees in fact blow their effing heads off, that is actually why I started my blog.
Adoption is a huge burden to place on a child. Huge. Personally, I think the very act of being adopted does just as much damage as being relinquished. It is of a different nature, and the requisites are tacit and elusive, but people underestimate the importance of identity.
It is a precious and wonderful thing, like oxygen though, only those of us who have been denied an honest one can appreciate the impact of its loss.
I just wanted to thank Lula for sending me over here. I’ve been so snowed under both literally and figuratively lately I might have missed this FABULOUS discussion.
Dawn thanks for working so hard to create a space where this can happen. And for FREE! I feel like we should be paying you.
I have a lot to say about this and I will take it to my own blog soon.
This has been a very interesting discussion, but it seems like some comments have gone missing.
Or maybe, for some reason, I just can’t access them.
Just wondering what’s up.
Kippa, they’re on two pages now. I didn’t know my theme did this but apparently it does! If you look above “Leave a reply” you’ll see the navigation to go back to earlier comments.
(sent via email and posted on blog)
Kippa, there’s two pages now, if that’s what’s making it look like posts are missing. You can click back to the earlier ones there above Reply: “Previous” or “1″.
Here’s mine:
http://lilysea.blogs.com/peterscrossstation/2009/01/why-adopt.html
Oh, sheesh, never noticed that. Things have to be right in front of my nose for me to see them!
Thanks, folks.
“Adoption is a huge burden to place on a child. Huge. Personally, I think the very act of being adopted does just as much damage as being relinquished. It is of a different nature, and the requisites are tacit and elusive, but people underestimate the importance of identity.”
My friend tried to compare it to divorce.
Needless to say, that discussion went out the window, otherwise we were seriously going to start personalizing and hurting each other, and that wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere.
I’m coming in late, and completely new to this blog; I wandered on over here from Peter’s Cross Station. Nothing too profound to add, except that my adoptive process never seems to crop up in these kinds of discussions, which I find interesting. My wife and I adopted a six-year-old girl who had been permanently removed from her birth family.
We’ve got all sorts of larger issues with the thought that she was removed; there is so often a persecution of the poor involved in children being removed from their parents and first homes. If it was possible to go back years and provide culturally sensitive support, perhaps the removal would not have been necessary. But that fact is contrasted with the fact of the scars all over my daughter’s body. The choice to remove her was a fait accompli by the time we came along. Whether or not she would be able to find a stable, permanent home that would allow her to thrive was the present question in her life. Our adoption is mandated as a closed one, and that decision wasn’t ours to make; the government agency decided that it was in the best interests of our daughter’s safety and well-being. Again, it’s hard for us to comment on the truth or validity of that perspective. We have a lot of compassion and empathy for what we imagine to be the struggles of her birth family, and we certainly have a vast amount of sadness and compassion for what will be a painful road for our daughter, one that we can support her in only to a point. She said the other day that her first mum must be dead, because that’s the only way it makes sense to her that she’s now with us. Her questions around identity and belonging have already begun, and will probably never end.
I know that older child adoption is a minority experience within the world of adoption. But it is a reality. As queer parents, we thought long and hard about why we could or should parent, what parenting meant to us, and what role biology played for us. But additionally, a thing that bemused us a great deal was the seemingly universal focus on babies. I believe that there is some as yet unexplored cultural mythology around babies that suggests to many that it’s somehow not really parenting if you weren’t in on it right from the beginning. We’ve had many people tell us flatly that they simply couldn’t have started at age 5 to parent a child. From our perspective, the fact that our daughter has independent memories of her family of origin, and of the path she travelled to us, is of incalculable benefit. She won’t be relying entirely on the stories we tell her for truth. She has some inherent sense of her beginnings, and doesn’t just have to take our word for it.
Sorry, this is all over the map, but the comments raised so many different thoughts for me. I guess I’m interested in others’ thoughts about why this aspect of adoption never seems to crop up in debate, and how it impacts others’ thoughts around the validity of adoption? I wish our daughter had never needed to be adopted. I wish she could have stayed safely and happily in her birth family. But that wasn’t the case, and since it wasn’t, I am blessed to have been given the responsibility of parenting her. How does this fit within the discussions of privilege, and stealing other women’s children? It’s just all so muddy, and complex.
It seems to me that there’s a general perception out there in the general population that adoption ‘heals’ relinquishment (or something close to – that it’s a kind of social remedy. Personally I don’t see how that could be the case, although whether it does *as much* damage as relinquishment I wouldn’t know (and frankly I’m not sure how anybody else would either, unless they were in a position to make the comparison, which I don’t know how anyone could be. I’ve heard people brought up in foster care or institutions make a case for the opposite).
However, I do see how being adopted obliges a person to conform to norms that would be fundamentally foreign to him/her. Effectively to take on a different persona than the one they’d have developed naturally within their biological clan. I think that could be quite a burden to carry. Some people seem to be able to do it relatively easily. Others to feel the disconnect deeply. And many in between.
I’d guess the degree to which adoption causes damage would depend on a lot of different factors.
[...] entitlement and the adoption chasm I am inspired by Dawn – or at least the commentary on this post of hers. I am not sure I can cover everything that is in [...]
[...] is often the case, there’s a great conversation/ debate going on over at dawn’s place . i didn’t have the energy to respond there in a timely manner, but i am very impressed with [...]
As a PAP in Australia I’d really like someone to explain to me why adoption in Australia is so wonderful and what progress has been made, because while I really like that the decision not to parent is made and finalised before there are any PAPs involved, I don’t like the minimum of 3 months in foster care, it being illegal in some states for adoptive & birth families to have independent contact even within an open adoption and the situation with permanent care for children over 1 and those with special needs.
I really don’t feel that we’re in a better position at all. I’m glad that it’s impossible for us to buy a baby. I’m glad that open adoptions are encouraged. But the PAPs and even APs that I’ve met have mostly been largely uneducated about adoption, desperate for a baby and only choosing local adoption because they can’t afford more IVF or IA. There’s basically no information available, questions are often not answered, even in applying there are significant problems and no guidelines in terms of what PAPs should look like.
I’m sorry to rant like this but I really don’t like seeing Australian adoptions being held up as something to strive for when I have a lot of concerns that I mostly can’t get answers to and I don’t have the option of going to another agency. I also think it’s worth noting that there are only a tiny number of domestic adoptions and while this is great in that it shows women all over the country aren’t being pressured into placing their babies, I’m amazed that any happen at all as adoption seems to be not only socially unacceptable over here but it also seems to be overly complicated and confusing for birth families with adoptions being delayed for months because of birth families moving on and losing contact with the Government agency without knowing that there are more things they need to do before their baby can be placed.
I think it’s also worth noting that since our government started paying out the Baby Bonus there has been a significant increase in the number of infants requiring intervention from child welfare workers. This is because people are having children for the sole reason of getting the money and people are make the decision not to abort / make an adoption plan because they see the money as a safety net, unfortunately it doesn’t go far and when it runs out things get tough very quickly and too often (and not often enough) the kids end up in care. Given our shortage of foster families and social workers this often ends badly for the children and their families.
Now I’ve calmed down a bit, I wanted to come back and thank you and your commenters for the great discussion that happens on this blog. Without it and other sites like it, I’m really not sure where I’d be.
I also wanted to add that I think it’s a good thing if the baby bonus means that people who would have otherwise made an adoption plan are able to parent and get through a temporary financial situation. But the other side of the coin, where people who are unable to care for their children are bribed by the Government to have a child or two that they otherwise would not have had really makes me queasy. Especially when I know from being a foster carer that many children who aren’t safe in their homes are left there with little support for them or their families because we just don’t have enough support services for people who don’t know how to provide a safe place for their children.
It also concerns me that adoption doesn’t seem to be accessible (and definitely not socially acceptable) over here. I’m concerned about how expectant parents are treated in hospitals here and I worry about the counseling and legal advice they receive. It’s horrible that anyone is manipulated into placing a child, but I don’t think it’s any better when people aren’t able to place an infant for adoption given that once they’re over 6 months old adoption is not legally possible in this country (instead there are parenting orders which restrict the legal rights of those parenting child and the child itself). If I was faced with an unplanned pregnancy and no support I doubt I’d be confident in making the decision make an adoption plan under our system and if I can’t do it, how can I expect others to put their faith in us as PAPs when I know they probably aren’t fully aware of what they’ve agreed to (e.g. open adoptions that wont be enforced and that most PAPs here have no interest in.)
I also wanted to add to the demand discussion that there is a much larger demand here than there is supply but since adoption is pretty much inaccessible from both sides and the Government controls it all it stays stable. Instead of adopting here more and more people with money are going to India and buying babies over there through surrogacy programs. Personally I’d prefer to see a lot more education about adoption, a lot more support for EPs, BPs & APs, and the abolishment of Parenting Orders in favour of actual adoptions than have people bring home babies born in another country to a surrogate using donor gametes. That is just so fucked up when I’m sure many of those families would be more than happy to adopt over here if it was accessible to them and they knew that their rights would be the same as other parents. Although, I do like that birth certificates aren’t faked when POs are made, I really wish birth certificates could be amended to include the adoptive parents below those of the birth parents. I also wish that private adoption was an option for people in this country so children could be raised within families & communities, again with the same legal rights as others.
I know I’ve just gone off on another rant. Maybe we’ll be disapproved of and I wont have to worry about this, but there is so much that doesn’t sit right with me about adoption over here, and as I said before, I really don’t like our adoptions being labeled progressive when adoptions as open as yours are not possible here.
Sassy, I really appreciate your input in this conversation. I hear Australia upheld a lot in reform circles but then I hear real life stories that make me wonder how it’s ACTUALLY working.