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.
