The blogosphere is humming with ethical adoption talk. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and wanted to talk about the specific challenges of adopting ethically in a domestic infant adoption like ours.

First off, if you’re adopting or are in a position to adopt, you’re by definition privileged. As helpless as we might feel while waiting for our children — dealing with bureaucracies, waiting for official approval, jumping through hoops — we really have the power. If we were powerless, we wouldn’t have options and we adopters have options. You know what Spiderman’s uncle says, right? “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Some people argue that people who have the means and desire to adopt should use our means and desire to dismantle adoption. They say we should protest policies that make adoption necessary — here in the US or in other countries. They say we should adopt the children most in need of a family (and here people argue like crazy — which kids deserve families the most?). We should put aside our needs and work for the greater good, the definition of which is again up for debate.

I disagree with this, obviously. I think adoption is a reality and that being an adopter doesn’t automatically make us bad guys but we do have to watch our step.

I think our responsibility is to do what we can to make sure our individual adoptions are done ethically. Morally speaking, since people tend to place one kind of adoption above another, I’d say domestic infant adoption has the potential to be one of the least ethical kinds of adoption on an individual level. Here’s why: Because we are often personally part of the mother’s decision as she makes an adoption plan, our very presence can change those plans to work in our favor.

Now this doesn’t always happen. Nat’s parents weren’t part of Mama Rose’s decision. She made that decision before contacting the agency, which was after Nat was born. Ethically, that was a pretty clean adoption but sometimes women want to see profiles before they meet their babies and they have that right. The only problem is that it makes everything murkier.

Mary Wineman Axess, an adult adoptee, writes:

In the context of an ethically rigorous program like the one in Traverse City-in which there is an alertness on everyone’s part regarding the possibility of even the most subtle coercive influences-I think contact between a woman and the prospective adoptive parents of her child can be positive and beneficial. But the potential for a coercive influence in the relationship between prospective adoptive parents and prospective birth mothers is high, especially when the birth mother has little or no other sources of emotional or financial support; it is not uncommon for a young woman in this circumstance to end up feeling that she “owes” the couple her baby.

source: What We Must Learn About Open Adoption, For Our Children’s Sake

See, that’s the great challenge of adopting domestically. Our very presence changes things. Our smiling faces in the profiles, our friendly voices on the other end of the phone, our sympathetic nods when we finally meet. As individuals, we tilt the situation — subtly or like velvet hammers — in our favor.

I was very aware of this when I had those long phone conversations with J before Madison was born. I would talk to her about parenting — about resources and possibilities — with the guilt-ridden understanding of this irony: The more ethical I tried to be, the more I built her trust and so the more likely she would feel good about placing Madison with me. And it was made more difficult because once J was talking to me, she lost interest in talking to her social worker. So it was me — my voice — who walked her through it.

What potential for abuse, eh?

I bring this up because adopting domestically is sticky. (And adopting a black baby doesn’t buy us any points despite the condemnation heaped on those who won’t.) Those of us who do it have to watch ourselves carefully. We have to acknowledge that we are stomping on butterfly wings all over the place. Every time we communicate with a woman considering adoption — whether it’s with our profiles or actual face-to-face contact or anything in between — we have to do as much as we can to stay morally honest. We have to remember that as baby hungry as our arms may be, that this is not our story. We’ve been invited into a woman’s life as she contemplates what will likely be the biggest decision she’ll ever have to make. At the end of it — whether she chooses to parent, place with us, or place with another family — we need to be able to say, “I was ethical in my dealings with her.”

I never thought I would adopt the way we adopted because I had such distaste for it. I really thought (and still think) that adopting a child who is already free to be adopted (whether in a foster care situation or through an international adoption) is an ethically safer way to go. Heck, when I read The Kid I knew that I could never ever ever leave a crying woman’s bedside carrying her baby away with me.

Well, never say never, I guess.

I’m not trying to convince people not to adopt domestically or even to imply that every domestic adopter has done something immoral (I don’t think I have although I wrestled with a lot of guilt — as long-time readers know — in the months after Madison was born). What I’m saying is that every adoption has its ethical challenges and the ones present in domestic infant adoption are, in my opinion, the most personal and also the ones that are most in our control. We have to keep our noses clean.

Is anyone interested in writing about the ethical challenges of their adoptions — international or foster care — on their blogs? I’m interested and if you’d leave a comment or ping me so I could go read it, that’d be great.

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