Adoption Critics

During the past few weeks, I've received a number of messages from people who are opponents of adoption. They've written, in expectation of my memoir which of course celebrates the adoption of my daughter from Guatemala, that "the term ethical adoption is an oxymoron," that all children who were adopted were ripped from their real families, and...ahem...other things that I can't repeat here.

Like any kind of fundamentalists whose anger, isolation and unbendable certainty in their convictions close their minds and hearts, such anti-adoption voices don't seem able to engage in dialog or to hear other people's stories.

I've been grateful, though, that I made the decision in Love You More to address critics of adoption. I believe we share many key values. 

• We care about the well-being of children and of birth mothers. 
• We want children to grow up in homes where their backgrounds and stories are honestly told and explored. 
• We are offended by policies or practices that have abused, coerced, or otherwise hurt birth mothers.

Unlike the fundamentalist anti-adoption folks, though, I know that (ethical) adoption is a beautiful thing. All around me, I see families with thriving children who were adopted. I know women who placed their children for adoption and who are grateful to have had that opportunity. They didn't have resources and/or the desire to raise a child when they had their babies. For various reasons, they didn't have access to reproductive health education or services. They delight in knowing that their children are happy and loved. It's a situation free of secrecy and abuse. They know who they are, and so do the children to whom they gave birth.

Here's an excerpt from my book in which I explore the tricky territory of anti-adoption voices.

"...not everyone rejoices when they hear that a baby has been adopted. It’s important, as adoptive parents, to hear those arguments, puzzle them out, and continue to grapple with them. 

I don’t want to sequester myself in a cozy place and simply ignore those who are deeply hurt and offended by my choices. I don’t want to be left speechless if someone approaches my family and shares opinions very different from my own. I don’t want to put myself into a position where I might be written off as a person who just keeps blithely saying that God brought her family together and has never heard another set of opinions about adoption.

Some adoption critics assert that when a child cannot be raised by birth parents, relatives should take charge of the child. Failing that, guardianship relationships with strangers may need to be employed, but they are a necessary evil. Under no circumstances, they maintain, should guardians adopt a child, change the baby’s name or live as though the child is a true part of the family. A child should always remain connected, at least by name, with his or her biological relatives. Some such activists primly note that if everyone used birth control or, failing that, terminated unwanted pregnancies, there would be no need for adoption. This fails, of course, to address issues such as sexual violence against women, women’s access to reproductive health services, and whether or not a woman considers abortion a permissible choice.

Over the years, I have engaged with various people who believe that all adoptions are criminal. In their minds, whether a child is an abandoned baby girl in India, an orphan in Ethiopia whose parents died of AIDS, or an infant who was born anywhere from the Glendale neighborhood of Indianapolis to the highlands of Guatemala, adoption is wrong. 

If you haven’t heard voices like theirs before, it might be hard for you to imagine how they can take this position in a world of more than 150 million orphans and in a country where more than 100,000 children wait in foster care for families.

Personally, though, my decision to adopt wasn’t about statistics or research studies. I knew that I was meant to bring a new child into the family by adoption. Arguments against adoption don’t make me feel defensive. I’ve found that they grow, most of the time, out of a true desire for justice. And, to quote Martha Stewart, this is a very good thing. Some people who speak out about adoption have suffered tragic loss in their lives. Perhaps they were once pregnant teenagers who were forced by their parents to place their infants for adoption and were told that they would forget about these babies – but of course they never did. Some lived their whole lives feeling their children’s absence as viscerally as do amputees who experience a tingling sensation in the invisible limbs that were, decades ago, severed from their bodies.

Others who speak out against adoption are the children of American women who, in the middle of the twentieth century, made the choice to relinquish babies but were not permitted to know where these children went to live. Their children, too, were denied access to information. Secrets and lies shrouded their early lives. Through serendipitous twists of fate (or, you know, God’s providence), some of these mothers and children have been reunited. Some unite in a strong hatred of adoption.

Other anti-adoption activists have seen, firsthand, the suffering of women in some of the world’s most resource-poor places. They have heard stories of coercion and bribes. They know of instances where the desperation of vulnerable women that has been played upon and manipulated in horrific ways so that a rich, childless couple may adopt a healthy baby.

As a reporter accustomed to conducting thorough research, I had examined the problem of illegal and unethical adoptions around the world, including in Guatemala. And, yes, there have been horrific abuses there. Between 1960 and 1996, during the country’s civil war, Guatemalan soldiers stole more than 300 children and sold them to adoption facilitators. The children were adopted by families in the U.S., Sweden, Italy, and France, who believed they were adopting orphans. Sadly, some of them were indeed orphans; their parents were killed so that they could be put in the government-operated system and adopted.

Are all of these instances tragic and completely unacceptable?

Yes, yes, yes and without a doubt.

But I can’t make the leap to saying that some abuse makes all adoptions unethical. It sure is an imperfect world we live in, yes? Do I pretend to understand the problem of evil? (Um, absolutely not.) Can I efficiently explain why bad things happen to the world’s most vulnerable people? (No again.) Do I think God allowed my child’s birth family to be poor and disempowered so that I would be permitted to call her my own? (No, no, no.) In the mystery of faith, I do believe God planned for us to be together. I know that God can make good come from tragic circumstances. I wrangle with it and certainly wish ours were a world where there wasn’t such sorrow and brokenness.

A few years before I adopted my Guatemalan-born baby, I wrote a few stories about “street kids” in Latin American countries. I learned about the lives of “glue sniffers” or “resistoleros” (named for a brand of shoe glue that is sniffed by homeless children to provide a high that staves off cold and hunger). Would my child have ended up in that tragic situation? I don’t know, but I feel privileged to be raising four children who desire to improve the economic and health status of people around the world. I’m glad to be able to give my daughter the love, family, food, education, and opportunity her birth mother desired for her."

How do you answer those who believe all adoptions are unethical?