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International adoptions seem so wierd to me because I guarentee there’s no shortage of orphans in your own country.
The problem in the U.S. is that you can deny people adoptions if they’re a different religion from the official stated religion of the agency (many adoption agencies are religious), or if they just have a religious objection to you adopting (i.e. you’re a single woman or queer).
It’s also super expensive.
It’s also super expensive.
This is because adoption of healthy infants in the US is a market. A regulated and yet still dysfunctional one, and one with a pretty weird relationship to its supply side, but that’s absolutely what it is. It was even worse in decades past.
As an adoptee from the Mormon system, let me tell you that if I hadn’t already bailed on that bonkers religion, it would have happened after visiting the “Family Services” office by slinking through the side door in the food storage warehouse in the light-industrial park in search of my legally entitled information, only to learn it was a one-page printout of nonsense and very much did not include the letter I was later told by my birth mother that she’d given them. I also grew up knowing that I cost approximately as much as a small speedboat, and later realized that my mom’s conversion from being a died-in-the-wool baptist to the LDS church happened almost exactly a year before I was acquired. Hmmm…
healthy infants
Every single time an anti-abortionist uses the “just put it up for adoption” argument, I ask them how many babies with disabilities they have adopted or plan to adopt. Weirdly, none of them have ever told me they’ve adopted a single disabled child.
Yup, and even apart from that they say it like it’s not a health risk to carry and deliver a baby, a professional risk to even be pregnant, and that separation is lifelong trauma for all involved. It’s perfectly possible to raise an adopted kid well enough that it’s a not a major component of their personality, but it’s a challenge that must be handled.
And that’s best case. I’m super pleased to have been born, but honestly I’m not sure my birth mother thrived how she might have if she’d made a different choice with her own body. She’s a sweet, sensitive lady and the couple of times I’ve met her I can tell it weighed on her for decades.
Don’t know about elsewhere but in Australia it’s damn near impossible to adopt. And don’t even try it if you’re not a straight white couple because the shitty Christian charities they’ve outsourced it too will magically ignore you.
Here’s the issue, and these stories don’t swing to such prominence in what is now that perpetual firehose to the face of information we now have daily.
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No one wants to invest years into what they assume is now their child, love, tears, hope, relief, and find out a few years in it might not be a done deal.
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Hi, I’m her real mom. I was on drugs and not of sound mind when I signed those papers. I’ve cleaned up my life and now want my baby back. Thanks and all but here’s a subpoena. Wins in court after 4 years of what was supposed to be permanent adoption.
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Hi, I’m his real dad. I never signed off on this. Sure I abandoned him, but now I’ve cleaned up my life and want to be a better man. I deserve this opportunity. Here’s a subpoena. Wins in court after 5 yrs of what was supposed to be permanent adoption.
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What does a couple do to avoid this bullshit? You travel to an orphanage in another country, then leave.
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If our system had permanence, I doubt this would even be a thing.
This is extremely rare and focusing on it promotes an unhealthy mindset among potential adoptive parents. No one is entitled to a healthy infant with no strings attached, and adoption inherently does come with strings attached, even if people try to pretend otherwise. I daresay if this is explicitly on someone’s mind, they should consider whether they should be adopting at all. It’s literally a smaller risk than that your kid will die in a car crash, with the added relief of said child not being dead.
Children deserve actual parents. Zero pity for anyone who abandons their child because of negligence or bad decisions.
Yes, they do, and 99.99% of parents who fuck around and neglect their kids do indeed lose them forever. So do 99.99% of biological parents who did nothing except sign the papers under duress. It’s just that it’s a statistical non-issue that someone is going to even try to steal your baby back, and the 4-5 years of court cases are there specifically to make sure that all parties are heard. Honestly, the only time I’ve really even seen this recently has to do Native American tribes, who have a very different relationship with this process and some pretty strong reasons to distrust the system.
I can tell you feel strongly about this, and I don’t want to imply there’s no room for nuance or that negligent parents deserve an unlimited number of re-tries, or that adoptive parents don’t love their kids. My adoptive parents are/were broken people in many ways, but I never felt unloved or unwanted. I do feel very strongly that infant stranger adoption has an outsized role in family planning options that pushes it to a darker place than it needs to be, and that in foster situations reunification should be the goal if it’s practical. For both, if all parties are acting in good faith and in the interests of children, then the numbers will land where they land. I just don’t think we’re there right now, through a combination of cultural norms and governmental policy.
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Honestly, stranger adoption really just shouldn’t be a part of the culture of family planning, and it’s one of those little out-of-the-way corners of American life that’s unexpectedly toxic. Seems like in other Western countries, the mainstream culture is a little better and lack of “domestic supply” means that the overseas adoptions still happen a ton, so while I guess it’s better in aggregate, it’s obviously still devastating in the particulars. Of course, then you have to unpack whether and how much a resistance to adoption is a symptom of small mindedness, but that’s a different discussion. Enough to say the American approach is awful.
Adoption outside the natural family should be a trauma-mitigation tool when all else has failed or a birth mother is personally determined to see it through. Few (not zero, but few) things mess up a parent-child dynamic more consistently than a rich couple trying to “save” a baby.
There are a number of people who want to raise a child but for reasons cannot have their own. I know several people with genetic issues that they do not want to pass on for example. There are also couples who despite trying just cannot have a kid (their doctors know more but that is private so it wasn’t shared with me).
There are a number of kids who do not have family who can take them in. There are neglectful parents who are not taking care of their kids (drugs are often a factor). There are cases where mom and dad died (car accident?) leaving a kid with no family to care for them (no aunts/uncles and grandparents who realize they are too old). The above is a small minority, but will several hundred million people in the US, and 8 billion in the world it happens all the time. The only question is how to get the two together.So, I was specifically trying to allow for scenarios like yours by saying it shouldn’t be in the “culture of family planning.” It’s extremely sad that people who want children can’t have them. If they feel a calling to build a family and care for a child whom the universe has failed, then wonderful. They should seek out fostering opportunities, get training and counseling to understand their role in the process, and to find the joy in reuniting when birth parents get their shit together. If that doesn’t happen and they adopt or assume permanent legal guardianship, then they are doing a service by mitigating the trauma experienced by a child. Unfortunately, people like this are exceedingly rare.
What happens more often is people are made to feel like they deserve a healthy infant with no strings attached (look at some of the other posts in this thread), and the large number of them creates a culture of pressuring birth mothers (usually indirectly, but not always), putting resources into tracking down babies or jumping the line, or when that fails, throwing money at the international process where their relative wealth brings out the bad actors and the temporarily desperate. In America at least, there are something like 20 qualified birth parent couples (to say nothing of the single folks who also have the means to support a child) for every healthy infant that enters the system. The normal thing would be to go to the back of the line and hope a call comes before you age out.
Instead, you get a scramble and competition and agencies that are nominally non-profit, but certainly have financial incentives to preserve their jobs and status (to say nothing of attorneys in truly private adoptions), pop up to serve the demand, and there are only so many ways to procure and price a supply, and most of them are at least somewhat unsavory. The international market tends to serve people who couldn’t bubble to the top of the domestic process, so it’s even worse.
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The genetic details absolutely matter. There’s no one factor that’s determinative, but it’s utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn’t matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.
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The main thing is the child’s welfare, and what’s best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.
In English, the word “parent” can be used in two important but very different ways.
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Biologically, conveying causal information about gametes and probability distributions of genetic data.
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Normatively, implying duties, rights, and responsibilities associated with certain close human relationships.
While it’s true that people often love their biological children and vice versa, the relevant fact is the emotional bond (condition 2), not the biological one, which has no normative import.
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