The subject of adoption comes up frequently in the sometimes acrimonious back and forth between pro-choice and pro-life in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Some would have it that adoption is tantamount to child abuse; others that it has only a positive side. I feel that the truth lies somewhere between the child abuse narrative and "all is sunshine and butterflies".
A number of articles have come up lately, including this one on the NCR site a couple of days ago:
Here are a few takes from the NCR piece:
Born just three months after the watershed Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, John Gregg has early memories of being led around more than one National Right to Life conference as a toddler by his Catholic adoptive parents, who were enthusiastically anti-abortion.
"I'd walk around where people were tabling, and I'd see photo albums of aborted fetuses," Gregg recalled. "People would say, 'You were adopted? That's great! This is what would have happened to you if you hadn't been adopted.'"
(Just...wow, *face-palm*, stuff you should never ever do to any child, make them a poster-child to prove a point; or show them photos of aborted fetuses to make them grateful they were adopted.)
Tory Bae "...believes adoption should be a last resort to meet children's needs, not a chance for couples to satisfy a wish to have kids. In most cases, Bae said, biological families ought to be given resources to make it possible to keep their children."
"Keturah Wik, a 28-year-old adoptee in Portland, Oregon, agrees that the money adoptive families spend would be better redirected toward family preservation. "We are looking at families who are willing to pay upwards of $30,000 to essentially purchase a child and care for them," Wik said. "Why can't we hand that to that woman who is considering an abortion? If you want the child to be born, and to exist, why must it go to someone else, versus staying within their biological connection?"
Just a few personal words about these comments. The reason most people consider adoption is because they want to be parents. Helping families in poverty to stay together is of course good, but philanthropy is a separate subject. Referring to the $30,000-plus fees as "purchasing" a child isn't accurate, because this includes medical costs for the mother, also other costs such as home-studies, counseling, and social work services.
For a more positive take, there is this article from the Gladney Center for Adoption : Why Is Adoption Good? | Adoption.org
"We cannot ignore the fact that there is such a thing as forced adoption. I have heard countless stories of young mothers being forced by their families to place their children for adoption. This is especially true for adoptions that have happened in less recent years. Unfortunately, adoption has quite the sordid history. There was such a stigma with teen pregnancy in our history that there are many stories of women being sent away to have a child and then never seeing that child again."
"It would be ignorant to ignore the fact that abuse can happen even in an adoptive home. Not all of these situations are good and humans are incredibly flawed. There are many people who love their children but have issues or develop issues of dependency or abusive actions. Adoptive parents are not immune to this. Adoptees are not immune to abuse or the trauma that abuse brings."
"All adoptions come from a place of loss. While adoption may be celebrated and be a very good thing, someone in the situation is still losing. This may be the birth family and/or the adoptee. There is an initial breakdown of one family to form another. While an adoptive family may be overjoyed, there is still a certain amount of loss that occurs. There is typically a large amount of loss that a birth parent will experience as well as the rest of the birth family. "
"One good thing about adoption is the increasing popularity of open adoption. It was not too long ago that open adoption was virtually unheard of. Adoption in American history has included children having very little to no info about their birth family. Their birth families often have little to no information about what happened to their child. However, as time goes on and we realize the healthiness of open adoption, part of that birth family is being preserved to an extent through open adoption."
"To see the good in adoption, it is important that we first recognize the bad that comes with adoption. With anything good comes at least some bad. It is inevitable. However, adoption is good in so many ways that make adoption so worth it. In speaking about adoption as a whole, it is incredibly beautiful and life-giving in many situations. The bad that comes with adoption is often situational and a product of a broken system and broken people."
"...Adoption is good because it does create families for children who do not have a forever home. There are hundreds of thousands of children in foster care. With this, a multitude of them are available for adoption and are seeking adoptive homes. This means that either their parents’ rights have been terminated or their parents have passed away, and they have no other family who is able to take them in. These children deserve to be in a forever home. Adoption is good because it provides these children the chance to be a part of a family. This is a chance that they would likely not otherwise have without adoption."
a footnote in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling itself citing a severely limited "domestic supply of infants."
ReplyDeleteMany adult adoptees are tired of being rendered as products to prove a point.
"The commodification of children should never be in the same conversation or context when it comes to a person with a uterus and their access to health care," said Tory Bae, …It's two completely separate things."
I have been disturbed by articles about abortion, and comments following them, which look at babies as commodities. They often mention the many couples who wish to adopt babies but can’t because there aren’t enough available. Of course, they ignore that reality that there are currently about 120,000 children in the foster system waiting to be adopted. But it is unlikely that many of those children are perfect, white newborns. Fighting choice to make more babies available for adoption IS turning babies into a commodity, a product to be sold. I much prefer financial safety nets and financial incentives for women who are going to get an abortion because of desperation about how to:pay the bills than I am about a system that is set up to create more of a scarce commodity- adoptable newborns.
Of the people I know who adopted children, at least half are inter-racial adoptions, and some weren't infants. Of course it is wrong to commodify children. But I don't see that as being widespread.
DeleteI am all for expanding the social safety net to help meet the financial needs of mothers so that they don't feel pressured toward either abortion or an unwanted adoption.
Infant adoption, foreign or domestic, is a market, and lawyers and agencies have always made money on it. Not sure that's avoidable.
DeleteFertility clinics are a real racket.
I have no problem with diverting adoption money to needy birth families.
But I do think some state laws are way too skewed in favor of giving abusuve and neglectful parents umpteen chances to get their act together before rights are terminated. These policies keep kids in foster care, screw them up, and hamper adoptability. Give parents one year and one chance to clean up. After that, time's up.
Jean, I agree with you that the laws are too skewed in favor of parental rights when a reasonable chance has been given for them to shape up. Same with preference being given for family members to foster or adopt kids. That's fine if the people are able and willing to assume responsibility. But if they're just as messed up as the parents, it doesn't do the kids any favors.
DeleteI know a few grandparents here raising small children. Decent people with adult children in jail on drug related charges.
DeleteWhen I lived in the UP, there was a lot of legal activity surrounding Native American foster children and adoption. That seems to have died down as tribes asserted their rights under the Indian Child Welfare Act.
But where children of other ethnicities are concerned, there seems to be an ongoing debate over harm done by interracial adoptions.
Don't know if the interracial nature of the adoption is the problem, or if the practices of some agencies, especially those that operate in other countries, is at the root of it.
The US is a hard place to be ethnically out of sync with your family and neighborhood just now.
About the debate over interracial adoptions, the former gripe was that couples only wanted white infants. Now it's like they're doing a bad thing to take children of another race. But the bottom line should be to give children a stable, loving home. It's not always possible to match them up according to race. That said, the adoptive parents need to be well informed and sensitive about racial issues affecting their children.
DeleteIn the four or five interracial adoptions I've seen, ethnic differences add another layer of difficulty to the family dynamic when the kid hits adolescence. How much difficulty, tho, depends on a lot of factors. And, let's face it, nobody, adopted or living with their birth families, ever gets the optimal family. With adoptions, you can only try to get kids into the best available option.
DeleteAfter my second miscarriage, we looked at adopting an older child or sibling pair whose parents' rights had been terminated. Most of these children were birn to addicts or had been sexually abused, or both. Children with physical handicaps and Down Syndrome were plentiful. Their parents were nearly all in prison. We got through to the home study when fate intervened and I got pregnant again resulting in The Boy.
ReplyDeleteI still think about the binders full of photos of those kids. I wanted to adopt one of the Down syndrome babies when The Boy was 6, but Raber was against it. We got Geoffrey the cat instead. (Poor old Geoff died just a couple of weeks ago.)
We never wanted to adopt an infant in Michigan. The DeBoer case was still fresh in our minds. Michigan also allows birth mothers and fathers to change their minds.
Friends who adopted a baby girl right after birth were advised not to have a shower or decorate the baby's room until the adoption was finalized. Under the terms of their private adoption, the birth parents (who later married and had another child) received photos and letters and were allowed to send the baby presents on her birthday and Christmas.
The handoff at the hospital was poorly handled, with the birth grandparents running up to my friends and sobbing, asking for final chances to hold her and take photos. The grandparents had wanted their daughter to adopt the baby.
However awful these situations are--and they are awful, and I want to smack the idiot proliferation who think it's all just sunshine from heaven--no one is left with a dead child or miscarriage to mourn, and there is hope of seeing the child again.
Jean, yeah, that's true in our state too. The birth parents have a long time to change their minds. In fact that's why some couples lean toward a foreign adoption, though that's been curtailed lately. And not everyone is prepared for the challenges that you mentioned of adopting out of the foster system.
DeleteWith 23&me and Ancestry, anybody can track down their birth parents. Closed files by adoption agencies are irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteStanley, yes. People can have the degree of contact that they are comfortable with, but the basic facts are out there. Not just with adoption, also with sperm donor-ship. I was reading yesterday about some awkward secrets coming out, about broke male college students thinking that was a way to earn some extra cash. And fast forward a few years, finding out (and their wives and families finding out) that they fathered children they didn't know about.
DeleteKatherine, yes, and check out Netflix series "Our Father" about fertility doctor Cline fathering dozens of children with his own pollen. Apparently, there are 50 discovered cases of this. Years ago, nobody saw this DNA testing coming. Could prevent accidental incest.
DeleteWhile it might seem that adoption is the logical next step for someone deeply committed to the pro-life cause, further reflection should indicate that anytime a parent has a big agenda of their own in parenting, the parenting is likely to become very flawed. Parents expressing their interests vicariously (such as wanting their children to be very successful at sports, or get degrees, or make a lot of money) often do more harm than good.
ReplyDeleteWhile it is natural to think that parenting should be easy since the children receive not only genetics but also a major part of their environment from the parents, the reality is that the combination of genetics from both parents plus all the uncontrollable things in the environment means that having a child is more like being randomly assigned another human being.
Having a child, even more than marriage, is a life- long commitment for better or worse, richer or poorer, in health and in sickness, etc.
In the Byzantine Rite crowns are carried over the marriage couple during the ceremony. They are the crowns of martyrdom, signifying a commitment to greater self-lessness. That is also true of the vocation of having children that is implicit in marriage.
While ideally marriages and parenting should succeed, the reality is that some marriages and some parenting becomes so bad that new partners and are needed.
One of the greatest insights that I have come across about human development was given by a researcher-clinician who maintained that children in a problem situation (failing in school, family, or peer relationships) needed a new positive start. He always tried to find some interest or talent of the child and then partnered the child with a mentor, e.g., if the child was interested in sports, he partnered the child with an athlete who could provide the child with an environment and mentoring that could start a new positive trajectory.
Most of us in dysfunctional families look for relief. Dysfunctional parents rarely seek therapy for their kids because they don't want the family's dirty laundry aired. So some kids find relief in booze/dope. Some in early sexual relationships. The lucky ones find a teacher or other adult to take an interest and open up a more positive outlet.
Deletehaving a child is …like being randomly assigned another human being
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. As the youngest of five sibs, and the mother of three children, it has been clear to me my whole life that being children of the same parents, or biological parents of children, does not take the randomness out of the equation. Some physical traits may be shared, perhaps even some inborn talents or strengths like musical ability, athletic ability, etc but the personalities are all over the map. Becoming a parent is a blind faith venture into the unknown, whether parenthood comes biologically or via adoption. The church spends incredible amounts of time on marriage prep, or RCIA, but NO time on prepping people for parenthood. It is the hardest vocation out there, bar none, and most of us walk into it as cluelessly as we enter marriages.
Yah, kids usually turn out OK in spite of us rather than because of us.
DeleteAgree completely.
DeleteI'd say sharing biological and psychological traits might have some benefit. When I found out my father's peculiarities were a result of his OCD, it was revelatory. I found out where some of MY psychological problems came from. I believe I was able to compensate and even think my way out of some bad places. In my case, good parenting from my father consisted of just knowing my father and his history. But he did love the Russian authors and gave me a copy of "War and Peace". He gave me a book in geometry. Both books had a large effect on me. The most important thing is that I was loved and am able to love and feel compassion to this day. Regarding adoption, I just hope it isn't child snatching, especially from the poor here and abroad.
DeleteGuessing that most folks here have read Huckleberry Finn at some point or other. Huck was given back to his abusive father, who beat him regularly, on the theory, espoused by the judge, that children should stay with their parents. IIRC, Huck had been staying with two spinster women (who also were slaveowners) whose care for him probably was not the parental ideal, but which must have seemed benign compared to life with his father. His father was a rascal and apparently was well on the way to training Huck to be the same. Yet Huck's emotions upon learning of the death of his father were genuine. And then there is Jim the slave becoming Huck's de facto father. I found all those passages believable.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, I guess bioparents are not enough. Extended family and community are also parental. I was in an extended family and that's a plus.
DeleteI've known several couples who have been foster parents. They found it extremely challenging. I think it is, or can be, a holy vocation.
ReplyDeleteOne of the cases which resulted in Rest in His Arms burying an infant was that of a 13 year old who gave birth in the bedroom of her foster home. The girl's 14 year old sister assisted. The father of the baby was the abusive foster father. The 13 year old had been able to hide the pregnancy; her incentive to hide it was that the older sister had been impregnated by the same man a year earlier and had been beaten severely. After the baby was born, the kids literally through it away in the family's outdoor trashcan. The dad was arrested. I don't know what the outcome was for the two teens, but I hope the legal system was lenient on them. Our state's Department of Children and Family Services has been pilloried by the media at various points over the decades, but for some reason, this particular case didn't result in a round of bad publicity for them. No point to my sharing this except to illustrate that not all is sunny and rosy in the world of foster care.
If these post-Dobbs laws succeed in restricting abortions, I expect the need for foster parents will increase, perhaps significantly. And Children/Family Services agencies surely will need more funding - they're already stretched too thin, at least around here.
That is such a sad story! Hopefully the man who was the rapist (I'm not going to call him a father!) was put away for a long time. I hope the girls found some help and some TLC. Yes it's easy to find fault with Family Services, but we have to consider the situations they work with. I'm sure there is a high rate of burn out.
DeleteThere seem to be a lot of weirdos in the foster parent system. People who are doing it for money, homeschoolers with nutty disciplinary ideas claiming the.kids are possessed, poor supervision among the kids, and pedophiles. Many terrible things.
DeleteI know there are weirdos and bad people who foster for the wrong reasons, but in fairness there's a lot of good people who want to help kids who have been abused and neglected. I suppose the system doesn't vet them thoroughly enough. I think sometimes they take warm bodies because of the number of kids in the system and no place to put them.
DeleteHopefully the prolifers will be willing to pony up for more oversight as the system gets more stressed, but I haven't seen any interest on their part in improving things in the last 50 years. It's already terrible here in Michigan. Large numbers of kids just disappear and can't be found. Others are bounced from home to home so often they don't have enough credits for a high school diploma. The military is taking some and helping them get their GED, but 70 percent of kids who visit the recruiter are too fat to qualify.
DeleteMaybe all families are dysfunctional, it's just a matter of how far along they are on the spectrum of dysfunctionality. My parents genuinely loved us, but in some ways they were ill-prepared to be parents. They both grew up in the Catholic subculture bubble in the 1940s and 1950s, and it didn't prepare them for the craziness of being a kid in the 1970s. My parents didn't cope very well with what was, back then, modern life. They got better at it as they grew and matured. I think they would admit that they made mistakes with the older few of us.
ReplyDeleteI find it easier to be a parent of younger children than I do of these older children. I want them to get on with their adult lives. I hope it happens sooner or later :-)
A lot of parents had a hard time with the 70s. My mom said, somewhat later, that the late 60s and early 70s were the most difficult years for them. I said, "Well, I wore my skirts too short, and Martin (my next oldest brother) wore his hair too long, but we didn't actually do anything that bad!" She said, "It wasn't that, it was worrying about the world you would have to live in." But it did seem like they lightened up with the younger siblings.
DeleteMy parents were always going on about how much they loved us. Except on the days when they told us we were why they were drunk and crazy. Kids need encouragement, structure, and parents who model responsibility and consistency.
Delete