The Tricky Stuff

A few weeks ago, my friend Caryn and I were driving home together after a little jaunt into Chicago. We are, most often, friends who communicate via email or text, so it was a pleasure to be “live and in person” with her. She asked me how the writing of my book was going, and I told her about its trickier parts. The ones that snag me, keep me returning to them and that I want to make sure to get right. (Or as right as I can.) The most challenging chapter is one I’ve called “Adoption: a Crime, a Necessary Evil, or a Miracle?"

She seemed surprised that anyone might consider adoption either a crime or evil. She’s familiar with the staggering numbers of orphans around the world. Low estimates are 150 million, globally. And there are more than 100,000 kids in the U.S. foster care system who are waiting for families. I told her about some of the research I’ve done over the years on unethical adoptions and said that I needed to acknowledge in “Love You More” that abuse certainly has occurred (and, tragically, still occurs).

I often read stories and position papers on Ethica, an organization which is are both pro-adoption and looking with open eyes at problems and abuses and calling for justice.

"Ethica speaks out about the difficulties and problems in the adoption community, we do so out of a desire to improve adoption, not eliminate it,” its site states.

Others who look with a critical gaze at adoption conclude that all adoptions are criminal. In my experience, most often, the people who take this position have been deeply wounded personally by adoption abuse. Some are mothers who gave birth as teenagers in the middle part of the 20th century, were forced to relinquish their babies and were never given access to information about their children. Secrets and lies seemed the order of the day in American adoptions back then. Happily our culture has changed radically. Among those who maintain that every adoption is a crime, some justify this conviction by saying that, because the first mother and adoptive parents are not equals, it’s a coercive situation.

Journalist and adoptive mom Laurie Sterns has written: “Adoption is dicey by definition, a transaction between unequals.” Sterns adopted her son Diego from Guatemala about a decade ago and has spent the equivalent of years there since then. She and her family have become close to her son’s birth family and she has spoken to many Guatemalan women who chose to place their children for adoption. Despite acknowledgment of the “uneven exchange,” Sterns is an adoption proponent. It's an imperfect world we live in, she says. She knows from the intimate relationships she has developed in the country that choosing to place their children for adoption is an option of great comfort and help to many Guatemalan women. Guatemalan women work very hard, too often their children are undernourished (some estimate that more than 70% of rural, indigenous children in the country are malnourished) and usually lack access to reproductive health education and services. (I highly recommend, by the way, "Finding Home," a series of radio programs about adoption to which Sterns has contributed – listen to them here.)

When my husband and I decided on adopting from Guatemala, I almost immediately began exchanging emails with some of the most outspoken anti-adoption voices there. I wanted to hear all of their concerns. I wanted to hold my own agency accountable to their critiques. One day, the anti-adoption person with whom I was corresponding asked me whether my agency had warned me that the birthmother might change her mind. She said that if I’d not received such warnings, my adoption was more likely to be a shady one. Just a day or so before, I’d read an emailed update on Mia’s health as well as a sober reminder that her first mother was still in the position of being able to stop the adoption process. A good sign. And there were others.

This week, I’ve revisited the tricky parts of my book, smoothing them out trying to trim parts that might not be of interest to readers. Paraphrasing Elmore Leonard, I wrote to a friend: “I’m trying to take out the parts people will skip over.” But how much to leave in? How much of the story of my own nation’s culpability in Guatemala’s 36 year civil war, a war that cost the lives of more than 200,000 Guatemalan people and dug its indigenous people into deeper poverty? And what fraction of this support was related to American holdings in the United Fruit Company? (Ever wonder where the name “Banana Republic” came from?) Our government, decades later, took responsibility for our actions and apologized. We acknowledged our secret sins of providing funding and training to a military that we knew was committing atrocities. My book, however, is a family memoir and not a journalistic exposé or an indictment of the CIA or the Truman Doctrine. (Mr. Leonard, of the "leave out what they would skip" school, would definitely sound the alarm if I got too far into such issues.) 

Yet, this connection between my country and that of my daughter's birth is another thread that pulled us together. Does God mourn over secrets and lies? Does God hate injustice and cruelty? Yes. And I believe, in deep and mysterious ways, God can pick up these broken pieces and transform then into good. 

Caryn wrote me a quick email this morning, telling me about a story involving adoption and secret sins. She watched “Lost Sparrow” last night, a documentary on PBS about the way a sibling group, Native American children, were adopted in the early 1970s and the abuse that they suffered afterward. More secrets and lies.

So what’s the answer to that question my chapter title asks? Is adoption a crime, a necessary evil, or a miracle? I think, like many other things, it can be any of those three. In the case of my family, I consider it a miracle. In this big world, in which – too often – children are victimized, a little girl on a waiting child list became a cherished member of a family and changed us all for the better.