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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Honestly, stranger adoption really just shouldn't be a part of the culture of family planning, and it's one of those little out-of-the-way corners of American life that's unexpectedly toxic. Seems like in other Western countries, the mainstream culture is a little better and lack of "domestic supply" means that the overseas adoptions still happen a ton, so while I guess it's better in aggregate, it's obviously still devastating in the particulars. Of course, then you have to unpack whether and how much a resistance to adoption is a symptom of small mindedness, but that's a different discussion. Enough to say the American approach is awful.
Adoption outside the natural family should be a trauma-mitigation tool when all else has failed or a birth mother is personally determined to see it through. Few (not zero, but few) things mess up a parent-child dynamic more consistently than a rich couple trying to "save" a baby.
There are a number of people who want to raise a child but for reasons cannot have their own. I know several people with genetic issues that they do not want to pass on for example. There are also couples who despite trying just cannot have a kid (their doctors know more but that is private so it wasn't shared with me).
There are a number of kids who do not have family who can take them in. There are neglectful parents who are not taking care of their kids (drugs are often a factor). There are cases where mom and dad died (car accident?) leaving a kid with no family to care for them (no aunts/uncles and grandparents who realize they are too old). The above is a small minority, but will several hundred million people in the US, and 8 billion in the world it happens all the time. The only question is how to get the two together.
So, I was specifically trying to allow for scenarios like yours by saying it shouldn't be in the "culture of family planning." It's extremely sad that people who want children can't have them. If they feel a calling to build a family and care for a child whom the universe has failed, then wonderful. They should seek out fostering opportunities, get training and counseling to understand their role in the process, and to find the joy in reuniting when birth parents get their shit together. If that doesn't happen and they adopt or assume permanent legal guardianship, then they are doing a service by mitigating the trauma experienced by a child. Unfortunately, people like this are exceedingly rare.
What happens more often is people are made to feel like they deserve a healthy infant with no strings attached (look at some of the other posts in this thread), and the large number of them creates a culture of pressuring birth mothers (usually indirectly, but not always), putting resources into tracking down babies or jumping the line, or when that fails, throwing money at the international process where their relative wealth brings out the bad actors and the temporarily desperate. In America at least, there are something like 20 qualified birth parent couples (to say nothing of the single folks who also have the means to support a child) for every healthy infant that enters the system. The normal thing would be to go to the back of the line and hope a call comes before you age out.
Instead, you get a scramble and competition and agencies that are nominally non-profit, but certainly have financial incentives to preserve their jobs and status (to say nothing of attorneys in truly private adoptions), pop up to serve the demand, and there are only so many ways to procure and price a supply, and most of them are at least somewhat unsavory. The international market tends to serve people who couldn't bubble to the top of the domestic process, so it's even worse.
The genetic details absolutely matter. There's no one factor that's determinative, but it's utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn't matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.
The main thing is the child's welfare, and what's best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.
In English, the word “parent” can be used in two important but very different ways.
Biologically, conveying causal information about gametes and probability distributions of genetic data.
Normatively, implying duties, rights, and responsibilities associated with certain close human relationships.
While it’s true that people often love their biological children and vice versa, the relevant fact is the emotional bond (condition 2), not the biological one, which has no normative import.