Adoption is intended to serve the interests of adopters first, of relinquishing parents second, and of adoptees last—providing legal protections to ensure the security of the adopter’s right to the child above all else, while masquerading as a privacy shield for the relinquishing parents. To do this, an adoptee’s birth certificate is overwritten, reflecting a new name, and in a majority of states, allowing little to no access to their original birth records or medical history. The “better life” that is promised for so many adoptees fails to consider the trauma of severance and alienation inherent to adoption. Research shows that adoptees are overrepresented in mental health settings and are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their non-adopted peers.
As Laura Briggs traces in her book Taking Children, the United States has facilitated family separation, and the threat of it, as a method of counterinsurgency since its inception. This terror has been used to control enslaved populations, Native tribes, migrants, and other so-called surplus populations both domestically and abroad. The possibility of rebellion plagued the slave owner, and so too did the specter of Black kinship; in response, families were separated through public auction and the everyday sale and hire of enslaved people across plantations. To remain with one’s kin was a privilege, rarely afforded to enslaved peoples, but often enough for its promise to serve as a deterrence.
In the 20th century, child-taking became more fully absorbed into the political economy of reproduction. As the value of children shifted from their labor capacity to their symbolic and emotional utility, a market demand for parentage emerged among those who could not otherwise have children of their own—and with it, a powerful conceit: that the desire to parent could harden into something like a right, one to be satisfied—and monetized—at the expense of the poor. For over 30 years, Georgia Tann, the architect of the modern adoption industry, orchestrated a trafficking ring that sold as many as 5,000 children to wealthy and often powerful people—including a governor of New York, Herbert Lehman.
Nearly two decades ago, Foreign Policy published a piece that confronts the very premise of Western adoption practice—the narrative conception of the orphan—incisively referring to it as “the lie we love.” A healthy infant (or toddler) who has suffered the death of both parents and has no extended family left to raise them is incredibly rare. In addition to all the families actively fighting the foster care system for their children, nearly all infants placed for private domestic adoption are relinquished by living parents, and globally, at least 80 percent of children labeled as “orphans” have one or both living parents. But it’s easier to conceive of adoption as a humanitarian response to “orphans” than to confront the social conditions that produce adoptable children in the first place. The crisis, more often than not, isn’t orphans who need raising but families facing poverty, displacement, or criminalization who need support.
[C]hild-taking never lost its function as a tool of counterinsurgency. Indeed, it continued through the family policing system, where Black, brown, and Native children faced removal from their families not under the banner of abuse as often as “neglect,” a poverty crime, or for nontraditional kinship arrangements that weren’t considered civilized—a moral crime.
And with the onset of the Cold War, the US exported its Indian Wars around the world, from the reservations and boarding schools at home to the jungles and hamlets of South Vietnam, where enemy territory was referred to as “Indian country.” Their enemies, the Viet Cong, considered “savages,” shorthand for those living outside the bounds of their civilizational standards, whom they would soon tame to surrender. Just as child-taking came to serve multiple functions at home—social control and a booming baby business—it did abroad as well.
This meant the US was getting into manufacturing orphans overseas now, which later ballooned into a massive transnational adoption system rife with fraud, taking advantage of wars or poverty, and relying on coercion or, in many cases, outright child abduction to reach its ends.
It soon became clear that many of these Vietnamese children were not orphans at all but had living families desperately searching for them at home. Their kin in Vietnam went on to sue the US government to reunify with their children, but the case was thrown out, and records were sealed—in the end, only a dozen families were reunited, many years and lawsuits later.
However, the orphan-rescue story has considerable cultural and political purchase, and adoption occupies a nearly unparalleled position in American politics; the Congressional Coalition on Adoption is one of the largest bipartisan, bicameral caucuses in Congress. Adoption serves both sides of the political spectrum: It maintains the right’s ideal of the heteronormative family structure at the same time that it flatters the left’s commitment to the nontraditional “chosen family.”
Today, adoption is a billion-dollar industry, with an estimated 1–2 million people waiting to adopt at a given time. Cutting this demand would require making adoption, as it is currently practiced, socially and politically stigmatized. This is no easy feat—the practice has been lionized in our culture for decades, from our media consumption to our religious spaces. But the well-being of children has the power to mobilize the masses and bring about seismic cultural shifts.
Source: We Need to Tear Down the Adoption Industry | The Nation
