There are several streams that feed into transracial adoption, each of which is deeply problematic at its source. Adoption itself is one: Why is there ever a child being placed for adoption? Adoption solves, in a wonderful and satisfying way, the problem of infertility for so many people that we tend to forget that adoption itself is a problem and not just a solution. I once led a student reading group on adoption…. We read widely, bringing in books and articles to share with each other. One evening a man brought in a table of international adoption statistics. Sweden—not Utopia, but a place with good social services, readily available contraception as well as abortion, decent services for single mothers, along with all mothers and children—Sweden had twelve domestic, nonfamily adoptions that year. Twelve Swedish women found themselves in a situation where placing their babies out for adoption was their best option. Twelve. When you take away most of the social forces operating upstream that put women in that awful position, you are left largely with personal idiosyncrasy, personal reasons. Twelve.
The United States is bigger than Sweden; if we had the kinds of social supports the Swedish have, we would still have more than twelve babies available. But we would never, ever have anywhere near the number of babies we currently have placed “voluntarily” for adoption, and we would never have enough to solve the problem of infertility. Adoption is the result of some very bad things going on upstream, policies that push women into giving birth to babies that they then cannot raise.
Rothman goes on to talk about race; class; gender bias that leaves more black boys than girls without adoptive homes (perhaps one of the reasons that, not long before we started working with them, our agency stopped allowing adoptive families to specify what gender baby they wanted).
But I want to pull out that notion of “voluntarily placing a baby for adoption” that Rothman interrogates with her quotation marks. Previously I mentioned concerns about coercion of birthmothers, and here Rothman is arguing that the whole system is coercive. “Racism is of course the other feeder stream,” she says, and “A lot of what adoption is about is poverty… And a lot of what poverty is about in America is racism.”
I am stuck here. I have, on the one hand, so much to say; and on the other hand, I want that image of the Twelve Swedish Women to stand there, for people to just hold that image for a bit.
This is one of those bits that I found convicting—that say to me that I could not choose to adopt a black baby without being complicit in a coercive system. People have commented many times about my compassion for our birthmother, about my compassion for the birthfather even when we were in a custody dispute with him (“You seem like a really compassionate person,” my lawyer said to me one day, not unkindly, “But it’s time to cut that shit out.”). But what does it mean to have the luxury of compassion because other people, because a system of racism and entrenched poverty, have already done the coercing?
This is not news to me—I’ve been able to talk glibly about how white people who are not racists nonetheless benefit from racism for twenty-five years or more. But something about this, about the way Rothman speaks so plainly—“adoption itself is a problem”—and about the embodied reality of Yehva here, and not there, that hits me viscerally, that takes it to a deeper level of reality for me. Again, I don’t feel guilty, and I don’t think I’ve done wrong. But I am trying not to shade my eyes from the glare of truth.
I'm going to have more to say about coercion. But this is all I want to say right now.
5 comments:
Wow. Thanks for those numbers. I think you're right to set the "rest of the story" (as Paul Harvey would say)aside for a moment of framing silence around that thought. Twelve women in all of Sweeden. serious pause for thought.
Joann
*No doubt* racism and all the many big and small ways it plays out in the lives of communities and individuals plays a role in the disparity of the number of black children placed for adoption in this country. I have no doubt about that, and you are right to have us look at that clearly.
In addition, I think there is another factor that may be at least as important when comparing Sweden to the United States in this regard, and it is no less thorny politically or morally (in this country, anyway). Rothman touches on it in the quoted passage in only a single word: abortion. Abortion is free to Swedish women and apparently widely accepted as a means of family planning. (According to a 1993 report from Healthcare for Women International, 25% of Swedish pregnancies ended in abortion. [http://www.popline.org/docs/0999/082789.html] I do not know the current rate, but if it is lower, my guess is that it's due to better contraception methods or availability rather than an increase in opposition to the practice of abortion. In contrast, the U.S. abortion rate in 2008 was about 2% according to USA Today.) In this country, abortions are much more difficult and expensive to obtain, and a sizable percentage of the population is, at the very least, uncomfortable with the practice if not outright opposed to it. It seems that the abortion issue must play a role, and I don't think that role is *entirely* dictated by poverty, racism or the Swedish health care system. Neither poverty nor racism completely obliterates a woman's moral agency nor her desire to act according to her moral convictions if she perceives it as within her ability to do so. Understand, I'm not arguing the morality of abortion one way or the other. I simply suspect more women in the U.S. consider it morally out of bounds than in Sweden and thus choose adoption or motherhood more frequently as a result. To be sure, safe and legal abortion is simply not available to many poor women in the U.S., so it's hard to extrapolate to what extent our low abortion rate is due to conviction vs. lack of availability. Both are bound to be factors, I think.
Of course I am speaking generally, and not of Yehva's birth mother. I do not presume to know her reasons for pursuing adoption.
Oh, "Naturalmom" is me, Stephanie Charlot. (No need to post this comment -- I just wanted to let you know it was me in case that mattered to your approval process.)
Stephanie
I'm a little taken aback by that statistic that one in four pregnancies in Sweden ends in abortion, and would like to know more about where that came from. It's my understanding that in cultures where women are equal and children are valued, abortion rates go down, both because of availability and acceptance of contraception and because women feel safe raising their babies. Thinking about a connection between a need to provide babies for infertile couples, and the quite intentional elimination of abortion options for poor (and rural) women, gives me chills.
"But what does it mean to have the luxury of compassion because other people, because a system of racism and entrenched poverty, have already done the coercing?"
Yeah.
And what about white women who make adoption plans? Most white birth mothers I know who've done so were definitely struggling economically, for the long term.
[keeps chewing on this]
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