I actually wanted to write about outlining
Sep 21, 2006 Adoption
But instead I’m going to write more about adoption.
Kathleen wrote:
I take issue with the idea that a refusal to sign adoption papers is the same as “deciding to parent.†My view is no doubt colored by working in family court. However, the idea that all parents who choose not to go through with adoptions go onto to actually parent the child is patently false.
My bias is to assume the best intent of families making adoption plans (not being forced to make adoption plans or else lose their children to social services). There are individual stories about terrible people who make adoption plans who do not follow through and then are abusive or hateful of use the children to manipulate partners, etc. There are also individual stories about adoptive parents who are abusive or hateful or use the children to manipulate partners. But we make policy on the most common scenarios and most commonly, people are pretty good.
Some of the antiadoption activists make a point of collecting stories about adopters who kill and obviously, this is an argument full of holes. There are many reasons to criticize adoption but pulling out stories of abusive adopters isn’t all that convicing to this (not abusive) adopter. Likewise circulating stories about terrible almost-birth parents doesn’t convince me that every adoption that doesn’t happen is a tragedy.
There are general truths about adoption and then there are specific truths about every individual adoption. Parents who consider adoption are given the same rights as parents NOT considering adoption. That means that some parents (who considered adoption or not) are going to be awesome and amazing and that some parents (who considered adoption or not) are going to be bloody awful.
Wendy asked (on the livejournal post), “How saintly can we be? I mean really? (we being adoptive parents) At some point isn’t there an “okay enough fucking with us, really now, get your shit together now” moment?”
We don’t have to be saints. We can rant, rave, feel bitter, hate the parents who chose to parent and weep for the baby that isn’t ours. Like I said, we can feel however we want to feel but we can’t dictate policy on the feelings of a few. That’s just the reality. That’s just what it is to adopt. And that’s also why we need the support of ethical adoption professionals who will help guide us when we are at our most fragile.
And yes, absolutely there can come a point where people can say, “Enough of this — make your decision or don’t.” The desperation that we can feel when we’re waiting to adopt can sometimes make us say yes to situations that aren’t working for us. Again, an ethical adoption professional can be a guide there; they can encourage you to say no. (I am amazed by the number of hopeful adoptive parents who are put out to sea by agencies and lawyers who shrug and say, “Well, hang in there. You never know what might happen.” That’s bullshit.)
I have learned more about the situation I was blogging about before (Cecily put it out there so I feel comfortable linking now) and it really is a truly shitty situation. But knowing how shitty it is doesn’t change how I feel about making generalizations. It says a lot about this almost adoption but not much about adoption in general. (I’m really wondering about the agency/lawyer here. I think they dropped the ball but don’t know for certain.)
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Tags: anti-adoption, moomins
Daily Madison
Sep 20, 2006 Parenting
Madison enters room carrying her hairbrush and offers to brush my hair. As she’s brushing, I notice the brush is wet.
“Did you spray it with your spray bottle?” I ask her. We use a spray bottle to spritz her curls before we condition and comb.
“No,” she says, smoothing back my bangs. “I put it in the toilet.”
Rats.
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Tags: Madison
When adoptions don’t happen
Sep 19, 2006 Adoption
You know those stories where this couple waits and waits for a baby and then they decide to adopt through a lawyer or agency and they get a baby and take it home and parent it and love it (for 3 hours or 3 days or 3 months or 3 years) and then the child ends up back with their first family? Every single case I’ve ever heard of this happening there was some kind of legal issue that gets left out of the conversation. Legal issues like:
–The baby was not legally free to be adopted;
–The baby was taken back within the time set by the state in which the first family could change their mind.
Let me make this clear: Legal adoptions are rarely (if ever) disrupted. Placements are disrupted but a placement is not an adoption. A baby placed in the home of hopeful parents who is returned to his or her first family before the adoption is finalized is not a disrupted adoption; it’s a disrupted placement. (I wasn’t clear on this back when I first wrote about it.) Until the first family signs the legal surrender AND chooses not to revoke it (in the case of states where there is a revocation period after the surrender), the baby is not the child of the adoptive parents.
I’m not downplaying the grief of a family who thought a baby in their arms was theirs only to have the mom (or dad) change her mind. Those families have the right to grieve the loss of the child they hoped would be theirs. However I think it’s imperative that we get the terminology right and that we understand that their grief does not implicate and is not the responsibility of the parents who choose to parent.
Hopeful adoptive parents need to be well schooled on the rights of expectant parents. They need to understand the legal risk they take when they accept the placement of a child who is not legally free. And we must stop demonizing parents who exercise their right to change their minds about adoption plans.
If a parent considers adoption, makes an adoption plan, puts that plan in motion, chooses a family for placement, promises that family to go through with it, births the baby and releases that baby to the care of the family then CHANGES HER MIND, she is exercising her legal right as that child’s mother. She is not morally wrong. Her decision does not make her a liar or selfish or cruel or inhuman or unfeeling. Her decision does not (or at least should not) have anything to do with the adoptive family. This is HER life, HER crisis — we wannabe-adoptive parents, we’re just very interested bystanders living our OWN crisis.
A parent who changes her mind about adoption and chooses to parent is no different than any other parent who takes her baby home from the hospital. The presence of an adoption plan doesn’t make that child a better candidate for adoption than any other child who is born.
We cannot argue that a parent should place her child because she made a plan. We cannot say that the hopeful adoptive parents are better suited than she is because she made a plan. We have no right to trash her for exercising her legal right to parent the child to whom she gave birth instead of placing it with the oh-so-deserving wannabe-parents. We may as well take to the streets and demand that every woman who births a baby in circumstances we deem not ideal gives those babies to oh-so-deserving wannabe-parents. After all, that worked so well before!
I don’t mean to get sarcastic. I’m just frustrated that this is an adoption idea that will not die — that adoption promises mean anything before the surrenders are signed. They don’t. Adoption professionals need to do a better job of telling hopeful parents this. And the public needs more education about what an adoption plan means. (Nothing! For the hopeful wannabe parents it means nothing! It’s all about that family dealing with a crisis and exercising their options!)
We need to separate out our experiences. We (adoptive parents, hopeful adoptive parents) need to understand that our crisis — waiting for a child, hoping for a child, not being placed with a child we hoped to parent, not getting to adopt a child we parented for a short while — is ours and not lay it at the feet of families living their own crisis.
It would be nicer if we were able to sympathize with grieving wannabe parents (hopeful adoptive parents who did not get to parent a child they hoped to parent) without trashing families who changed their mind about placing their babies.
(This goes for fathers who decide they want to parent, too. I’m writing this after reading some comments on a blog entry about hopeful adoptive parents who were disappointed to learn a baby they had for a few days would not be theirs after all. The comments were not BY the parents, they were from some outraged bystanders who don’t seem to know much about adoption and how it works.)
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Madison’s sweet nothings
Sep 19, 2006 Parenting
Today Madison came into the family room when Noah had on Teen Titans and she went up to the television set — right up to it.
“I give Robin a hug,” she said, then put her arms on the screen to do it. “He’s so skunchable!”
(This is something Brett says to her when he’s hugging her, “You’re so lovable yet so scrunchable!”)
Then she said, “He’s a sweetheart!”
Then she put her foot up on the screen and said, “Eat my foot, Robin. Eat dis foot.”
Ahh, young love! Makes us do such silly things!
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Why it takes me a long time to write
Sep 19, 2006 Book work, Writing
I’ve been chunking my essay and found a great gaping hole. Now I’m trying to ask myself some questions so I know how to fill it up.
I found some research published in Bioethics that is but exactly what I’m talking about and it’s helping me reorient my thoughts. But then also having read someone else who sees what I see, I’m wondering if everyone sees it and so it’s not worth writing.
Segues into insecurity and back out again are one of the things that stall me. (The other is that I have to think on things for so damn long and then when I’m ready to write, I don’t always have time in my schedule to write although the babysitter is changing all that for me. At least until I have to start bringing money into the house again.)
I’m trying to take this in small bites but it’s hard work.
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Tags: essay