You'll hear a lot of wingnuts decry abortion. You'll hear them say that
promoting adoptions is part of the "solution" to ending abortions. You'll hear them promote adoption as though it's some Magic Pill anyone can take to resolve their pregnancy problems. To listen to some people, adoption is the end-all, be-all, most wonderful thing ever, because adoption makes for perfect families, sweeps those troublesome unwed mothers under the mat, and creates a shiny happy rose-tinted world.
That's because they don't know what they're talking about.
Adoption is not the "solution" to the abortion-rights problem. In fact, as a solution, adoption has the potential to destroy many more lives, for a number of reasons. This diary elaborates on what I see as the main counterargument to adoption as the Magic Pill That Will End All Abortion. I also see it as the main danger to adoption as a solution to anything--that adoption in this country tends to be run as a business, not as a service. And kids aren't its only victims.
I should start off by saying that I'm adopted. My own personal experience with adoption is just what wingnuts most love to tout--wonderful. My parents love me, and I love them. I had an average middle-class upbringing. We had pets, my parents helped me with homework, I cut the lawn when I was old enough to learn how. I have an enormous extended family and I'm crazy about all of them. Well, most of them. It's a family, after all, and that's just how families are. On the surface, it's all rose-tinted glass and good times.
It's what's under the surface that wingnuts don't consider. And what's under the surface that causes the problems.
Terminology is also important here. Adoption is essentially a legal fiction by which parental rights to a child are transferred. In an adoption, the "birthparents" (but often only the birth mother) agree to give up their parental rights to the child, or "relinquish" the child. Their parental rights are "terminated" by a court. While this is happening, "prospective adoptive parents" are going through an approval process (which differs by state but usually includes psychological testing and social-worker home visits). Once they gain approval, the "adoptive parents" are allowed to "adopt" the child, and the court enters the adoption. The adoption becomes final after a specified period of time has passed, leaving time for the home situation to be assessed, to make sure everything's working out. Of course, adoption is a great deal more than this--it's emotion: love and desperation and hope and fear and care. But at its base, in the way it's regulated and the way it's brought about, adoption is legality.
A little more crucial terminology here. Adoptees don't have "real mothers" and "fake mothers". They have "birth mothers" and "adoptive mothers", "birth fathers" and "adoptive fathers". When I say, "my Mom," I mean the woman who adopted me, the woman who raised me and tended to cuts and scrapes and rushed me to the hospital when I slammed my finger in the car door, driving with tears in her eyes. Same goes with "my Dad". They're my "parents", pure and simple. When I was a teenager, nothing set me off like having people ask "Do you know your real mother?" It infuriated me, even though I knew they didn't mean any offense. They didn't know any better.
That's part of the problem with adoption as any sort of solution to anything at all. Most people, including the ones in charge of it and the ones trying to make it into a Magic Pill, just don't know any better. And they don't seem to want to learn.
Adoption is a business in the U.S. Supply, demand, and physical characteristics factor highly into the marketplace, and kids who don't make the cut get left behind. There were an estimated 1.6 million adopted children (under the age of 18) in the U.S. in 2004. 16% are black; 7% are Asian, 2% are "American Indian and Alaska native". Also, 17% of adopted children under 18 were a different race than their adoptive parents. That sounds good, right? Adoption is clearly working in the United States! Think again. The same U.S. Census Bureau report states that "13% of adopted children are foreign-born". My math is bad, I'll admit that, but it seems 17% of adopted children were a different race than their adoptive parents, but only 4% of those children weren't foreign-born.
It was in the 1950s, in America, that demand for adoptable infants began to outstrip supply. This led to stricter screening of adoptive parents. It also led to some agencies, by 1975, refusing to accept applications for nondisabled white children altogether. Think about that. Refusing to accept applications for nondisabled white children. The supply wasn't keeping up with the demand. There weren't enough healthy white kids available, so agencies wouldn't even tell prospective adoptive parents they could get one.
The situation seems to be ongoing. The current status in America, is this: white/Hispanic children make up the overwhelming percentage, nearly 75% of adopted children in the United States today. Black, Asian, and Native American children, combined, make up the remaining 25%. In 1999, roughly 250,000 children exited permanent foster care in the United States. Even though 16%, or approximately 40,000, were adopted, the number of children waiting for adoption was 2.5 times the number of children adopted during that year. Children adopted from foster care in fiscal year 1999, as compared with children still in foster care, were younger, female, and white/Hispanic.
What does all this prove? Not a lot. But it strongly suggests that the average adopted child is white/Hispanic, and that a lot of kids out there who need homes and permanence in their lives aren't getting it, because they don't meet the right guidelines. This is not a solution to anything. As long as adoption is a marketplace, and children are its commodities, adoption will never "solve" the abortion problem. Too many in-need children slip through the cracks, while adoptive parents seek children elsewhere; "intercountry" adoptions increased from 5% to 15% of all adoptions between 1992 and 2001.
"Is this kid white enough for me to adopt" syndrome is clearly a problem, if adoption is going to be the solution. It's unlikely that the unwanted children who would have been aborted are all going to be white, female, and healthy. That, it seems, makes it unlikely that they're all going to get adopted.
In order for adoption to be any sort of solution for abortion, it's going to have to take care of the leftovers. And I have yet to see any wingnut come up with a plan to take care of all the kids who'd be born if women were forced to relinquish rather than abort. As far as I can tell, they can't even come up with workable plans to take care of all the kids already born who need food and housing and health care and education. And it's clear that the adoption system already in place isn't going to be able to handle the excess.
How many more children's lives would be made a misery, knowing that they were unwanted at birth, and knowing that they were still unwanted years later? That's what adoption-rather-than-abortion would do--"save" children's lives, then abandon those children to a system that can't do anything for them.
Imagine that you're six. That you're black. Imagine that your life has been a succession of moving to different houses, being cared for by a parade of strangers. Imagine never having a mother or father, never having friends for longer than it takes to move on to the next placement.
Imagine what life is like for you, when you start school. When your first-grade teacher shows you pictures of Dick and Jane and Mom and Dad and Spot. When you look at them and don't understand, because you've never had a Mom or a Dad. Because you don't have a dog to throw a ball to, and you've never known anyone who has.
When no one comes to Parent's Night to see your drawing of a house and a boy and a tree, done in Crayola and sweat on construction paper. When your teacher doesn't ask where your parents are in your picture, because she knows you have none, and you know, even though you're six, that she's avoiding the question she's asked everyone else because she knows. When you first realize, in your heart as well as your brain, that you are different, and alone, and no one can help you.
Imagine that child, and know that he lives in Detroit, and New York, and Los Angeles, and Peoria, and in your hometown. Imagine how many more of him there will be, if adoption replaces abortion as the solution of today.
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Another huge problem with that marketplace of adoption is more difficult to tackle. It's not the rainbows-and-daisies save-the-children problem, and it's not just less visible. For most of the country, it's less emotionally-charged, less worrisome, and less sympathetic. It's the effect the adoption marketplace has on birthmothers.
We're not just talking about the "stigma" of being unwed mothers. Don't get me wrong, the government's concerned about that, as well. State governments started mandating the sealing of adoption records back in the 1930s, partially to "protect" unwed mothers from the stigma of their pregnancies. They were also sealed to protect adoptive families from embarrassment or recognition of their connection with an illegitimate birth.
Times have changed and the stigma isn't what it used to be. But most states still seal adoption records, and they'll keep on protecting you from your stigma whether you like it or not. Which means that if that baby you relinquished back in 1971 would like to meet you and say thanks for making the right choice for everyone involved, no dice. If you need to get hold of that kid some day to let them know they're at risk for a medical condition or just to make sure, from a distance, they're okay or even that they're still alive, forget about it.
You. Will. Be. Protected. From. Your. Stigma. Dammit.
Like I said, it's not just the stigma. In the end, stigma is something each birthmother (and/or birthfather) is going to have to deal with in their own way, on their own terms. I think, frankly, that it sucks that anyone would feel guilty, or ashamed of having given up a child for adoption. I think it sucks that anyone would try and make someone else feel that way. I think it's likely that, for most people in an adoption-or-abortion scenario these days, the stigma is greatly lessened. And I think that's all for the good.
The bigger problem, I think, is one that people don't even consider. You relinquished your child, right? That means you're done, it's over, there's no relationship between you and this child, and you'll never have to worry about it again. Right?
Wrong.
Think, for a minute, what it's like to be forced to be pregnant. Whether you wanted it or not, imagine that you're seventeen and you're pregnant, and that your baby has been growing inside you for nine months. Imagine that you've come to terms with the fact that you're having this baby, because you've got no other choice. Imagine that you decided, back in your third month, when you hated the idea of being pregnant and the baby and the father and the law and everything that had helped get you in this situation, to relinquish the baby, and that you signed the papers. Imagine that you kept that thought in the front of your mind, even while you felt the baby kick and doubted you were choosing the right thing, because you're seventeen and you're pregnant and you can't imagine raising a baby on your own.
Imagine knowing that you can't raise this baby alone, knowing that the government won't help you do it. That living alone on welfare is a scary thing for a seventeen year old and that you know you won't be able to afford an apartment in a safe neighborhood, let alone diapers and food. That you know you need to finish school and you won't be able to give your baby a good life, that someone else out there can do it better than you can. That your baby's only chance, and your only chance, rests in giving the baby up for adoption. Letting someone else raise your baby and care for him, read him books to put him to sleep at night, hold him after nightmares wake him. See him off on his first day of school, put a quarter under the pillow when he loses his first tooth. Watch him grow, play football, break his arm, graduate from high school, leave for college. Give him everything you can't, because you're young and alone and pregnant and you haven't even graduated high school yet.
Imagine knowing it's for the best. Having your hand forced.
Imagine how that would feel, knowing that everything you hoped and dreamed for him over nine long nauseous awkward terrifying wonderful months, was now in someone else's hands.
And imagine what your next twenty-one years will be like, never knowing.
Imagine what it will be like, when they take him out of your arms and you're left to wonder, forever, what might have been. What will be.
Imagine knowing that you can never know, will never know. Imagine that hell, and understand what substituting adoption for abortion will be like.
Adoption isn't the solution to abortion. Anyone who tries to make it one risks destroying many more lives than could be saved.
It's not just the kids who can be hurt. They just make prettier poster children.