Children are Priceless (pp. 33-34)

This is from a chapter called "Motherhood in the Marketplace."

Children are priceless. And yet we know they are costly. We know that getting and maintaining children is about as expensive as anything in this society. A child costs more than a car, less than a house. There really are price tags here. If you just get easily pregnant the old-fashioned way, there are still the costs of pregnancy care, birth attendants. One adoptive mother, rightly offended when asked how much the baby cost, replied, “Less than a Cesarean section.” But if you can’t get pregnant, there are often serious costs: reproductive technologies, adoption—these are big-ticket items.

This is a tension we live with. Viviana Zelizer expressed it perfectly in the title of her book Pricing the Priceless Child. She talked about the sentimentalization of children, their pricelessness, and the necessity of putting price tags on them. A kid is killed in a car accident and we sue. A dollar value is assigned. An infertile woman or a man without a woman wants someone to get pregnant, grow them a baby. A dollar value is assigned. And the costs are not the same for all babies. A minister at the Antioch Bible Church is trying to raise money for a billboard that will show a white baby, a Latino baby, and a black baby, and next to each the fee charged by adoption “facilitators,” of thirty-five thousand, ten thousand, and four thousand dollars, respectively. “I raise thoroughbred racehorses. I sell them by supply and demand. I’m not going to let people sell children by supply and demand.”

Most people don’t have any need to know much about how adoption works, and so they don’t. People I’ve spoken to about adopting Yehva are sometimes surprised to learn that adoption law varies state to state; since you do not have to adopt in the state you live in, this means that it is possible for adoptive parents to choose to adopt in a state whose laws they prefer. We, for instance, adopted in Illinois, which allows no revocation period once the birthmother has surrendered her parental rights; we didn’t choose our agency for this reason, but were glad not to have the risk of bringing the baby home and then having the birthmother change her mind and take the baby from us. Dan Savage, in his book about adopting his son, The Kid, says that many people choose to adopt in Oregon because Oregon has very weak birthfather rights laws.

[On the other hand, birth parents can only place a child for adoption in the state where they live. A couple I know recently lost the potential for a birthmother match because she was in a state that does not allow same-sex couples to adopt. Our birthmother could not have chosen, for instance, to place her child for adoption in Michigan, which has a much longer revocation period during which a birthmother who has placed a child can change her mind. I know there are reasons for this restriction, that have to do with child trafficking. But here is a case where adoptive parents have much more freedom and control than birth parents do.]

You can also choose your agency, and policies vary widely between them. We chose ours in part because they will work with single women and men, unmarried opposite-sex couples, and same-sex couples as well as married opposite-sex couples like us. We also chose them because on their website they decried the practice of charging different fees for babies of different races. During my research, I had seen many agencies that listed graduated fees on their websites: lowest for black babies, a little higher for partially-black babies, a little higher still for Hispanic babies, and a whole lot higher for white babies.

Supply and demand certainly drives this. White newborns are in such high demand and low supply that agencies can be very choosy about the adoptive parents they work with. In my research, I found that most agencies placing white newborns would have excluded us, for instance, for any or all of the following reasons: being over 35; having biological children already; being fat; not having medically-documented infertility; having a mood disorder. Meanwhile, the adoption e-mail lists I’m on regularly include appeals from agencies that place children and babies of color, expressing the need for more adoptive families.

[Another digression: David and I recently received such an appeal from our Michigan agency. Although we are both entirely clear about our family being complete, each of us, independently, upon opening the e-mail, had a knee-jerk reaction: “We should update our home study!” And then we laughed at ourselves.]

I understand the social forces that lead agencies to try to give economic incentives to adopt children of color. But adoption rhetoric says that the fees we pay are not funds for the purchase of a baby; they’re payment for services provided by the agency. Why then should it cost less to adopt a baby who is hard to place? Shouldn’t it cost more, if the agency has to work harder to find a home for that baby? (Or, if adoption is driven by the desires of adoptive parents, is the current fee structure partly because agencies have to work harder to find birthmothers of white infants?)

Nonetheless, I was not willing to work with an agency with a graduated fee structure. “Why did you pick me, Mama?” I imagined my future child asking. “Well, honey, you were on sale.” No.

Would I have preferred to adopt a white child? Oh, what a question. Easily set aside now with the answer that I cannot imagine anyone but Yehva being my third child; comfortably evaded three years ago by the knowledge that we were excluded from the marketplace of white newborn adoption.

I want to say no, though, for a number of reasons. One is that I really do think a black kid is just as good as a white kid; I don’t aspire to the kind of faux anti-racism that claims to be color-blind, and I know that adopting a black baby brought a different package of challenges and concerns than adopting a white one would have. But I could not imagine it making any difference to my love of my child and my delight in her.

Also, there is a part of me that wanted the adoption to be visible, as a way of asserting that I see this way of building a family as entirely valid. That adoption is not something to hide. (But what about the Twelve Swedish Women? Am I somehow trying to express publicly my valuation of something that is a symbol of the high costs of racism and poverty? Gaaagh! It's tangly and it hurts my brain.)

Finally, I did not want to adopt a white child because I did not want people to think it mattered to me to have a white child.

(I’d be interested to hear friends who have adopted white children talk about how this is for them, especially when they’re surrounded by so many white parents who have adopted interracially.)