Part #9 in a continuing series on the anti-feminist, anti-choice organization Feminists For Life. Serrin Foster pretends to address feminist concerns about abortion bans; I make fun of her and shoot down her lies. This week’s topic is a doozy for those of us who actually don’t want children to suffer, so get your mouth protection against grinding your teeth at the callousness involved: What about all those kids in foster care that nobody wants?
Good question! Why bring more unwanted babies into the world when there’s already a huge problem getting homes for the babies there are? The callousness of anti-choicers towards abandoned children is legendary and gives lie to their whole notion that they are in this because they love babies. Foster, as you can imagine, dodges the question.
Many of the children waiting to be adopted are waiting because of legal processes, not a lack of loving homes. There are two million pre-approved American couples awaiting adoption. Two million women want to be mothers right now, and many of them want more than one child, as well as wanting children with special needs.
According to people who aren’t lying to you for sleazy anti-woman reasons, this isn’t true at all. It’s true that there are a lot of couples out there looking to adopt, but the idea that it’s strictly a numbers game is easily disproven. Turns out that quite a few of those two million couples go wanting because they have very exacting standards about what their child must be like—and the biggies are healthy and white.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services estimates that as many as 127,000 children in foster care needed adoptive families. The ethnic backgrounds of these children are as follows:
* 42% were African American
* 32% were White
* 15% were Hispanic
* 1% were Native American/Alaskan Native
* 1% were Asian/Pacific Islander
* 8% were of unknown/unable to determine ethnic backgroundsThe average mean age of children waiting to be adopted is 7.9 years. More than 70% of the children are under the age of 11.
42% of children languishing in foster care needing to be adopted are black, way out of proportion to the larger population, which is 12% black. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but the stigma against interracial adoptions is a huge factor.
This heart-wrenching concern for the woes of parents who want to adopt but have to go without is at the core of many an anti-choicer’s worldview. Massively increasing the number of unwanted children bouncing around without stable homes is but a small price to pay to address the concerns of white, middle class couples who can’t get healthy babies that look like them. The end game is reviving the practice of hiding teenage girls in group homes if they got pregnant and then forcing them to give up their babies for adoption before coming home to act as if nothing happened. In fact, that’s what the network of “crisis pregnancy centers” will morph into if Roe is overturned—a series of intake places to separate the teenage girls likely to give birth to babies desired to adoption from those who aren’t white enough to pass muster. They’ve already started, in fact. No doubt this increased the number of the desired white, healthy newborns up for adoption, but no one who actually cares about girls and women would desire a return to this traumatizing practice. It’s not worth it.
Back to Serrin, who wants to distract you from the facts some more.
On a personal note, my father was a foster child. (No pun intended on my last name!)
His father died when he was just a year old, during the Great Depression. My grandmother could not care for him, and so he grew up in an orphanage and later in foster care.
As a little boy he lived through unspeakable horrors until he was rescued by a loving couple.
But you can never tell me that my father’s life wasn’t worth living.
Ah yes, we’ve covered this ground before but it bears repeating: Supporting a woman’s right not to make a baby doesn’t mean you hate every single person who was a baby before. If the notion of roads not taken bothers you to the degree that you want to ban abortion, then you also should be fucking desperately right now with the hope that you’re not leaving any child unconceived. If you’re not fucking right now, I can conclude you want me dead. That Serrin Foster has a dad—who knew?!—is not evidence that women should have our right terminated so we can become baby factories.
The rest of her letter is about how cool her dad is. It’s heart-wrenching. Really, every menstrual period you have should make you swoon in self-hate at your own selfishness. Why don’t you want Serrin’s dad to live? What’s wrong with you, sitting there bleeding someone’s life away into a tampon as if you had a right?
As I noted in the comments of the last installment, Serrin Foster’s biography is all over the place but nowhere did I see any mention of the 20 or so children that she must have in order to make sure she didn’t selfishly take someone’s life away before it started. But even if she has spent her entire adult life pregnant, Serrin has a lot to answer for, because every time one is busy gestating one child, one is not making others. The potential lives lost to pregnancy alone are staggering. Clearly, we need to ban pregnancy in the name of potential lives as well.
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And infants. Older kids, from ages 5 or so on up, are languishing in foster care, waiting for someone, anyone, to take them in permanently.
But many people refuse to adopt kids that age, because they “don’t want someone else’s problems”.
And probably for similiar reasons to the racial ones—they want babies they can pass off as their own fairly easily.
It is also really hard to raise kids who have serious problems as a result of parental neglect or abuse. It’s not a job for the faint of heart. This is, of course, why people need to be allowed - nay, encouraged - not to have babies they don’t want.
eh, well, that and also they just really want infants. it’s also really hard for older cats and dogs to get adopted, from what i’ve heard. i don’t know, it’s probably some combination of “wanting to watch them grow up” and the cuteness factor and worrying they won’t bond with you and knowing that it’s just going to be harder for everyone to adjust when the kid is already his own person. overall i find the sentiment (or at least the anxiety about adopting an older kid) understandable, honestly, but that’s still no excuse to whine that liberated women aren’t producing enough of the *right kind* of unwanted babies.
“His father died when he was just a year old, during the Great Depression. My grandmother could not care for him, and so he grew up in an orphanage and later in foster care.”
Um, considering that her father’s father died when her father was already a year old, it’s not like her grandmother had much choice in the matter. Killing your one-year-old child has always been illegal in the US, as far as I know.
I know that the pro-lifers insist that a blastocyst and a toddler are exactly the same thing, but it’s kinda starting to creep me out that Foster doesn’t seem to see any difference at all between the two.
The pickiness of most would-be adoptive parents is legendary. Agreed, roula, I don’t blame them, but still. If you read Dan Savage’s book about adopting his son, it turns out that he and his boyfriend got their boy mostly because a lot of other couples passed over him when they found out that the mother had drank some before she knew she was pregnant. She was not a risk for giving the baby FAS, but the cult of perfectability built around adoption meant she had a hard time giving away a healthy white newborn boy. That story spoke volumes.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Will they stop equating fetuses with 80 year olds who lived through the history of the 20th century?
Sorry, dear, but the wombs of single women are not a baby farm for all those heartbroken couples who want a healthy white baby. Maybe those folks will just have to grow up and realize that life doesn’t always give you everything you want.
Me and Mrs. Older: one white infant (not by our request, just happened to be so), three older black children.
Serrin Foster: _______ (She may feel free to fill in the blank with her own total).
As an adoptive parent, I don’t like adoption being used as a tool by opponents of legal abortion.
But nor do I particularly like the flood or presumptious, spiteful bullshit from people who presume that they know all about my outlook on race, class, and children just by knowing that I am white with Asian children.
Of the people who are perfectly comfortable pontificating or sniping about how I should have adopted a [insert ethnicity] child instead, or an older child, or a child with minor or major disabilities, I wonder — how many of them have adopted or fostered a child?
The funny thing is that even many people who normally would accept the proposition that it is nobody else’s business how one builds a family — same sex couples, non-traditional families, etc. — are quick on the trigger to complain about how nasty people are if they want a healthy baby, or an infant, or a baby through a process that doesn’t involve the domestic legal system or hostile state social workers.
I can’t imagine thinking that I would only accept and love a baby of a particular race. But that sort of decision strikes me as the essence of what is nobody else’s goddam business.
Well thank goodness my adoptive parents (who are white) aren’t some of these stuck-up-ass people who are solely interested in adopting pearly white, blond haired and blue eyed kids, and then go show them off at the church cook-out, as if they’re just an accessory. My mom gets so pissed when she hears about these kinds of people, because she works with neglected foster-care kids everyday who go un-adopted due to the reasons that you listed, Amanda. Not white, not “perfect,” not male, and so forth. I was placed in foster for only six months after I was born, and then I was adopted.
My parents adopted my sister and I, because my mom went sterile due to those old seventies IUDs, and she and my dad already had two boys and they wanted two girls in order to “complete” their family. Both my sister and I (we’re from two different families) are of Color, and my sister is autistic, but that didn’t matter to them. And neither did the shitty weird looks and comments some of their white acquaintances gave them.
“Everytime you menstruate another couple goes without.”
Oh how ironic. I just started today! But I’m only half-white, so the “a-fetus-in-every-white-woman’s-womb” brigade over at the Stepford-Feminists for Li(f)e(s) wouldn’t be interested.
That’s fine, except that those who do only accept and love babies of particular races seem intent on making it everybody else’s goddamn business. I don’t see condemnation of people who have that opinion, as long as they’re not going around whining about it all the time. “Oh, this abortion culture is leading to the extinction of the white race - my husband and I DESPERATELY want to adopt but the abortion mills have made that impossible [tofindawhitebabythatwon’t”dilute”ourfamily’sgenepool]!”
Or, worse, showing up at protests carrying signs which say “Because of you [aborters] I wound up with this [a picture of a non-white baby].
I’m not impressed with the privacy rights of “parents” like that.
Auguste: as I said, I don’t like people who use adoption for other political ends (perhaps especially abortion), and I agree that people who use their adoption choices offensively like that are casting aside privacy.
But, as this thread amply demonstrates, the scorn I am talking about is not focused just on such parents.
I’m with Tam on this one Amanda. A lot of the older kids in foster care have serious health or mental issues, or come in groups larger than most people feel they can handle because care workers don’t want to separate siblings, or are in care in areas where social workers don’t want to adopt kids “out of their culture” (although that seems to be a particularly USian dysfunction). That vastly overwhelms the “pretend it’s mine” desire - otherwise international adoptions of healthy kids who look nothing like the adoptive parents wouldn’t be nearly so big a business.
And I find the whole criticism of the “cult of perfectablility” interesting, because it places expectations on adoptive parents that don’t exist (or are inverted) on biological mothers. If a woman chooses not to drink during her pregnancy because it might affect the foetus, she’s encouraged and rewarded (and if she chooses to drink, she’s often criticized). If an adoptive parent wants the child of a woman who didn’t drink, that’s being overly picky. If a woman choses to abort a Down’s foetus, that’s entirely understandable. An adoptive parent who doesn’t want a child with Down’s is insufficiently caring. It makes second class parents of adopters: you can’t have kids, so you don’t deserve the choices you’d have if you could.
Auguste: Um. Please, please, please telling me you are joking/exaggerating/NOT TELLING THE ACTUAL TRUTH about the protestors with the pitures of non-white babies. Please? Pretty please? No one would ACTUALLY do that. Right?
Auguste, are you serious? That’s one I haven’t seen before? That must be a lovely moment, the one of realization that your parents really wanted a white baby but put up with your black/Asian/multiracial/whatever self because white teenagers no longer have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Nice.
It makes me want to call up my cousin who adopted his daughter from China and thank him for showing her every day that he thinks she’s the greatest thing that ever happened to him.
If Stalin was aborted, would we have had as much bloodshed in the world as we have had?
Do YOU want another Stalin? Do you?!
The other issue with interracial adoptions is that many states are reluctant to allow them because there are still some unpleasant connotations. Think of something like Rabbit-Proof Fence, where the half-white/half-Aborigine children are taken away from their Aborigine mothers so they can be raised “correctly” and turned white. Interracial adoption really got a black eye in the 1970s and a lot of people (on all sides of the color fence) still think that kids who are raised by parents of a different race will be permanently damaged by it.
Not to mention the whole class-based issue of who is and is not allowed to adopt.
So does this mean we should be encouraging white girls to have lots of babies to put up for adoption? Abstinence, bah!
@Jannia,
I think the problem is when anti-choicers say that women should not have the choice to abort a foetus with [xyz], claiming that adoption is an option, but you don’t see that many of them lining up to adopt [xyz] babies themselves, or focusing just as much effort on encouraging others to adopt them. (And that is not to say that there are no anti-choicers who adopt children who are unlikely to be adopted for one reason or another– but the vast majority of anti-choicers that I know aren’t exactly lining up for it).
And Mnemosyne illustrates the double-edged sword of the race issue. Some people still believe that cross-racial adoption is wrong. I’m not talking about segregationists. I’m talking about self-described “progressive” people who think that whites can’t raise children “of color” decently. Until relatively recently, one of the most prominent and powerful social worker organizations described cross-racial adoption of blacks by whites as “cultural genocide.”
Then, on the other side, you have the people who disapprove of parents who DON’T adopt children of another race, or who adopt Asian children. We are instructed that most of us must be doing this because we are racist or because we want to pass of kids “as our own” (whatever the fuck that means) or because our vision of the child we want is inappropriate or self-absorbed.
But you can never tell me that my father’s life wasn’t worth living.
Yes, I can. If he’d never lived his life, I wouldn’t have a headache from listening to your stupid ass right now. My problem = SOLVED.
Peter you let the cat out of the bag.
One of the biggest abstinence pushers, Leslee Unruh of Abstinence Clearinghouse and one of the people behind the SD abortion ban thinks like that.
She was arrested on a bunch of felony counts for running an illegal pregnancy home and conducting illegal adoptions. She was also paying teenage girls not to have abortions, as long as she could have the babies to adopt out. For a fee to the new parents of course.
She just wants her old business back..
I’d like to see some interviews with kids who were adopted by parents of another race as well as kids who were never adopted and aged out of the foster care system, with questions a little less leading and snarky than what I’m about to pose:
Would you rather have grown up being bounced from foster home to foster home or had a parent/parents of another race/culture?
I’m going to bet that a loving parent of any race is better than growing up in a foster home and getting “thanks, nice knowing you” from the state when you turn 18.
I have a hard time seeing a progressive person arguing that any loving parent would be bad for the child, regardless of race. Someone might argue that white people tend to be more blind to their own privilege, and thus, they may act towards their child differently because of it, but I have yet to hear any real argument that interracial families are bad from a progressive standpoint. Personally, I believe that loving parents who have the means to support a child should be able to adopt whomever they wish to, though I seriously think race needs to be something which they cannot specify. I understand parents’ rights in this aspect, but I seriously feel dubious about giving a child to a family who merely wants that child because it conforms to norms allowed by the parents adopting the child. It should be that, if you have a stipulation with regards to superficial characteristics like race and gender, you don’t get to adopt. My personal assessment.
Well, if they want the white newborn so very much, let them pay for it!
IVF through egg donation=$60′000
Surrogate womb=$50′000
A little bundle of white: priceless
I have a hard time seeing a progressive person arguing that any loving parent would be bad for the child, regardless of race.
I’ve seen it fairly often. Again, the argument is that the parents will not understand the racial issues that the child faces and that the child will be better off being brought up “among their own.”
It looks to me like sacrificing the children for “cultural purity,” but it’s easy for me to think that, because I’m white. I don’t have to worry about my culture being subsumed or wiped out, because I am the dominant culture.
As with most things, if there wasn’t a history in this country of minority children being taken away from their parents and placed with white families so they could learn the “right” way to do things, people would get a lot less squicked out about it. Unfortunately, there is that history. It’s like the people who are still opposed to distributing baby formula in Africa, even to AIDS-infected mothers, because of the lousy, exploitative history behind it.
JackGoff:
Let’s assume for a moment that it’s acceptable to intrude on the adoptive parents’ decision of what baby they want to adopt. That’s a proposition I don’t accept, but I’ll use it for the sake of argument.
There are, in fact, parental reasons for prefering same-race or limited-race (that is, only races X and Y, but not Q) adoptions that should, IMO, be acceptable to progressives.
I have two children adopted from Korea. As it happens, I live in a town that is about 30% Korean, have a number of adult Korean friends, and my kids enjoy a school with a reasonable number of Korean teachers. There’s a treasure trove of Korean cultural resources available to me. This makes it much, much easier to raise my children with exposure to and appreciation of their birth culture — as much as I can give them now, as much as they want when they are older.
I would have no hesitation loving and raising a black child. But we would probably have to move. Our immediately community is close to 50/50 white and Asian, nearly communities are very diverse with Asians, Latinos, and Armenians, but it’s a fair distance before the percentage of blacks approaches anything like the national average. There are damn few black kids — if any — at our local elementary school. Owing to where I grew up and went to school and worked, I have far fewer black friends and acquaintances than Asian and Latino ones. I have far fewer African-American cultural and social resources at my disposal. So, if I wanted to take seriously an obligation to expose the kid to his or her birth heritage, I would probably have to move.
That’s fairly easy for me. I might even find a place with reasonably equitable resources and role models for both by Asian and African-American children. But it isn’t easy for everybody. Consider someone a lot less materially fortunate than I am. Consider someone living in a far less racially diverse place than greater Los Angeles: say, Iowa. What do they do? If they take seriously the obligation to give a kid exposure to role models and cultural resources from their birth culture, they’ve got to move, or they’ve got a very, very challenging task ahead of them. Is it unprogressive of them to take that obligation into account in adopting a child? Is it unprogressive if they say “you know, I could love a baby of any race, but I just don’t know how I’m going to give an African-American baby what they need right now?”
That’s not to say, as I’ve said before, that there’s anything wrong with cross-racial adoption. The presumption that adoptive parents CAN’T adequately expose kids to their cultural is unreasonable. I’ve seen people do a fantastic job of it. (I’ve seen people abandon it as an obligation as well.) But if we accept that adoptive parents have cultural obligations towards their kids, then it is damned harsh to judge them if they think they aren’t up to the task.
I agree that parents should be able to give children cultural context, and, in so doing, prepare their children for the world that awaits them. Is there something inherent in one race that keeps it from learning about the history of another race? Does race make us inherently different? I argue no and also that this fact must be made a core point of reason in society. That minorities have been treated so egregiously in our culture means that we have to know what those transgressions were, how adversely they affected the oppressed, and how people fought against them, not that they can never be overcome. Basically, what I am advocating is teaching children history on the basis of the history of oppression and progression in America. Children also need to be taught that racism is potent and is alive and well in America. Personally, if and when I adopt, I plan to stipulate nothing, since, at that point, I will have reasoned enough to where I understand that every occurrence in one’s life brings one joy. Some more than others.
My brother and his wife adopted a baby girl almost six years ago. She was biracial and the birth mother admitted to smoking pot during her pregnancy and had had drug problems in the past (not to mention three other kids). She lagged ever so slightly in development as well, and the state had a bitch of a time placing her because all the people who claimed they “just wanted a baby to love” shied away because she wasn’t the perfect little white newborn. Today, she is a gorgeous, happy and healthy little girl in kindergarten who reads at a fifth-grade level.
What makes me really sick is that people will whine that adoption is SO expensive and SO time-consuming, but will happily pour money down the fertility clinic rabbit hole for years.
My family is a mixed racial via adoption one. One biological duaghter of my white parents (me); one adopted scandinavian & native american duaghter (my sister), and one black, native american, white son (the elder of my 2 brothers).
My parents then divorced. Both eventually remarried. My father had more daughters (my biological half-sisters whom I have never met). My mother had another son (my biological half-brother).
To whom am I closest? With whom do have the most in common? The adopted mixed race brother.
The other brother is younger than my daughter and is more on par with my neices and nephews. We did not grow up together. We did not share life experiences or views, nor as I have often said, did we really share the same mother. My mother was 20, had only a little college, went through a nasty divorce. His mother was nearly 40, in a very solid marriage, who had a masters degree in special education with a specialization in reading and early childhood education and home-schooled him for elementary grades when their small school district did not have the resorces to meet his educational needs to her satisfaction (ADHD & dyslexia).
Family is more experience than blood.
Hubby and I are considering adoption for a variety of reasons, and we do take exception to the Cult of Perfection that causes some potential parents to treat that process like ordering a custom pizza.
Potential parents shouldn’t be guilted into considering children they believe are beyond their capabilities, but they should be encouraged towards open-mindedness; and away from viewing adoption as some sort of commercial transaction through which they’re entitled to a child with predetermined characteristics.
More than anything, I think the consumerization of parenting – not just adoption, mind, but pregnancy as well – leads to false presumption among parents who come to believe they can order every area of a child’s life so as to raise up the anticipated result.
And while I agree with you, Ex-Fed, that individual parents should not be subject to scrutiny over the way they build families, I disagree that the phenomenon discussed above is beyond the realm of polite discussion.
I, personally, attack the consumer mentality in parenting at every opportunity, and do believe it’s my business in the same way as it’s my business (and everyone else’s) to look at and dissect other cultural realities.
Mr Nice Guy failed to mention another barrier to adoption, one which we experienced: rejection of prefectly acceptable adoptive parents because they don’t match some stereotype of the agency or the case worker. Our three black kids are from overseas, because we were so massively unacceptable to local agencies, and Dan Savage’s story notwithstanding, you don’t necessarily get a little slack just because you’re willing to take less than the A-1 model of kid. We were willing to take (in fact, looking for) an older sibling group, and were willing to take any kid without such a handicap as would preclude his or her living with us.
Even when we had arranged for the overseas adoption, we still needed a local home study. We went through all the local agencies without finding one that would approve us, even though our homestudy for the little boy we had previously adopted was described as “the best I’ve ever seen” and “unqulifiedly positive.” (We must be the only adoptive parents incaptivity who have not seen our — supposedly — confidential homestudy report; these descriptions are from people who have seen it.)
So the adoption industry itself is working against the placement of many kids who might be placed.
Oh, and yes, I do know why we were rejects, although no one was ever willing to tell us. Note that I use the name “Older.” That’s not the only reason, though; I’ve talked to people who had similar problems for different reasons.
Ironically, our first adopted child was the A-1 variety, a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy. He was placed with us by the birth mother (before birth) the same week that an agency told us “No birth mother would ever place a baby with you.” Our response was, “We’re not looking for a baby,” but it seems that we were.
I don’t think its really fair to criticize people for pursuing fertility treatments to build their families– I used to though. I thought it was very wasteful to do that when a person could just adopt. Reading infertility blogs has given me a different perspective though. Many of the women (all of the ones I read are authored by women) want the experience of pregnancy itself as well as the child. Women who are unable to get pregnant without intervention are often heavily guilted about their “unnaturalness” and how inadequate society has decided they are. It seems to me that women who are already undergoing a lot of personal pain don’t need further criticism, although of course there are people within any group whose behavior leaves something to be desired.
Jack,
I agree that parents should be able to give children cultural context, and, in so doing, prepare their children for the world that awaits them. Is there something inherent in one race that keeps it from learning about the history of another race? Does race make us inherently different? I argue no and also that this fact must be made a core point of reason in society.
Cultural context and history are part of the job of parenting. My sister, who is white and raising her white bio kid, has an obligation to teach her child about history and racism. But that’s about being a good citizen of our country and planet.
As the adoptive parent of a child of color, I have another obligation which I cannot carry out in Iowa or without support, and that is the obligation to show throught experience that my child’s birth culture is a healthy, strong and equal one. She can’t develop self-esteem without experiential knowledge that when she is an adult, she will be a person of color…and some observed alternatives for what that will look like.
IIRC you don’t have kids, and if you don’t work with them every day it’s probably hard to understand exactly how concrete the thinking of young children tends to be. My kid is prefectly bright but she just can’t extrapolate from ‘my parents think my ethnicity is great!’ to ‘when I’m grown I’m going to be an adult who looks like Auntie Jan, not my moms’. Seriously, when she was 5 she told me that when she grew up she would have blue eyes like me.
So while obviously parents differ in their commitment to providing great resources for their kids, it’s an enormous obligation that falls differently on adoptive white parents of children of color.
(This isn’t as much of a thread hijacking as it appears.) So any white person who thinks s/he might not be up to that commitment just shouldn’t be pressured to make it. If it’s too much trouble, don’t adopt a child of color, and please the Disco Ball don’t complain that the world owes you a white baby that can pass as ‘your own’.
And anyone who thinks that abortion and adoption are alternatives can kiss my grits. I occasionally pull over minivans with bumper stickers that imply the driver endorses that point of view to tell them they are dumbasses. And bigots.
Oh, and this Serrin babe is a twisted liar. Where’s Jeff and his ‘demented fuckwit’ phrase?
Two million families with approaved homestudies is not the same as two million families that will adopt kids from foster care. As anyone who knows anything about foster care could tell you.
Is there something Serrin knows anything about besides her daddy’s life story?
Tampons Satan’s Little Cotton Fingers
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0999/cotton.html
More than anything, I think the consumerization of parenting – not just adoption, mind, but pregnancy as well – leads to false presumption among parents who come to believe they can order every area of a child’s life so as to raise up the anticipated result.
To a certain extent, they come to believe that because they are told by the surrounding culture that EVERY decision they make, no matter how tiny, will immediately and irrevocably affect their child and it will be THEIR FAULT if they make the wrong decision and their kid grows up to be Ted Bundy.
They’re also led to believe that it’s possible to protect their child from every possible bad thing that can happen, and that if the kid, say, falls out of a tree and breaks his/her arm, it’s somehow evidence of parental neglect. (Seriously.)
This while they get completely conflicting advice from the “experts.”
Then, on the other side, you have the people who disapprove of parents who DON’T adopt children of another race, or who adopt Asian children. We are instructed that most of us must be doing this because we are racist or because we want to pass of kids “as our own� (whatever the fuck that means) or because our vision of the child we want is inappropriate or self-absorbed.
I’ve read that very line of thinking from Steve Gilliard more than once. (Actually, I think it’s more like “If you adopt an Asian baby, you’re a racist” line of thinking.)
In general, this is an awfully tricky post to address, and I agree with Ex-Fed for the most part. Having family members who were unable to conceive, I remember well how they felt as if they were scapegoats for the world’s problems–”Why don’t you just adopt one of those kids in foster care whom I myself would never in a million years think of adopting. It’s obviously your lot in life.”
I am absolutely pro-choice, and my personal feeling is that I could never subject myself to fertility treatments, and I agree that it’s completely ridiculous to pine for the days of “more white babies for you.” But I also could never criticize the people I know (who did adopt incidentally) for their choice on how they dealt with the issue.
Exactly. Personally, I don’t see myself adopting as I already have two kids and I don’t want more. Not just, I don’t want to be pregnant again (and I absolutely do not), but that I don’t want more kids. However, if at some point in the future I do decide to have more (and I would try to adopt in that case, as I really, really don’t want to be pregnant again), I don’t think I could handle a special needs kids. I certainly wouldn’t specify race, or even necessarily age up to a certain point, but I really don’t think I’m capable of taking care of a severely, or even moderately, mentally, emotionally, or physically disabled child. I don’t think that makes me a horrible person or ableist (it might, but I don’t think so), I just know my limitations and what I’m capable of handling.
This entire idea of yours that thousands of black babies are languishing in foster care because white middle class couples are too ’selfish’ to adopt them is not true.
First of all we are a country of almost 300 million people so 127,000 children in foster care, as horrible as that statistic is, is not a huge number.
Second of all most people do not plan their families around the agendas of social engineers, who wish to advance the notion that a family can be created out of whole cloth with no early physical bonding process taking place. Most babies of any race are adoptable, older children are not for that very reason.
Last but not least, many people do not wish (and in fact it is oftentimes not approved) for families to adopt children of differing racial background.
As the whole Madonna controversy amply demonstrated, many progressives would rather see millions of black children in orphanages or dead before allowing a white family to adopt one of them…
Then, on the other side, you have the people who disapprove of parents who DON’T adopt children of another race, or who adopt Asian children. We are instructed that most of us must be doing this because we are racist or because we want to pass of kids “as our own� (whatever the fuck that means) or because our vision of the child we want is inappropriate or self-absorbed.
I don’t really have a problem with that, so long as you scrupulously never, ever complain if you never get the child you want and never forget you are not entitled to someone else’s because she fits your criteria.
All that said, it’s awesome to see people that are both involved in adoption and pro-choice come out. To hear anti-choicers talk about it, you’re either for adoption or for abortion.
“What makes me really sick is that people will whine that adoption is SO expensive and SO time-consuming, but will happily pour money down the fertility clinic rabbit hole for years.”
Really? Because what really makes ME sick is the notion of people who aren’t adopting or doing IVF telling others what they should or shouldn’t be doing with their money/time/lives.
I *AM* pouring money down the fertility clinic rabbit hole, and it really annoys the bleeding crap out of me when people glibly suggest that we “Just adopt,” as if it’s never crossed our minds.
I’m pro choice, which means that I don’t generally judge the reproductive choices of others, even when I don’t agree with them, but I make an exception for indignant advocates of adoption who are not personally part of the adoption process, either as adoptees, adopters, or support staff.
Most people end up with biological children for free. I can’t. That doesn’t mean my desire for one is any less valid (or unnatural or wrong) than a person who accidentally gets knocked up in the back of a pinto.
Or, to simplify, why not lambaste the parents of existing biological children for their shameful selfishness because they didn’t adopt first?
I really wasn’t trying to guilt anyone about not wanting an older kid or whatever. My point was that reducing women’s reproductive rights will indeed increase the number of babies out there in foster care—but not just the ones that will get adopted. To my mind, if would-be adoptive parents go without the kids they want, that sucks, but the cure (forcing women to give birth, resulting in more unwanted babies altogether) is worse than the problem.
Amanda:
“I don’t really have a problem with that, so long as you scrupulously never, ever complain if you never get the child you want and never forget you are not entitled to someone else’s because she fits your criteria.”
Here’s the thing — aside from a few freakish outliers, I’ve never heard anyone talk like that. For five years I’ve participated in several very active adoption forums, where people feel free to pour out insecurities and anxieties and anger about adoption, and I’ve never seen anything approaching that. Also, frankly, though the “consumerist” take on adoptive parents might be accurate for some, it’s not accurate for all, or even most. Rather, it’s an unfair generalization, thrown about rather disturbingly freely in this thread and elsewhere.
I don’t think that you, or other progressives, would tolerate such generalizations about other groups, and I don’t think you’ll continue to tolerate or make such generalizations about this group if you gave us a fair thought.
As Akeeyu and others have suggested in this thread, there’s something strange that happens when some progressive people encounter infertile couples — they feel justified in substituting their parenting judgment, and feel comfortable placing on the infertile couple obligations they would never place on anyone else. The sentiment that childless by choice couples are selfish or materialistic would be universally condemned as wingnuttery here, I suspect. But the sentiment that couples are selfish if they spend thousands on IVF rather than, say, cars or trips to Aruba is apparently accepted.
I recently visited my town’s Crisis Pregnancy Center because I was writing a report on teen pregnancy. What struck me most (aside from the egregious portraits of smiling white children) was their treatment of adoption as an option. Of course, abortion was evil and would make your uterus pickle, and raising a child was rewarding but hard, but adoption, oh, that was hero’s work!
Besides that, they only talked about open adoption and how you could see your baby any time you wanted! Sitting there listening to these women talk, I just couldn’t imagine actually being in that situation, being younger, pregnant, and in need of honest help. Surely it’s illegal to lie for political ends to such a vulnerable population.
She was not a risk for giving the baby FAS
This is not at all what Savage wrote. He and his partner were very concerned about FAS, and they did a lot of research. What they learned was the difference between prospective and retrospective risk analysis. That is, we can look at kids who have FAS and go backwards to see how their mother’s drinking contributed to their affliction, but we can’t say “pregnant woman who had X drinks has a Y% risk of a baby with FAS.” And doctors wouldn’t want to give out those numbers, because they’re afraid it will encourage people to play the odds.
What Ex-Fed said. Of course the social phenomenon of race, class and adoption is important, but I’d like to think we can talk about it without sliding into snotty generalities–as Halfmad points out, the ‘why don’t you sacrifice yourself nobly in a way I, myself, would never consider’ mentality.
I summarized, myth. But the end result is they learned that the alarm over FAS was way, way overblown. If the other prospective parents done the research, they would have done the same. I think Dan and Terry were somewhat aware that they couldn’t be as picky because of the gay thing, which inspired them to look past the adoption perfection paradigm. Also, as Dan notes, they never really thought of having a baby as their birthright, and so they were in a position where they weren’t easily panicked.
Ex, I am sure that progressives are better about not believing they are entitled—and they’re certainly better about not saying it—but the existence of a nationwide network of “crisis pregnancy centers” that are, amongst other things, places that are basically set up to try to encourage adoption, is a telling bit of evidence that the more conservative side of the wannabe adoptive parents may not be as hip to the fact that they aren’t entitled as you are.
By the way, Auguste’s story about someone shoving an Asian baby up front at an abortion protest and saying, “Look what I had to settle for!”—yep, that’s not an exaggeration. When he comes back online, I’ll ask him to elaborate.
It’s been my experience that my outlook on fertility treatments tends to upset the TTC (trying to conceive) crowd–I’ve gotten into it with people in my own blog because they say I’m being mean. To me, so many TTCers come off as spoiled children whining “it’s not FAIR! How come other women can have babies and I CAN’T?!” A friend of mine moderates some boards on Babycenter.com, and the TTC board is total drama. If someone does get pregnant and has the audacity to announce it on the board and be happy about it, she is immediately chastised by jealous women who haven’t won the IVF Lottery saying that it’s not right to “rub other people’s faces in it.” So much for support. Then there are the women who say that they want “the experience of being pregnant,” as if it’s like running a marathon or going rock climbing, just one more tick on life’s Great To-Do List. It’s still drilled into women’s heads that It All Doesn’t Matter Unless You’re Somebody’s Mother–And The Kid Better Be Your DNA To Boot. The antis talk about the “abortion mills”–what about the “fertility mills”? Why aren’t more people disgusted by these clinics that are happily scooping in the cash that desperate couples throw at them, even though IVF has a 80% failure rate and the reports of the various health problems IVF children suffer mount?
Guest manners prevents an adequate response.
I think it’s hard to expect people to behave rationally when it comes to such emotionally charged things as pregnancy, infertility and adoption.
My source for the “I had to settle for this!” thing is from a comment to a Lance Mannion post linked from Pandagon in February. Admittedly, there’s no photographic evidence of same, but I remember it being widely remarked on at the time.
Ex, I’m not trying to insult. I believe you, I really do. But because a lot of very nice, open-minded, progressive people adopt doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of not-nice, racist, pissed-off white people who want to change abortion laws to make their “chances” of getting a white infant go up. We are all, I think, aware of the diversity of people enough to realize that both groups are likely in existence.
That said, I think a lot of the political forces behind anti-choicers are *using* adoption as a way to guilt trip women who have abortions. Like the fact that there’s waiting lists is just more evidence to them that we sluts should be forced to have babies, because it’s just not fair blah blah. The actual feelings of couples on waiting lists is irrelevant to that, since they live in fantasy land.
If you don’t want anti-choicers speaking on your behalf about the “need” for forced pregnancy, you’re doing the right thing by speaking out about how you can be part of the adoption process without wanting to force women to have unwanted babies.
“Why aren’t more people disgusted by these clinics that are happily scooping in the cash that desperate couples throw at them, even though IVF has a 80% failure rate and the reports of the various health problems IVF children suffer mount?”
Do you have a citation for the “health problems IVF children suffer”.
Hell, why stop at being disgusted with clinics that try to help people have kids? Why not take a take a shot at other clinics? Oncology clinics and docs, for example?
There are millions of adults who go homeless each year. Oncology doctors happily scoop up the cash that desperate people and families throw at them, even for patients already considered terminal. Instead of pouring money down the rathole of treating cancer (with the high rate of failure and the various health problems surviving chemo patients face), why don’t you just go adopt a hobo?
Sam B.
(One of many references for the Chemo risks: http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/20240/)
Amanda, to be clear, my last comment was not directed to you.
Oh, okay. I see what you’re saying. Yeah, no. My only real problem with fertility clinics is I’ve seen evidence that they err on the side of over-selling the hope, which concerns me because so many of their customers are really emotionally vulnerable, for obvious reasons. I wish their advertising was more tightly regulated so they can’t overencourage vulnerable customers.
Sam B., I quite agree. And don’t forget that the people on those “fighting cancer” forums can be really whiny as well.
Yes, those that over-sell the hope could be bad. I’m all in favor of all advertising being tightened, for all businesses, politicians, corps., etc.
Of course, unlike used car dealerships, my general practitioner (GP) or my dentist, one can check up on how well a particular fertility clinic has been doing by visiting the CDC online.
http://www.cdc.gov/ART/ART2003/index.htm http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/ART2003/clinics03.asp
Very handy, that.
Sam B.
I summarized, myth. But the end result is they learned that the alarm over FAS was way, way overblown.
Your summary was wrong, and that’s not what the ‘end result’ was. What they learned is not that concern over FAS is overblown; they learned that you can’t predict who is going to have FAS because there are many factors, including genetic susceptibility, and there are policy reasons (not wanting to encourage pregnant woman to blow off the risks) doctors don’t say “Oh, one drink won’t kill you.”
It’s also not true that Dan and Terry generously adopted a possibly-FAS baby because they’re such swell gentlemen and willing to take risks, being gay. The adoptive mother picked THEM, and it was only afterward that they learned about her drinking history, and started researching whether it would be a good idea to adopt her child or not.
Jersica, that’s truly horrible, but it’s not (sadly) illegal. I’m sure they aren’t having any pregnant woman talk to her own lawyer to advise her of her rights, and of the probably 0% chance she has of enforcing any kind of open adoption agreement.
I don’t understand why being pregnant shouldn’t be on someone’s To Do In Life list. People spend thousands of dollars and hours on other frivolous or seemingly frivolous passions like skydiving or photography or whatever. They don’t get a lot of criticism for that. I’m sufficiently ambivalent about the idea of kids that I’d never pursue IVF, but I would never have considered, say, majoring in business because it would help me make lots of money in the future.
“Guest manners prevents an adequate response.”
You’re a bigger person for ignoring Patricia.
Fortunately I’m not that big, so I’ll say something instead.
Patricia, you’re a good argument for a retroactive late term abortion…
I find the idea that a baby of a particular ethnic background should raised in a particular cultural background to be borderline racist. Culture is learned, not coded. There are many 3rd and 4th generation Americans who do not follow the cultural practices of their ancestors’ homelands. I, for instance, haven’t the slightest idea how to make soda bread or Irish cream liquor despite having Irish heritage on both sides. I know people of Asian descent whose cultural life style is indistinguishable from mine. They seem to do ok. I also know middle class black people whose cultural lifestyle is indistinguishable from mine. They do ok, too. It would be presumptuous of me to insist that they adopt or even learn about the culture of their ancestors. Why would I insist on something like that for a baby?
I agree that a person with no direct experience with racism will have a tough time preparing a child of color for what he or she will experience. But people can learn. I suspect that people who would be amenable to adopting a child of a different race would be strongly motivated and therefore successful at learning to identify white privilege and subtle racism so they can point it out to their child. (wow, wouldn’t it be nice if all parents did that)
I wouldn’t want to presume to speak for someone else’s experience, but I know that at least some international adoptees do feel that the experience of being raised by parents of another race (all white parents) was negative for them in some important ways. Just because someone is willing to adopt a child of another race does not mean they will not then ignore that race will be an issue for that child, if that makes sense. At least some of this is tied to problems with the international adoption system generally or in some specific countries, but the issues remain. I would also point out that internationally adopted children are not 3rd or 4th generation Americans, but first.
Fruminous B - you don’t know how to make soda bread, but you do know that is one of the staple dishes of the Irish culture. An adult who has knowledge of her culture and traditions can choose not to follow them, but a child has to depend on someone else to teach her these things before she can make that choice. I don’t think anyone here said that a baby can only be raised in a cultural background that matches her ethnicity, but what people did say is that they feel that it is important that their adoptive child knows where s/he came from.
For instance, my parents are of different ehtnic background (my dad is Jewish), both are atheists, and both didn’t want to influence me one way or another as far as religion or traditions go. In addition, I grew up in the old Soviet Union, during the time when anti-Semitism was institutionalized and where the subject of Jewishness was at best silenced, if not outright taboo. I often feel very accutely my lack of knowledge of Jewish traditions and the yiddish language (which my grandparents spoke, and which my dad still understands but can’t speak). Sure, I can, and do, learn now, but this cultural context was just not there when I was a child, and that makes a difference to me. I used to visit my paternal grandparents once every few years and what little bits of knowlege I picked up then make up a larger part of my identity, now that I realize what these things meant, more so than anything I have learned since. YMMV, but I don’t think it’s possible to argue that a desire to raise a baby within some kind of relevant cultural context is racist.
Myth, I didn’t say that. I said that she picked them after others rejected her. And yes, it’s true that they were alarmed. But, unlike the other couples, for some mysterious reason they were motivated to find out more. And found that there’s “alot of factors”, alright, and that FAS is incredibly rare in cases like hers and the odds of the baby having it were shockingly low. You’re making it seem like I said they generously adopted a FAS baby. I did not. My point was that the anxiety about perfectability is overboard if a perfectly good baby is rejected on the grounds that there’s an extremely slim-to-almost-no chance that he’s going to have a certain disease. I was a little shocked. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with getting guys with an IQ of 8 million to donate sperm if that’s what you want—you’re paying for it, have at it. Nor to pass over a birth mother on a fairly slender chance that a baby is born with a disease, even though you still have the option to reject the baby at birth. But it gave me pause, if only because I think some of the parents might feel they’re in the market for something there won’t be any sellers on.
Now with this preconception stuff, I worry even more. If a birth mother is rejected for drinking early in a pregnancy even though she’s in a low risk category for FAS, what’s going to happen now that people think drinking before you’re even pregnant is a big risk factor?
Of course, all my concerns would probably be rectified if there wasn’t a somewhat loose interpretation of what acceptable medical knowledge is around reproduction. Contraception is a good example of the value of giving it to people straight—99% protection if you take it perfect, so that 1% chance is up to you. But the 1 drink=FAS paranoia reminds me of nothing so much as the people who run around saying abstinence is the ONLY WAY TO PROTECT YOURSELF OHMIGOD. Well, if you equate a big risk with a small risk, you’re going to create a situation where people are either overparanoid or throw all caution to the wind.
Count me in with Tam, roula, Ex-Fed, Jannia, PhoenixRising, and ks. I’m a midwestern gentile who married a Jewish woman; we adopted an infant girl from India. We went international because at the time it was a lot faster and easier than in-country; we picked India because we had a positive feeling about India (and didn’t anticipate environmental problems from anybody regardless of what kind of kid we had), and because I examined my own feelings, and decided I was put off by epicanthic eye folds, but not by Indian skin color, and a girl because that’s what I preferred to be raising. (My wife would have been equally happy with Indian or Chinese or Korean, and with either sex.) I considered it appropriate to consider what I was comfortable with. And we wanted a baby because we wanted to start from scratch and bond as deeply as possible. (My wife died from multiple sclerosis almost 25 years ago when my daughter was in kindergarten. My daughter is a very different kind of person from me, but we get along remarkably well, especially considering the differences, which are not at all due to ethnicity or such superficialities.)
Child-rearing is a serious business; I think people need to be honest with themselves about what they’re up for. I think we should expect that people will have a considerable range (from one couple or individual to another) of what is appropriate, and keep the judgmentalism limited to those people are indeed obnoxious. (I have no clue on the statistics for obnoxious people, have almost never personally encountered any.)
Criminy
“By the way, Auguste’s story about someone shoving an Asian baby up front at an abortion protest and saying, “Look what I had to settle for!â€?—yep, that’s not an exaggeration. When he comes back online, I’ll ask him to elaborate. ” Amanda
Here we see that the only people more objectified than women are children.
Last time I checked infertility was not fatal, whereas cancer often is. If anyone can show me anyone who has ever died from not being able to conceive a child, I will gladly withdraw my statements. Any cancer patient should be as outraged about having their condition compared to not being able to get pregnant as a Holocaust survivor should be outraged when the antis compare abortion to the systematic murder of over six million BORN people.
And NYMOM, as I’ve seen in the past, you can always be counted on for an ignorant, hateful statement Feminists For Life would be proud of. As I respect Amanda and do not want to turn this thread into a flamewar, you are more than welcome to e-mail me through my website if you wish. Amanda, my apologies, but in light of NYMOM’s idiocy I had to respond.
I can also understand both not wanting to adopt a child of a different race and/or people being upset about a white couple adopting a black/Hispanic/Asian/other race child. As much as it smacks of prejudice to me, I’ve found that as a white person working with a predominantly black community, I’m not trusted in the same way my black co-workers are. In some ways the presumption is that no matter if you come from the same economic background and live a couple of blocks apart, you’re from a completely different culture, and can’t possibly understand what it’s like for the other culture. Whether or not this is a valid assessment is up to debate, but I don’t think people should be automatically condemned for thinking about these issues and realizing what they are or are not capable of dealing with.
I mean, one of the things that most pro-choice people argue is that people should be allowed to get an abortion if they know they are not capable of dealing with a pregnancy and a child. So it always boggles my mind a bit that we can say that on one hand, and then scorn adoptive parents who make an assessment about what they are capable of dealing with. There aren’t many people out there who actively want a disabled or troubled child, and as much as that sucks for those children, putting them into a home with overwhelmed and unwilling adoptive parents is the same recipe for disaster as leaving them in the same type of home with their biological or foster parents.
Idealism is a great thing, but when it comes to adoption it hasn’t got any place. I volunteer with social services in my city and sometimes come into contact with starry-eyed prospective adopters who talk about saving kids from poverty, disease, crime, etc. If they’re thinking about older children or children with disabilities, I applaud that, but I also try to encourage them to act as foster parents first, to see if they are truly willing to deal with the reality of those situations. The sad fact of it is, when confronted with the actual children, most of them aren’t, but I’d rather they realized it then and adopted an infant rather than fuck the poor kid up even more.
It’s not just unfertilized eggs that are going to waste. Think of all the semen that’s spilled out on sheets every day and every night, all around the world. The amount of potential life lost is staggering!
Feminists for Life should be running around gathering all the wasted semen in buckets. How they’ll make up for the difference in the number of rescued spermatazoa and rescued eggs is something they probably haven’t thought about.
Maybe the eggs could be cloned to match the number of sperm–oh no, I forgot! We can’t do cloning, either. It is a conundrum.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Just which of my 7 and my childrens’ 8 known ethnicities should I have taught them and should I insist my grandchildren (if my children choose to have any) be taught?
My daughter is amused by the Swedish side and celebrates St Lucia Day. My son has little interest in any beyond the broadly expected US celibrated holidays. I like a bit of the Scot, Irish, German and French bits of culture, but none are not a focus.
What exactly do the folks advocating you must teach your adopted child about their culture going to tell my mother who had mixed ethiticity and racial children, including two adopted ones?
What she did was give us a wide exposure to world cultures and religions before decending into the Christian fundy world. Yes, that included non-christian eastern religions. Yes, that included various native american, african, and european foods.
In the late 60s and 70s, they seldom would give you true backgrounds. White, black, native american are a bit too broad to really teach culture as they are too varied within these categories. German is not Irish which is not Swedish which is not Polish which is not Russian. All would be considered white by the 60s CA adoption system from which my brother and sister were adopted.
“…but in light of NYMOM’s idiocy I had to respond…”
Likewise and then some…
“I wouldn’t want to presume to speak for someone else’s experience, but I know that at least some international adoptees do feel that the experience of being raised by parents of another race (all white parents) was negative for them in some important ways.”
I wouldn’t want to presume either, but since you did I’ll do so as well.
I know a lot of internatonal adoptees also and never heard one of them say that being raised by white parents was negative for them in ways either great or small…
I wouldn’t want to presume either, but since you did I’ll do so as well.
I know a lot of internatonal adoptees also and never heard one of them say that being raised by white parents was negative for them in ways either great or small…
NYMOM, anecdote != data, but people are individuals, and it does happen, even if you haven’t experienced it yourself.
I grew up near a white couple who adopted three African-American kids, two boys and a girl, who were not siblings. One of the boys went through a hard time in his teens and 20s where he was angry at his parents for adopting him, angry that he’d missed out on the experience of African-American culture.
The parents, nice people that they are, had adopted these kids in the early ’70s, probably before people were hip to these issues, so they were gobsmacked. And his brother and sister didn’t feel the same way, even though they grew up in the same house with the same parents.
“Last time I checked infertility was not fatal, whereas cancer often is.”
Hey, I’ll bite, Patricia. Have you ever heard of clotting disorders, tubal factors that lead to ectopic pregnancy, insulin resistance and endometriosis? Without proper treatment, these can lead to stroke, internal bleeding, bowel obstruction, cancer, heart problems, diabetes, and, um, DEATH. Since most GPs aren’t qualified to dianose these issues, many women find out about them when they go see a Reproductive Endocrinologist (fertility doctor).
I believe Sam brought up cancer patients as another group of patients whose care is obscenely expensive, offers no guarantees of success, and is frequently unsuccessful. Wasn’t that what was upsetting you about infertility treatments?
Incidentally, are diseases required to be fatal before people can justify treatment to improve quality of life? If my asthma isn’t severe enough to kill me but just annoy me, should my doctors decline to treat me?
Oh, and when did we get to the halocaust?
Hell, fatal or not, infertility is heartbreaking to women who experience it. I’m not one of them, I’m actually about the most fertile person I know, but I have friends who have suffered through infertility and I refuse to throw stones at them if they want to go the IVF route instead of adoption. I personally don’t feel like I would’ve done IVF, I would much rather adopt than go through painful, invasive medical procedures to have a child. That’s my value system, however, and I recognize that there are women who desperately want to experience pregnancy. Honestly, I despise being pregnant for the most part, but there is something really cool about looking at the child your body created over 9 months and knowing that you did it. There can also be something very, very special about the prenatal bonding that goes on when you’re the only one who can feel the kicks and the hiccups and the moving around, and I don’t think women who want to experience this are somehow fucked up or should shut up and just adopt already. I may not understand the intense desire for pregnancy, but I’m not going to yell at them for wanting to be pregnant.
And infants. Older kids, from ages 5 or so on up, are languishing in foster care, waiting for someone, anyone, to take them in permanently. - Warren
Actually, I ought not to get into too many details, but if you’re willing to adopt a non-white infant, you’ll certainly be able to get one, provided you’re somewhat patient (which, if you are going to be a parent, it behooves you to be) as there is no shortage of infants. Of course, the actual adoption procedure oftentimes takes awhile even after you have custody of said infant (it’s a legal procedure — these things take a while to make sure the ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s are crossed), but it isn’t as if there are no kids available.
‘Hey, I know that lots of adoptees are not bothered by having had parents of another race, but some are– for example, http://twicetherice.wordpress.com/ (there are others, but I am not sure how many links I am allowed to have). I wish that this was not a risk that people take when they adopt, because I would like to adopt internationally. In the course of my research though I found it was something to think about.
I just want to point out that the prior Virgil E. Vickers comment… “because I examined my own feelings, and decided I was put off by epicanthic eye folds, but not by Indian skin color” is outrageously racist. It really jumped out at me. I can understand not adopting transracially because you don’t feel capable of giving the child the right kind of background. But because of a superficial feature like an eye fold or skin color? If you’re disgusted by the appearance of other races, you should try to change your attitude, at least so you can deal on an ethical level with people of those other races when you meet them in the workplace. If you can’t change it, then you should apologize for it, or hide it and try to fake a lack of disgust until such comes naturally to you… any strategy other than being proud of racial disgust.
It reminds me of a woman I met in Costa Rica. She told me “I don’t like black people. I don’t really have a reason, I don’t know why. My mother was the same way”. I didn’t know what to tell her at the time, I was so taken aback, maybe I still don’t know. At least have some shame, for goodness sake.
The rest of the discussion has been interestingly different from adoption-oriented board discussions. Tying in abortion and the zealots at Feminists for Life is depressing but great for added dimension. As an Asian prospective adoptive parent (from the foster care system), I disagreed with a few of the statements about adoption in Amanda’s post, but there’s already been a lot of debate over those statements. I would also suggest that people think about transracial AND transcultural adoption not just by white parents but by all kinds of parents. It’s true that the adoption systems, even just through sheer demographics, are predominantly oriented towards white parents. But there are also lots of black parents adopting black children, for example, both from the foster care system and through private adoptions.
Actually, I’m not proud of it (just refuse to hide and fake where it can be avoided) — and I did have someone of Chinese background in my workspace (actually, close in the “chain of command” above me) — mentioned the matter — don’t remember how exactly — there was some jocularity back and forth about the matter — it was an informal workspace — but “trying to change your attitude” when undertaking to raise a child (or in a comparably intimate relationship) is the kind of thing I don’t think is wise. It’s not in the same class as being fair to people. It’s one thing to “deal on an ethical level with people of those other races when you meet them in the workplace”; it’s another to be trying to kid yourself about what you can best handle with a child. In the event, there were enough challenges — I wound up finding strategies having to do with having the maximum feasible honesty in dealing as a parent. I consider raising my daughter the greatest and most creative adventure of my life.
“Actually, I’m not proud of it (just refuse to hide and fake where it can be avoided) ”
Why you refuse to do so is unclear, but nevertheless, while you may understand that it’s nothing to be proud of, by putting it out there, you’re providing a sort of support for other people who are proud of this kind of thing, and will see it as evidence that lots of others really share their view. in a very small way, you’re doing your part to normalize & legitimize racism. Please stop.
I am an adoptive mother to a child from foster care. That was my choice. While I think adopting from foster care is great, it is not my business what choices you make to start your family, add to your family or if you decide to not have a family at all. There are a lot of reasons why people don’t adopt from foster care. Some are based simply on ignorance.
But it is frustrating when people say “Hey! Stop doing infertility treatments and adopt from foster care! Stop adopting from China and adopt from foster care!” You should adopt from foster care if you want to adopt from foster care. Not to save a child, not to save the world.
Just because a child is 10 and in foster care doesn’t mean they have issues. Your adopted at birth child might end up having special needs. Or, *gasp* your biological child might end up having special needs. At least when you adopt from foster care you already know the issues your child has instead of just hoping for the best.
But people should adopt from foster care because they want to be a parent. That’s why I did it. You owe it to your children to love them for who they are and not because they further your political agenda.
Oh, and for the record….I said I would take a child of any racial background, and with most special needs and medical problems.
Who did they match me with? A blond haired blue eyed little girl.
Adding my voice to Baggage’s…
I am fostermom. I take gay teenagers. They are not adoptable for a host of reasons. Sometimes it is because their otherwise good parents are incarcerated or just unable to care for them.
More heartbreakingly, it can be because they have been passed over, unwanted, or because they experienced a failed adoption placement and no longer wish to be considered for adoption.
These are wonderful, valuable children, and they are also generally children who have suffered trauma. Caring for them is exhausting and rewarding work. It should not be taken lightly, and no one should be pressured to do it.
You may want to check out one foster parents’ response to your entry
at http://elborak.blogspot.com/
Not everyone who is opposed to abortion is unwilling to step up and adopt children who are hard to place. The main impediment is not an absence of willing parents. It’s a court system that is bogged down in well-meaning but endless and pointless red-tape!
Oh my god, check out the comments at that place… Just lovely.
Especially the one saying how “she doesn’t deserve a uterus”. I didn’t know it was a special prize or something.
While I am not an adoptee, I was raised as a black West Indian in an overwhelmingly WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon AND Protestant) town for the first four years of my life in the US. Then, we moved to a town that was also majority white but overwhelmingly Jewish, particularly in the advanced classes in school, where I found myself.
I can honestly say, being in a place in which nobody looked like me was fascinating at times and frustrating at times. I developed a strong appreciation for cultures and languages and religions that were different from my own; in fact, I’m still one of the only black people I know that knows the words to Ma’oz Tzur in Hebrew.
Is it difficult to be “the other”? You bet. But, the older I get the more I realize that everyone is always already the other in one context or another. Learning how to negotiate that and to be proud of yourself–learning how to help your child negotiate that–that is the challenge. I don’t think that challenge is particular to adoptive parents. So, frankly, I don’t see this as a problem when it comes to transracial adoption.
What I will highlight is something far more practical: only in the last 2 years has Covergirl started to carry makeup for people darker than a paper bag. Pantyhose, hair products, some forms of skin-care–all of these can be race-specific, particularly for medium to dark brown-skinned peoples; and I can testify that when I went to college in the Boston metropolitan area, I had a devil of a time finding these where I lived.
More subtly, clothing stores in dominant culture towns often don’t have clothing in colors that complement medium to dark-brown skin. Note, for instance the colors of West African traditional clothing (or West Indian clothing) and compare them to any colors you can find at Benetton or the Gap. These are the sorts of things that can drive little girl-children crazy–whether or not they are adopted. And it is this subtle, structural racism that can be ego-destructive.
None of this is to negate transracial adoption. I rather think that’s important and necessary, especially for adoptable children of color in the United States. Rather, it is to point out that sometimes being a transracial adoptive parent means that you will have to act as a race traitor and a rights activist–but that’s only because you’ll have fallen in love with the “other.” And that’s a good thing.