Just to prove that that bias I talked about in my last post exists.

(http://www.thrivetheblog.org/category/your-advice/)

The second image in Google image search for "adopted." Right after Angelina Jolie with Zahara. That seems to be the way this thing is framed. Idyllic and uplifting or shameful and traumatizing.

So. Rude.

Rude, Stupid, and Annoying Questions People Ask Parents: Is She Adopted? begins with this: "Unfortunately, interracial or biracial couples often get asked if their baby is adopted if he or she looks very much like the other parent." Unfortunately, the author doesn't fully explain why this is unfortunate. The only explanation I can seem to glean from the article is that

even if you are right and the child is adopted, why would you think it is appropriate to comment about this in front of the child? Depending on the situation, there is a fair chance that child hasn't been told yet that he is adopted and your rude comment may have done a lot more harm than you could ever imagine.

This I get. Though I still agree with Hopgood that parents shouldn't hide adoption from their children, this would be a harsh way to find out. The only other reason I can imagine why this might be considered rude would be that this would be an insult to the parent. The reason why this might be an insult would be that 1. the parent believes there is something to be ashamed of about adoption. (They're not really yours). Or 2. It's just an invasive comment. The end of the article seems to implicitly back up these other reasons. The list of related "stupid and thoughtless things that people say when kids really are adopted include:

* Which child is 'really' yours?
* How much did you pay for them?
* Why did their parents give them up?
* Where are their 'real' parents?
* Couldn't you have your own kids?
* Why didn't you adopt an American child?
* Are they 'real' brothers and sisters?
* Do they have the same father? "

I recognize that belief in the idea of "real" and, I suppose, "fake" children is ignorant and unkind, but they only carry weight if the parent feels at least to some extent vulnerable to those kinds of attacks. Also, these are just invasive, personal questions I would be tentative to ask of even my closest friends. But these are much harsher than the article's title question: is she adopted? That such a question would be considered rude, stupid, or annoying indicates to me that there do exist some real biases against adoption, or assumptions about the extent of "realness" in adoptive families.

Unofficial adoption

So I've been talking a lot about formal adoption, but perhaps even more common is unofficial adoption. When families throw their kids out or kids leave, when spouses kick each other out or somebody just needs to get away, friends, neighbors, and family frequently offer up their home, energy, and love. I have several friends who are not on speaking terms with their families, but still have a place they call home, a place to visit on Thanksgiving.

These scenarios illustrate our continuously morphing definition of family. A class I took back in college suggested that one of the dominant components of the Generation X identity was a desire to find one's true family with one's friends. I myself went through a period of time where an ex-boyfriend's mother took me in when I wasn't on good terms with my own parents. Perhaps the definition of family and parents is flexible not only in terms of biological or official relationship, but flexible also depending on the time in a person's life.

For children, I would contend, family should be a little more clearly defined, because for a long time, family does define the child in a big way. The danger of the foster system is that, after years of being shuffled from home to home, children begin to believe they don't really exist for anyone in a consistent way, because no one does for them.

What scares some adoptive parents about telling their child s/he is adopted?

Mei-Ling Hopgood's Lucky Girl asks this question. Adopted from Taiwan and raised in the midwest, Hopgood explains,

I sometimes resented people's assumption that adoptees must automatically, deep down, feel part empty or abandoned, that we must suffer some hole in us that will never be filled because our birth parents could not or did not raise us. I know people think this. I know because psychologists and adoption experts write essays and books about it. I know because of the questions people ask ("Did you always know you were adopted?" "How did you feel about that?") as if being adopted might mean you are somehow incomplete.

I also understand that adopted parents worry a lot about this. I've talked to parents who pine and mourn for their child's birth mother and father and fret over whether their baby will despair at not being able to know or find their birth family. I know parents who fear telling their child that he or she is adopted, which is ridiculous, in my view. The longer you conceal this so-called secret, the more likely it will become toxic.

I think there are people who do feel abandoned and betrayed, but I hear Hopgood's point; an individual's reaction to his or her adoption will depend on that individual's personality and circumstances. I suppose then, the answer to my title question has to be similarly nuanced. Individuals and individual couples will have different approaches to and reasons for their explanations about their kid's adoption.

A few prominent reasons come to mind for parents NOT telling their kids about their adoptions. Jealousy/fear of emotional detachment. Just as there is the possibility for children to feel pushed away by biological parents, adoptive parents could feel pushed away when their children seek out those biological families. Desire to protect their children from painful identity struggle. Genuine belief that adoption does put a child at a disadvantage in some way. Shame at not having been able to conceive a child themselves.

My Nanny and her husband chose to tell the girls from early on, as did Hopgood's parents. One ugly side of that coin, however, was that when my mom and aunt misbehaved, their father would tell people they were adopted, while good behavior was rewarded with "That's my girl."

It seems to me that the honest conversation bit is still families'--of any kind--best bet.

Jesus Land

Julia Scheeres' memoir Jesus Land chronicles her life with her two adopted brothers, both black, and her severely Calvinist parents. The parents adopted the younger of the boys, and Julia's best friend and confidante, David, because they felt that adopting a black boy when they wanted a white child would demonstrate their Christian generosity. They adopted their older son, Jerome, so David would have someone "like him" to play with, though Jerome was violent and too traumatized by his early life to prove as obedient as David was.

Throughout, Scheeres describes her parents' rigorous Christian values and demonstrates how their love of God seemed more often than not to get in the way of their love of their children--adopted or otherwise. Throughout, they also received seemingly endless praise from their church community for their selfless, Christian behavior.

This for me pinpoints exactly the danger of the idea that religious devotion in and of itself proves one's qualification for parenthood. It also highlights that the love or lack of love parents have for their children is not dependent on biological relation.

Frequently, I think international adoption is seen as a more humanitarian gesture. This is in part because frequently people adopt from countries with less extensive health, social, and economic security than is in the U.S. It is also, I think, because that child requires more effort. The love from internationally adoptive parents is assumed to be greater because they worked harder for that child, in theory. That child is more of a burden, though the parents would probably never frame it as such. In this instance, however, David's "burden" on his parents is that he is black. That was their benevolent Christian gesture. As Scheeres writes,

My parents didn't set out to adopt two black boys. They wanted the white kid on my sister's pediatric ward.
...But the adoption agency peristed. There were scads of other children who needed homes, they said: black children.
...To reject a black baby would have been un-Christian, a sin. God was testing them. This was a chance to bear witness for Jesus Christ, to show the world that their God was not prejudiced and neither were they.
...Years later, I learned that the first time my mother touched David, she feared "the black would rub off on her hands."

In contrast to the foster homes that felt obligated only to keep him alive and collect a check, Julia Scheeres parents "would keep him alive and save his soul." Soul harvesting seems like a crappy reason to adopt a neglected child.

Ricky Martin and "Religious Disapproval"

This article came out in 2008 when Ricky Martin's announcement about his twin boys, born from a surrogate mother, was met with hostile remarks most notably by the Cardinal of Honduras and a Mexican talk show host. Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez apparently said “What Martin did diminishes the dignity of a human being. You can’t just buy or rent life. It’s even worse when someone famous and in the public eye is doing it.” A few years ago, Martin had said he planned to adopt a Rainbow Family: one child from every continent. (I assume that mission excluded uninhabited continents.) I think the Catholic leader probably wouldn't have objected to adoption, which is arguably "buying" a child. I suspect that if Ricky Martin had been married to a woman, this also wouldn't have been an issue. Martin is now out as a gay man, but there had for years been speculation about his sexuality. The overlap between the "morality" of parenthood and religious doctrine is really muddy and complicated. Because so much of the Latin world is Catholic, the popular media frequently carries religious subtext--either in contrast (think scantily clad, busty ladies on popular TV) or more directly. (Of course I'm not excluding this phenomenon to Latino cultures and popular media; this struggle exists in the U.S. as well with Protestant churches.)

This may be why the Mexican talk show host felt comfortable saying, "I don’t think it’s right to deny children of maternal figures, just because you have a big ego.” This gets at my earlier post about the lack of evidence proving children suffer from having parents of just one gender. But furthermore, I struggle with this idea of the ideal family circumstances. Community approval is certainly not the primary evidence needed to prove a family's righteous behavior. I've been reading about some very subtly abusive, or at least of dubious mental health, heterosexual married couples who adopted children from other countries. I'll have to chew on this one a bit more.

The Adoption Market

I've been looking at a remarkable website: a sort of classified section for prospective adoptive parents. There is a lot of repetition in their little blurbs. Of course there is regular emphasis placed on the "loving home" that the family can provide, but also all the letters are direct appeals to the biological parents. I tend to think of the adoption process as almost always handled through an agency of some sort, but this showed prospective parents advertising directly to biological parents.

The website, Adopting.com, also features child listings, with a sort of CraigsList-type format and little bonuses typed by some children like "New," "Reduced Fee!" or "Grant Available!" The children are primarily from Haiti and Eastern Europe. Looking at an individual child's profile, I'm reminded of the profiles you can find at animal shelters as well. This "little guy," for instance, has won the hearts of many. There is basic medical info (HIV, syphilis, and TB tests) like with pets, and there is a bit of a story for each child. There is real practical reason for this kind of presentation, but I cannot dismiss that this is a market of children.

Also, there is heavy emphasis on the children being in need (but not too much), about their being in good spirits, and about their being brave. Constant reference is made to their smiling. This article talks about how smiling children or infants are seen as healthier and more adoptable. In several instances, I noticed in the pictures that the oldest children smiled the broadest, even if they had suffered considerably. Like these brothers, aged 2, 6, and 8. The oldest brother is smiling most broadly. It is certainly possible that that is a very happy little boy. It is also possible that he understands to some extent that he needs to sell himself to provide a home for himself and his two younger brothers. The adoption agency hasn't missed the difference. They assure prospective parents that the two-year-old, Michael, "is a happy boy, just apparently not in the mood for a photo."

I don't like to think of the adoption market in purely economic terms, because I think that's a reductive analytical lens. At the same time, though, there are striking parallels. The idea of "damaged goods" is still there--those children with special needs, physical, developmental, behavioral, etc. The age of children contributes to this idea. An older child is like an older animal; if the adoptive family doesn't get to see the new family member in the "cutest" stage, the parents may feel gypped.

Adoption, like other systems, has different markets and different avenues for tracking down the "right" pick or product. My Nanny (adoptive Grandma) found out about my mom through her brother, the doctor who delivered my mom. It was a different era in adoption; there was probably significantly less paperwork and screening across the board. However, it was also one of those instances in which the number of hands who passed along the baby was greatly reduced from comparable scenarios in large adoption agencies. It was a different market.

Gay Adoption, Pt II

One of the other ridiculous things about this Syndey article is the Ohio legislation that was proposed in 2006. I looked into it a bit further, and this PrideSource article informs me that the proposed legislation would have prevented adoption "if the individual is a homosexual, bisexual, or transgender individual; the individual is a stepparent of the child to be adopted and is a homosexual, bisexual, or transgender individual; the individual resides with an individual who the court determines is a homosexual, bisexual, or transgender individual." Really? If there is a bisexual person living in the same place, their friend, roommate, brother, sister, even parent couldn't adopt a child if that bill had passed. Really?

Gay Adoption

So, in case you couldn't tell, I'm liberal. But I think it is really clear that you don't have to be liberal, just reasonable, to recognize that gay parents do not pose an unhealthy environment for children. This article was pretty interesting to me. I had already read about how gay parents do not "make" their kids gay. What I hadn't known before was that, according to the 2000 Census, a third of lesbian households and 22% of same-sex male households already have at least one child under the age of 18 living in their home. That's not necessarily a stat in favor or against gay adoption, it just shows that there is a considerable basis for statistical analysis.

The article sited an article from The Sydney Morning Herald from 2006, which explained that the same people advocating a ban on gay adoptive parents are those who advocate restrictions or banning on abortion. Again, I think back to the incredible hypocrisy of that message to the general population. More babies without homes secured for them are born if abortions are restricted. Simultaneously, restricting the number of loving families allowed to raise children because of the imposition of a religious or cultural belief (again, clearly not based on statistical evidence about the quality of life in non-traditional family) hurts children.

I wish my baby pics were worth this much.

What the hell. This is absolutely ridiculous. $10 million dollars?

Also, there is absolutely no mention in this article of little Zahara, whose face is cut off but is still actually in this picture. I looked at this picture with a few friends, and I was struck by the fact that AJ's back is to Zahara. It looks like she's carrying Zahara on her back, which strikes me as being sort of vaguely African maternal. Zahara's expression and her position relative to her mother and little sister make her seem like an adult. Angelina seems to be interacting with the baby much more than with Zahara. It looks like more of a mother-child interaction rather than the yin-yang aspect that is at least visually present in the contrast between Zahara and AJ's skin tones. It's hard to tell where Angelina's eyes are, but her smile seems more likely in response to a vaguely grinning, shoulder-nomming baby, rather than a serene (bored? sad?) Zahara. I mean, her smile is probably just part of the framing of the photo, but visually, Zahara looks like an angelic bookend to the very human interaction between Angelina and her young baby. A baby that looks astonishingly like Brad Pitt:

The contrast between the biological family and the larger family including adopted children couldn't be clearer with just Angelina and two of her girls pictured.

Troubled Kids in International Adoption

This article is about international adoptions, focusing primarily on the instances in which the children, mostly from abusive pasts, have severe behavioral, mental, and emotional challenges that the parents aren't informed of or prepared for. After having heard about the seven-year-old Russian boy who was sent back on a plane without adult supervision, it seems that this is a rising topic of conversation. The subject of international adoption interests me. Why adopt internationally?

Well there are few answers to this question. One could be that the prospective parents have heard about tragedies children in orphanages abroad suffer. That is probably the most frequent answer parents give. Of course the agencies' reasons, in the best case scenarios, are primarily about protecting the welfare of the child. In poorer countries, it is entirely possible that a child's access to education, food, and health care would be vastly expanded by leaving the country.

I'm a little perplexed by the video accompanying the article. All about Guatemalan international adoption reform because of the Hague Convention.Hague Convention. I'm perplexed because this video is primarily from the touchy-feely perspective on international adoption: a series of interviews with happy white couples and images of gurgling Guatemalan babies. (Check out the clip of the little girl eating a leaf about forty seconds from the end. Very funny. Also, irritatingly for a Newsweek article, they put that one of the couples was "perspective" rather than "prospective" parents.) One of the couples was in the process of adopting their little boy, when he died in the orphanage. They were trying to adopt another child, but were concerned because there was an expiration date of sorts after which U.S. couples would probably not be able to adopt Guatemalan babies.

I suppose the consistent rhetorical link between the text and the vid is that the adoption agencies in other countries are frequently suspect. But the "Let the Children Come" message and the "kids become scary when they are abused so parents should be thoroughly informed of the circumstances surrounding their earlier life" message, though not incompatible, require a more nuanced connection than just putting them in the same web space. Both do seem to be sympathetic to the U.S. parents, even the woman who killed her two-year-old.

I think one of the big argumentative absences in this article is the inadequate discussion of racial and ethnic implications of many international adoptions. Also, the act of adopting a child from Eastern Europe makes me think about all of the Cold War tensions that exist in reinvented forms even today. "Rescuing" babies from Eastern Europe or from Guatemala or from Haiti means vastly different things. There is this illusion, for one thing, that someone can look like a U.S. citizen (and I am leaving aside, for a moment, the racial difference between parent and child). Perhaps a Russian or even Haitian child might be understood to "look" American, while a Guatemalan baby might not. Perhaps it's because I went to college in Texas, but I suspect people would think the baby was "Mexican." The overlap of national and racial identity is confusing and overlapping.

The issue with adoption is that a lot of adopted children must take on to a much greater extent and at a much earlier age the problems created by adults. As the article fairly points out, the behavioral or developmental issues of adopted children are of course not their fault. It is typically the fault of cruel or negligent adults. But it is the child that must take on those painful issues to such a profound extent.

iChooseAdoption Campaign

When I saw the link to this iChooseAdoption campaign on the Adoption Council website with the pitch "Sometimes choosing adoption is being a good mother," my mind flitted instantly to anti-abortion narratives. I was confused as to why an adoption advocacy site would suggest unprepared parents choose adoption over abortion, since creating a wider market of needy children seemed cruel. Then I realized I was being totally dumb. The negative alternative they were suggesting was mothers feeling obligated to raise their children, even if they were unprepared or unready.

This raises an interesting aspect of adoption: the women who are pressured to actually have children. There are a whole host of reasons why a woman might carry a baby to term even if she doesn't intend to raise it herself, and I certainly don't want to suggest that many women don't make that decision based on their own deep-seated values, but that external pressure is one of those reasons. There are many communities where pre-marriage pregnancy is a marker of shame, but so too is abortion. Pregnancy, according to word on the street, is kind of difficult. It can also be profoundly beautiful apparently, but usually that profound beauty is associated with preparing to have a lifelong relationship with that child. For women who don't plan to have that relationship, any of that beauty and excitement is probably denied them, and they are harshly judged while the father may remain silent.

I am pro-joyous and dignified life, for the mother as well as the child. The case of a woman being pressured into carrying to term and choosing adoption is one instance in which the mother is perhaps denied making a real choice for herself; she is forced into it by the value system of those around her.

I do think the posters and PSAs could be a little clearer. They feature a woman cradling her pregnant belly, looking at it with concern and possibly... fear? sadness? anger? The only text is 1. their slogan "SOMETIMES CHOOSING ADOPTION IS BEING A GOOD MOTHER," with "ADOPTION" and "GOOD MOTHER" larger than any of the rest of the text and 2. iChooseAdoption.org. If I saw that on a billboard on the highway, I would think pro-life. That is an unfortunate automatic association, but if they had simply included the slogan visible on their website, "resources for pregnant women considering options," I would have recognized the emphasis on options. Just as no woman should be pressured to carry her child to term, she also shouldn't be pressured to have an abortion. I still think that, if they want to appeal to the widest swath of the population, they should be clearer with their message.

I am glad to have found an alternative to the term "giving up [a child] for adoption." That phrase makes me think of giving up ON that child, giving up on your own abilities, failing. Not to say that adoption is not a real sacrifice; I just think "choosing adoption" doesn't charge the decision with a value system the mother might not agree or want to identify with.

"Open" versus "Closed" Adoptions

My mom's adoption was "closed," meaning that there was no contact between her biological and adoptive family. This has proved problematic for her for a variety of reasons. First of all, that lack of connection has instilled in her a sense of having been abandoned and a fear that everyone she loves will also abandon her, a realization she has only come to terms with in the last few years. Her adopted mother, my grandmother ("Nanny"), also made some accusations about her biological mother that my mother distrusts. One of the most practically challenging issues with a closed adoption is that Mom didn't have access to her family medical history. A friend of hers was also adopted in a closed adoption, and when the courts finally released her family medical history after years of petitions, she discovered that every woman in her family had had cervical cancer. When she had it checked out, her cancer was inoperable.

That lack of connection with one's biological family shapes an adoptee's understanding of herself. I think a lack of connection with one's medical past parallels strikingly with a lack of connection with one's heritage: one's family history in nonmedical ways. I understand that parents who choose to give their children up for adoption (I don't know another term, but I think "giving up" a child has possibly unnecessary connotations about sacrifice or failure--"I gave up on that kid...") should have the right to request some measure of privacy, because there are as many reasons for giving a child up for adoption as their are circumstances surrounding birth. The mother could, for example, be in social circumstances beyond her control, and, though she wants the best for her child, she must also protect her own safety by distancing herself from that child for whatever reason. But there is absolutely no reason why that child should not have access to his or her family medical history.

Luckily, my mom recently got the courts to reopen her adoption file! She has exchanged letters and emails with her biological mother, and has spent the last few weeks sending me updates on what she's found out about our family history. Beyond a practical need to know about the health of her family, she has for the first time gotten to hear about a family member who is a redhead like herself (my brother and I both are blondish). Getting that kind of connection--proof that she was born of real people with real stories and lives--has made her calmer and happier. I don't think all children have the same ideas about their adoptions, of course, but I think the court systems in each state and in the U.S. and hopefully eventually the world should be willing to provide as much information to those children as possible: as much opportunity for them to know that they have some agency in creating their identities.