I just had to pull this out
Dec 7, 2007 Adoption, Feminism/Politics
In the last entry, Jenna said in part:
This is where I stand on a lot of reform issues. I think less women would place if they were FULLY informed about the ins and outs of adoption. I think that, in itself, is what is needed: full disclosure of all the issues that surround adoption. I believe that because I was lied to and/or deceived by our agency because I wasn’t informed that OA’s were not legally binding in our state. (And a billion other errors.)
Exactly. I keep writing my way around to this in my book notes. See, I think sometimes reformists (and certainly anti-adoption people) say every adoption is a bad adoption and that’s too simplistic. At the same time, pro-adoption people are simplistic because they say, “Not every woman is unhappy with her choice and that’s proof that the complainers are unreasonable.”
This is going to be hard to word correctly but I’m gonna try.
In the very broadest sense when we’re talking about policy, it doesn’t matter if an individual woman is happy with how her adoption went down; what matters is whether or not she was treated ethically. Some women who had unethical adoptions are happy with their decision (we see them all over forums) but that doesn’t mean that we should be ok with poor ethics. In other words, happiness is a poor measure of ethics.
What’s hard is figuring out what good ethics do mean and I think it’s a mistake to tie them too closely to personal outcomes.
I don’t think I’m saying this right.
I do think that if adoptions were done more ethically that there would be fewer adoptions (as does the adoption worker I spoke with this week). But that doesn’t mean they would disappear. I struggle with this. Because adoption (as it’s done today) is built on injustice, I question the ethics of adoption period. At the same time I do believe that even in a just society there would be adoption. At least as long as there is fallible birth control there will be adoption — there needs to be adoption (just as I believe that there needs to be the option of abortion).
One of my issues with antiadoptionism is that it paints a rigid image of motherhood. Not every mother wants to be mothering. As a feminist, I support a woman who chooses not to be a mothering mother. The way the world works today, women who are mothers but who are not mothering are sexual suspects. I reject this point of view. Taken to the most extreme, this idea that mothers who are not mothering are anti-feminine is why we can’t get decent childcare in this country. Real women want to stay home with their kids and tend the hearth, right? And real women never walk away from their children. Women who do ought to be punished.
Women internalize this and place their babies. And when they suffer from regret, they take this on as part of their punishment.
This is what I mean about adoption being a feminist issue.
Taken individually, I cannot make a Christian woman keep her baby if she believes it is God’s holy command that mothers stay home with their children and she knows she will not be able to do this. If she feels her baby is better off with another family, I can’t force her to parent anyway. This woman might place through an agency that is less than ethical and feel ok with her decision. But this doesn’t make the adoption ethical nor does it make her decision wrong. Only she can say it’s a wrong decision although we can all say it’s unethical. Do you get what I’m saying?
One of the chapters I wanted to have in my book (and I’m not sure if I will, just that I want to — I’ll have to see what the book wants) is that why Jessica placed is irrelevant. What is relevant is if she was well-served. (Writing the book is my way to find this out.) Whether or not Jessica — or any woman — feels her adoption is a mistake is one thing; whether or not she was truly well-served by the system is another. People want to know why Jessica placed so they can decide whether or not the adoption is a good one. But you can’t tell that by knowing why Jessica placed. In a corrupt world, a good adoption can only be defined by the woman who placed. (The child’s experience is their own experience — it is separate from the woman who placed. A good — or bad — adoption from a child’s point of view will not necessarily reflect his or her first parents’ points of view.)
My argument is that the adoption system — because it is predicated on injustice because I am a feminist and think the patriarchy needs to be taken down — is unjust because the world is unjust. So on the one hand, I think it’s impossible for adoption ever to be just kind of like I think we’re all inherently racist. It’s kinda not so helpful when we’re talking about real change to get all meta like that, you know? So on the one hand I’m totally meta but on the other hand I know that practical change is important while we overthrow the patriarchy.
Within this unjust world, I don’t feel like it’s my place to individually tell women what to do. Like my work at shelter, I had to do the everyday work anyhow. It’s not so helpful to stand around theorizing when women needed immediate food and shelter.
In adoption reform I think it’s really easy for me to get caught up in meta and forget specifics. I also think it’s hard not to focus so closely on specifics that we forget that women have a right to free will in an unjust world.
Does this make sense? (I’m deliberately using some religious verbiage here to try to write it more clearly. I don’t think I’m succeeding.)
As I work on this book and talk it out with people they sometimes say, “Is Jessica happy with the adoption? Because that’s all that matters.” On an individual level, yes, that’s all that matters. And I would never try to tell Jessica how to feel about the adoption — whether she’s happy, sad, furious, indifferent, whatever. But on a broader level, it doesn’t matter how Jessica feels — it matters whether or not her treatment was ethical. I cannot control an individual woman’s feelings; I can control how ethically I treat her. I have doubts about the ethics of the system but this doesn’t mean I think Jessica ought to feel a certain way about her experience.
Clear as mud?
December 7th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I just want to write “You are right. Exactly.” I think you have the core of it explained pretty well.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Did you crawl inside my brain? These last two posts have resonated with me; they are the questions I’ve been pondering in the pre-adoption stage we’re at right now. Trying to balance the meta with the specific in every decision, bounded by the limited role we play as pre-adoptive parents. It’s easy in some sense to make lofty statements about how things “should be” in adoption when it’s all hypothetical. The real-world ethics are always murkier because so many issues are tangled together.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
While you probably remember I’ve disagreed with things you’ve said in the past, I had to comment on how EXACTLY RIGHT ON this post is. I agree completely. I couldn’t have put it in words so I’m glad you did!
December 7th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
This:
“Only she can say it’s a wrong decision although we can all say it’s unethical.”
is the core of it for me. And what I like about going in this direction is that it defuses the emotion and creates the possibility of an objective discussion of the issue.
Excellent!
December 7th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
I love this one too. And agree with it.
Brilliant.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
“Taken individually, I cannot make a Christian woman keep her baby if she believes it is God’s holy command that mothers stay home with their children and she knows she will not be able to do this. If she feels her baby is better off with another family, I can’t force her to parent anyway. This woman might place through an agency that is less than ethical and feel ok with her decision. But this doesn’t make the adoption ethical nor does it make her decision wrong. Only she can say it’s a wrong decision although we can all say it’s unethical. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Uh.. No. What makes this one unethical? I am not following this hypothetical at all… I *do* understand the distinctions between the individual woman’s level of happiness and the evaluation of what is ethical — but I don;t see what makes this case unethical.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Ibex67, this part, “This woman might place through an agency that is less than ethical and feel ok with her decision. But this doesn’t make the adoption ethical nor does it make her decision wrong.” If she uses an unethical agency. Sorry about that. It got too convoluted. I meant the presence of an unethical agency, not that her own decision-making — or reason for placing — is unethical.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Ibex, I wanted to add that one reason I used that example is because it’s one I hear a lot when people use the example of a woman who chooses to place for the “wrong” reasons. And to ME, it is a “wrong” reason but my point is that forcing a woman to parent under those circumstances is just as unethical and coercive as forcing another woman to place.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Thank you for your clarification Dawn. that makes a huge difference in my understanding of your essay.
December 8th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Well said. You’ve hit just the right balance between the individual reactions/feelings being important to the people involved in each case and the global/ethical issues of how it should be done. We have to care about both.
December 8th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Being a person who tends to be very empathetic, I get hung up on the individual mother’s feelings about the placement and tend to let that largely inform my feelings on how ethical the adoption was. I agree that placing the emphasis on measurable standard of ethics should be the focus. So how do we do this? What do we do? Adoption as we practice it today is a relatively new phenomenon. If it is still evolving we should be able to help it evolve in a better direction, right?
December 9th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Yes, actually, I think you’ve done a great job making it quite clear. Most excellent notes toward that chapter.
It’s the problem of “choice” as a concept in a world where all choice is constrained so much by injustice that “choice” ceases to really mean anything.
This is why I’m hypocritical about (theoretically, policy-wise) respecting other women’s desicions to place their children while vowing that no daughter of mine ever will. (Just went on about this in Margie’s “open mike.”)
December 9th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
“It’s not so helpful to stand around theorizing when women needed immediate food and shelter.”
As a pre-adoptive parent this is how I’m coming to terms with the guilt I’m experiencing - feeling like I’m ‘taking’ a child to whom I have no right to parent. We can theorize and talk about systemic issues until we are blue in the face. In the mean time, there are very real lives being lived and choices that are being made right now. And while I can work to change the ’system’, the reality of right now is the only reality of the present moment.
December 10th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
I’ve been thinking about the ethics of adoption at this meta-level a lot lately, as my kid made the leap last month. Something about the 8th birthday, or date assigned as her birthday, did it.
She went from a little kid who wanted to hear the story as we’ve always told it of what we think happened when she was born–in the realm of what we know for sure, it’s the truth: when she was born, the midwife held her up and washed her off and said, What a big strong healthy girl!–to a person who wants to know who was there when she was born and what their names are. And we don’t know. That’s an enormous violation of her most basic human rights, and it happened before we decided to adopt. So it’s pretty painless for me to say, That’s always unethical.
This is not a theoretical issue to me. Yet I’m not empathetic as the basis for my concerns about ethics. How my child’s birth mother may feel about the choice she made is irrelevant to whether this placement was handled ethically. I have come to believe that the answer is no, there is no ethical path on which a family in an undeveloped country can make a choice to send a child to my family. There is no choice there, really, until there are real alternatives with resources behind them. What the orphanage did was participate in a system that is itself unethical, and the abandoning parent(s) also participated in that system, and so did I.
What’s been a struggle to get clarity on over the past 8 years is that I’m not more implicated than the other participants in this system because I’m the only white person, the only literate person, the only person with a degree in philosophy…but I’m not less responsible either. I don’t know how much your own participation in Madison’s adoption influences your thinking about the ethical issues, but for me it’s been easier to think clearly having figured out that the lack of ethics in adoption is systemic, not individual.
What it’s like, I think, is that most of the time racism is an institutional structure in which whites are privileged and sometimes it also includes intentional acts of bigotry. But how the actors feel about each other generally doesn’t matter, or affect outcomes–most acts of racial discrimination are not carried out by people who think they’re bigots, and most of the structural outcomes can’t be changed by individual acts of insight. Adoption ethics work like that–adoption as it is practiced in our culture is a reinforcement of structural inequalities of various kinds. So how my kid’s birth mom feels about me, if she knows I exist, and how I feel about her, cannot mean that what happened between us was ethical or unethical, because it’s bigger than we are.
Does that make sense?
December 12th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I think in domestic adoption it’s different because the expectant parents are often explicitly choosing the family. In pre-birth matching (or pre-surrender matching) there’s contact between the bio parent and the hopeful adoptive parent and so there’s more room to make mistakes. It’s ironic that I felt more comfortable with the ethics of domestic adoption because of issues of colonialism in international adoption given the way I feel now. There’s a big difference between adopting a waiting child and trying to organize the adoption of a child not yet born.
December 14th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
[...] Dawn at This Woman’s Work thinks outloud (and writes it all down) about adoption reform–twice. [...]
December 15th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Very clear. And thank you. I’m new to the adoption world and have been struggling to understand why some are so adamantly opposed to it. Your post helps quite a bit. The analogy I immediately thought of is this, perhaps because I am African American. It doesn’t matter if a master treated his slaves respectfully or if they were “friends”, just that slavery (as it happened in this country) is immoral.
December 15th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Dawn,
I keep coming back to this post and mulling it over.
Overall, I agree with you 1000%. This right here: “In the very broadest sense when we’re talking about policy, it doesn’t matter if an individual woman is happy with how her adoption went down; what matters is whether or not she was treated ethically.”
That is dead-on. It’s why I’m politically pro-reform, not anti-adoption. Adoption has to remain a choice for women. It has to.
At the same time, something is squirming in me reading this post. And I think I’ve got it pinpointed.
What Jenna said here: “This is where I stand on a lot of reform issues. I think less women would place if they were FULLY informed about the ins and outs of adoption. I think that, in itself, is what is needed: full disclosure of all the issues that surround adoption. I believe that because I was lied to and/or deceived by our agency because I wasn’t informed that OA’s were not legally binding in our state. (And a billion other errors.)”
I agree. I agree fewer women would relinquish if they were fully informed.
But… and maybe you and Jenna aren’t trying to say this, maybe I’m being too sensitive, but…
I do NOT think that fully informed consent is the only–or even the most important–reform that needs to be made.
While I think FEWER women would relinquish with full information, I suspect it wouldn’t be THAT much of a drop, honestly.
There is a pregnancy counselor (within an adoption agency) who emails me from time to time. In our last exchange, she asked, “Do you think you really would have parented if you’d been told about all the potential repercussions of relinquishing?”
The honest answer is… no. No, I wouldnt’ have parented. I still would have relinquished. Fully informed consent wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
And I realize you are saying that we can’t focus on the outcome in terms of policy. You are right.
But my PURPOSE in wanting to reform adoption is wanting to reduce the number of women experiencing the heartache it brings. So I simply can’t dismiss outcome. I won’t let it drive what I think policy should be–that would be as misguided as the pro-adoption people letting THEIR views drive policy–but I also can’t abandon my concern for outcome.
I am more concerned with women making the choice that’s right for them than with a detached type of ethics. I am. If that’s wrong, so be it.
So, coming from that place…
I am not satisfied with informed consent. I want that, sure. But I don’t think it’s enough. I think passing informed consent laws is the easy part.
I think it is EQUALLY important to have good, competent counseling. Counselors that can get to the emotional reasons a woman is relinquishing and help her evaluate whether they are sound reasons.
Because ultimately, relinquishment isn’t an intellectual decision. So all the information in the world doesn’t address the core issue, the emotions.
The NCFA knows this. It’s not the spewing of misinformation that is the primary problem–it’s their spewing of emotional manipulation.
And I think we would be very naive indeed to combat an emotional attack with an informational attack.
I cannot consider an adoption ethical, even if it is fully informed, so long as expectant mothers are still under that kind of emotional attack.
December 16th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
[...] reform, agency tactics, emotional blackmail, informed consent, relinquishment | Dawn wrote two strong, articulate, smart posts about adoption ethics [...]
December 16th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Nicole, I don’t see anything in your comment that I disagree with and in fact I think it’s a lot of what I was trying (and obviously not succeeding) to say. I also think that the big wide world (outside of adoption) creates a climate that’s pro-adoption and there are some women who have taken a huge bite of the pro-adoption cookie and there’s no way that counseling/informed consent will make them spit it back out. While it’s not part of adoption reform per se, I think that the bigger picture is we need to get to women before they HAVE a crisis pregnancy. Adoption is a feminist issue both because the way we treat women in adoption (the way we madonna potential adoptive moms and whore expectant moms) is a microcosm of how we treat women without and because it’s an issue of choice where the “choice” is rarely freely chosen.
December 18th, 2007 at 4:38 am
[...] (I don’t know enough, I haven’t listened enough, to talk about this. Other people, like Dawn and Nicole, are talking about it more critically and thoughtfully than I could.) I’m going to [...]