International Adoption, followed by quiet time

I have a pile of work that I simply, absolutely must do. In an attempt to make myself do things that I detest doing, I shall deny myself the blogsphere until I make a certain amount of progress. I can't bear to turn off email, so if anyone really wants to talk to me, you can get me that way. Otherwise, don't worry. I am fine. Just pulling my hair out and gnashing my teeth over stupid administrative paperwork that is long over-due and fighting off the anxiety attacks that come when you have to call attention to the fact that you didn't do something when you should have by turning it in months late.

Mrs. Incredible, also known as Corey, has adopted children from Haiti and wrote a couple of long comments about it. She worries that she may have offended me. She did not (really, Corey, you didn't). I avoid talking about international adoption because ... well ... because I don't like talking about it (see problem with administrative paperwork above). So, just to be clear, here is what I think. I'm not including anything here about private domestic infant adoption because I can't think about that many things all at once. Feel free to add comments to round out the discussion.

I think that one does not help a community, however poor or otherwise in trouble, by taking away its children. This means that domestic foster care and international adoption are at best necessary response to problems that need solutions. When people think of them as solutions to community problems they are being short-sighted at best. In general, finding new parents for children is always a radical response for a problem and should be used only when other options are really and truly not options. We seem to understand that when we are in the US, or maybe it is just that the children of America's poor are not attractive to these sorts of parents. SOME people though do seem to think this way about adoptions from other countries. I read some articles recently about adoptions becoming harder from Guatemala. The parents interviewed spoke about the poverty of Guatemala and argued that they were helping the children by adopting them and bringing them to America.

I find the idea that we are helping a child by saving him from being a member of his family and country revolting. The money spent on "rescuing" one child from be a Guatemalan citizen, could improve the lives of many more children within Guatemala.

And yet I think that orphanages are not good places for children. If there are many orphan in orphanages in some country, and all reasonable efforts to help their first families raise them and local people to adopt them have been exhausted, then I cannot bring myself to say that the children are better off in orphanages than being adopted internationally. I also cannot bring myself to say that I am confident that they are. I really don't know. This is one of the points where I have to confess my ignorance. I just don't know enough about it.

I get confused by the realities of making decisions in this world and thinking about how the systems of this world are part of oppressive and abusive structures.

I think that foster can be seen as a system that supports oppression of women. I wonder if the rise of children in foster care can be correlated with welfare "reform." I am confident that (some) children go into foster care because we do not do enough in this country to help and support the poor -- and especially poor single mothers. I think the problems are systematic, societal, and not the sort of things that can be fixed on an individual level. When it is so impossible to get good health care, education, decent-paying jobs, adequate day care, when people who are parents have grown up without these necessities, when mothers have felt it necessary to live in abusive relationships in order to have a place to live, it is usually too late when child services gets involved. I don't think anyone actually thinks, "Well, we don't have to provide day care and health care to the poor in this country, because we can always take their kids into foster care." Nobody thinks that. I hope.

Yet still, I think that foster care is necessary in individual cases, and it cannot be considered a solution to the problems that create its necessity. It is, as Corey said of international adoptions, a band aid.

And I participate in it. I care for children in the system. Of my three permanent placement boys, two I think really needed to be there. Their mothers could not take care of them (one had died), and their extended families could not take care of them. In one case I continue to believe that if there had been the rights sort of intervention at the right time, care would not have been necessary. And so I believe that in some cases I care for children who were separated from their parents because of poverty, abuse, and lack of options which in a just society would exist. And I do not think that I am a bad person because I love and care for a young person who should have grown up with his mother. I feel slightly comforted knowing that my willingness to provide care is not creating a demand for such children to be taken away.

It bothers me when people use think of adoption as a way of saving children from poverty. Poverty should be addressed in different ways. And I don't say that very much, because I don't think I am standing on some sort of ethical high ground. Though I want to say that adopting from domestic foster care is better than international adoption, I don't think it is that simple. When I think of children who are in under-funded orphanages, I may believe the best solution in the long run is to deal with the problems of the society that resulted in them being there, but do I really think that adoption by foreigners is worse for them than living in this orphanage?

The question that needs to be asked is: When is a foreign adoption ethically similar to me caring for a foster child who in a more just world would not be in foster care, and is it one of the causes of the injustice? At what point does the demand for certain children become one of the reasons they are separated from their parents? At what point is it necessary to take the even more radical step of separating a child from his or her culture, language, and country?

I cannot say. And so I don't write about this very often.

I believe that many people turn to international adoption instead of foster-care adoption based upon the belief that the children they adopt will have suffered fewer traumas, been exposed to fewer drugs in utereo, and, in many cases, will not come with first families they don't want to deal with. Since I only have anecdotal evidence, I have no idea whether they are right in some degree. I am confident that it is not as risk-free as some people think it is. When those risks become realities I think it can be more difficult for people who have adopted internationally because they are not entitled to the same level of assistance from our social services. They may have a harder time finding professionals who understand ways in which differences of culture are interwoven into the problem. They will have even less access to the children's histories in order to understand the exact nature of the problem.

I find it odd that so many Americans are outraged that a couple is told to return the foster child they hoped to adopt to his father when the baby has spent 6 months with them and is bonded to them, and yet so few Americans think that there is significant trauma in removing an 8 or 18 month old child from her home country to live with parents who speak a different language, eat different foods, and live in very different ways. I think that we as a community tend to believe in the resiliency or fragility of children as it serves the needs of the ones who would like to adopt them.

I am not anti-adoption, although I am not pro-adoption either. Neither term makes much sense to me. Would someone be "anti-chemotherapy" as a political or ethical position? Chemotherapy is not a great analogy, but maybe it helps. Bad things happen in this world. Generally we are better at responding to problems than preventing them. Something has gone wrong though if we as a society so celebrate the necessary and most radical response that we stop caring about preventing the problem, or even finding less radical responses to them.

And I understand the joy of being the receiving parent. I know, I experience, the phenomenon of knowing I have been blessed by a relationship that in a more just world I would never have.

--
And now, without further even proof-reading, I am going to make myself work on that stupid paperwork.