Best interests of the child?
Dear Betsy,
Your book on adoption, Family Bonds, made a big impact in the US when it appeared in 1993. In it you advocate relaxing the rules that surround adoption-reducing the role of social workers and widening the group of adults eligible to adopt. I was almost your neighbour when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but our paths never crossed. I now want to challenge your views on adoption because I disagree with them, and also because everything American seems to wash up on British shores. I fear that your views on adoption will be taken up in Britain by the liberal left as a humanitarian solution to the self-made political embarrassment of the "undeserving poor" of feckless single mothers. While I cannot envisage Cherie Blair going so far as Hillary Clinton and offering to set the trend in motion personally, I know only too well how the argument of the "best interests of the child" has been cynically manipulated to justify almost anything that serves adult needs.
The real question about easier adoption is: what exactly would be made easier for whom? Let us start with the first interested party in the adoption "triad"-the mother who gives birth to the adopted children. Her point of view is barely represented because most relinquishing mothers are too poor or young, too distressed and ashamed to protest against the violation of the strongest emotional bond in biological creation. Their pain is justified by the belief that all that counts is "the best interests of the child." The inadequate mother is guilty. Of what? Poverty? Bad choice of mate? Sexual irresponsibility? These beliefs take us straight back to our primitive past, but they remain with us. The poor have always been suspect as parents, no doubt because they reproduce poverty instead of quietly eliminating themselves. Why not support poor or young mothers instead of threatening them with more pain and punishment?
What of the interests of their children? It is all too easy to attach value to visible material gains-the adopted child transferred to a comfortable middle class home-but almost impossible to quantify the pain of a mangled identity. Information on the subjective experience of being adopted is hard to come by. Most adoptees are disinclined to talk about their real experiences out of loyalty to the only family they have ever known. Adoptees who say that no matter how well their new parents tried to help them cope with being adopted, they still hated their condition, cannot help but feel bad. So they live under self-censorship: it is their fate. Other people can rail against the human condition but the adoptee has to become a little philosopher, suppressing the crude instinct to build a real sense of self in favour of a "worldview" that accommodates other people's perspectives. While the adults in the adoption triad predicate their stand upon their own needs (the need to mother or the need not to mother), the child can never at any time say, acceptably, "what about my need to have a normal life, to know who I am, and to see around me those who look like me?" The child will be told this is not a "need"; in your words, that this is "mere biologism." I disagree. And I would hate to see adoption make a comeback as a form of social provision for children whose mothers are in difficulty.
Yours sincerely,
Nerys
25th June 1996
Dear Nerys,
Yes I want to make adoption easier. I want to change the policies that lock children into foster care, depriving them of the chance to grow up in permanent families. I think these policies reflect an understanding of children more as property than as persons, as belonging to their birth parents and communities of origin, rather than as having rights to grow up in nurturing families. "Family preservation" policies condemn too many children to grow up in foster limbo, or shuttling between foster families and dysfunctional biological families. Even in cases of severe abuse amounting to torture, our system is reluctant to terminate parent "rights." Race matching policies prevent children of colour-half the foster care population-from being placed with white families, because the National Black Social Workers Association claims these children as black community "resources." As a result, black children are held in foster care for years and often placed in dangerous settings, rather than being given permanent adoptive homes. My state of Massachusetts admits that the pressures to maintain children's bonds to their birth parents and racial communities has led to the licensing of hundreds of foster parents with serious criminal records, including records for child abuse, both physical and sexual.
I do hope, as you fear, that my views will be taken up by the "liberal left" as that is where I see myself on the political spectrum and that is where the greatest potential lies for reform. You, and many other liberals, see my views as incompatible with birth mother interests, but this is a misconception as I argue in my book Family Bonds: Adoption & the Politics of Parenting. It is true that the women who surrender children tend to be less well off than the women who adopt, and also true that the cultures and countries from which children come for adoption tend to be blacker and poorer than those to which they are transferred. But it does not follow that the way to help poor women or black communities or third world countries is to insist that their children grow up in foster care rather than adoptive homes.
I care a lot about the situation of poor single mothers, but I do not believe that they are hurt by pro-adoption policies. You imply the current situation violates poor birth mothers' rights to hold on to their children. Ours is an unjust society, but the denial of parenting rights is not the core of poor people's problems. Ninety-eight per cent of single mothers in the US keep their children at birth, and relatively speaking, very few parents in this country ever lose custody of their children involuntarily. There are only about 40,000 non-related domestic adoptions per year, which given the size of this country's population is tiny.
In pursuing more adoption friendly policies I am concerned with liberating the children now held in foster and institutional care. For the majority, adoption represents the only alternative to life spent in an orphanage or on the street.
I see no inconsistency between children's interests and women's interests in this area. Women are oppressed by current attitudes, which push them to get pregnant at all costs (including the cost of intrusive, life-wasting infertility treatment) and to keep and raise the children they produce, again at all costs. I see adoption rights as part of reproductive autonomy, giving women the option of surrendering without shame the children they are not in a position to raise, and giving other women the option of parenting existing children rather than struggling to overcome infertility. I also do not agree with your claim that adoption always produces a "mangled identity," but more on this later.
Sincerely,
Betsy
27th June 1996
Dear Betsy,
As you say, there are dreadful problems in the foster care system in the US. In Britain we are facing an enquiry into paedophiliac abuse of children trapped in various homes and the subsequent cover-up (it is alleged) to protect influential men who visited those "homes" as though they were brothels. But will easier adoption result in these children having "a chance to grow up in permanent families?" I doubt it. Few people want to adopt kids who have been damaged; most want healthy newborns of the sex they prefer. Risky children are being returned to the foster system when they display problems attributed to their pre-adoption experiences, and it is even possible in some US states to bring a suit for wrongful adoption against social workers on the grounds that they passed off a child as less damaged than he or she was.
The injured children of the world will continue to be neglected if we let the market forces of adoption demand take the burden of dealing with social problems. Furthermore, promoting adoption as social policy will stimulate demand and this in turn will stimulate supply. Some people who fail to get approval to adopt through normal channels will turn to other ways. There have been press reports of Greek hospitals that sold infants of poor mothers; Irish hostels for unmarried mothers that did the same; kidnapping in Latin America; forced late term abortions in India; and only today, a racket luring pregnant Hungarian girls to the US for birth and the rapid removal of the newborn child.
Yet I must admit your letter presents me with a legitimate challenge: if I am so critical of adoption I should come up with a better solution to child care crises. Well, to be honest, I don't think there is an answer for those older children now trapped in the foster system, other than a programme that sponsors long term friendship between such children and selected adults. As for newborn children of mothers in difficulty, they should stay with their mothers who should be supported to take good care of them. But this is not what many comfortably off people believe. Only last week I listened to a well-heeled matron declare that "these single mothers don't even want the children they produce so carelessly." Rarely is this the case. The tragedy for very young women is that they do not anticipate how much they will fall in love with the child no one else wants to help them keep.
One more thing. If we want to liberate women, let us put money into effective health education or easier access to contraception and abortion. Who would want to go through nine months of pregnancy, hours of labour, post-partum adjustment and the onset of lactation-just to give a baby away? Traumatising women and children through adoption should be the last resort of social policy.
Sincerely,
Nerys
28th June 1996
Dear Nerys,
Yes, "easier adoption" will give many of the children now locked into foster care a chance to grow up in nurturing families. There are millions of infants growing up in orphanages around the world because of restrictive adoption regulation that prevents placement even when there is no chance of return to a biological family. But your claims that the older children with disabilities are unadoptable are wrong. There are now waiting lists for Down's syndrome and other children thought unadoptable a short period ago. And these adoptions are typically successful: studies show that the adoption disruptions you describe as common are in fact relatively rare (perhaps 10 per cent of special needs adoptions). Moreover it is the delay caused by restrictive regulation that damages children and makes it harder for adoptions to work.
It is easy to condemn market forces in adoption. I certainly support the laws in place throughout the world that prevent use of money to induce birth parents to surrender their children. But I would lift the heavy hand of the state to make it easier for children to grow up in the arms of birth or adoptive parents rather than of bureaucrats. Birth parents in the US often seek out the private adoption system to ensure that their children go immediately into an adoptive home rather than being trapped in the foster system.
I want to go back to your claim that adoption produces children with "mangled identities." It is a familiar claim: the search movement (which traces biological parents) regularly puts out work with titles such as Adoption Trauma and Primal Wound, arguing that loss of the biological parent produces lifelong damage. But the growing body of research refutes the claim. Studies of early-adopted children show that they compare well on measures of wellbeing and self-esteem with children raised by biological parents. And adoptees do much better than children raised in high risk birth families. You are right that these studies don't give us definitive answers, but they provide better guidance for policy makers than the fact that some adoptees feel pain and attribute this to their adoption experience. I could produce plenty of stories of pain suffered by kids growing up in their birth families. Many societies revere rather than degrade the adoptive form of family. The US and the UK stand out as atypical in their obsession with blood as the basis for kinship.
Sincerely,
Betsy
29th June 1996
Dear Betsy,
Those "waiting lists" for Down's syndrome babies exist because healthier babies go home with their mothers. Deregulate adoption, as you advocate, and such waiting lines will shrivel away again. In some situations adoption may be the best solution to a child's immediate needs. Even so, it should be accepted that some damage is being done to achieve a greater good. Adopters often go into denial on the "mangled identity" issue. It would be better to accept that confusion and disconnection are common among even well-adjusted and eventually "successful" adoptees. Adoption should always be monitored by social workers-something you argued against in your book-because mere enthusiasm does not guarantee that an adopter will be good for the child. The arms of a bureaucrat are no worse than those of parents-from-hell.
But my main worry about the new emphasis on adoption is its political uses-as a stick to beat single mothers in western countries, instead of cushioning the impact of labour market vicissitudes on family formation. Individual adopters may mean well and may even do good; but the adoption movement is a Trojan horse to fear.
Yours sincerely,
Nerys
2nd July 1996
Dear Nerys,
Again you join with our US anti-adoption movement members in your reliance on psychological jargon to make your case. If adopters say they feel good about their families, they are said to be in "denial." It is an understandable position given the absence of evidence that blood-linked parenting is essential to human happiness; but I hope policy makers reject this kind of psychological mumbo-jumbo in favour of the growing body of evidence demonstrating that healthy human identities develop when children grow up with loving parents, regardless of whether they are genetically matched.
I do not think you realise how well your anti-adoption philosophy fits with conservative views on women. You seem to share with the anti-abortion camp the notion of biology as destiny: women should be fertile, get pregnant, give birth, and raise the resulting child, without regard to what it does to their own and their other children's lives. You say infertile women should not look to adopt kids who need homes. I take it that you think they should pursue high tech treatment instead, and, if necessary, purchase eggs, sperm, and gestational services (thereby producing high-tech adoptees), without regard to the emotional and health costs. Adoption, like abortion, although generally not an ideal choice for birth mothers, is often their best choice. Adoptive parents include not only traditional couples but also single parents, gay and lesbian parents, and older parents, all of whom are crossing lines of genetic difference, and many of whom are crossing lines of racial and national difference, to form their families. I can understand that the existence of these families, and the fact that they seem to function so well, would be threatening to conservatives, but why is it threatening to you?
Sincerely,
Betsy
