Before commenting on John Seabrook's personal essay about adopting a child from Haiti, I just want to acknowledge that writing about adoption is difficult, and writing about one's own adoption is, I imagine, even more so. That said, Seabrook's overall message is pretty problematic.
Seabrook's tale starts before the January earthquake that inspired so many to adopt children from Haiti. He and his family were already in the process of bringing a young girl named Rose into their home. Seabrook acknowledges that he and his wife wanted to have another child, wanted to adopt, and adopting internationally seemed the easiest way to do it. They had a personal connection to Haiti, and they decided they wanted to adopt from that country despite the fact that it would take longer to do so than it might if they looked to other nations.
I am generally pro-adoption for a lot of reasons, but international adoptions bring up some really horrible issues, and it's those issues I wish Seabrook had acknowledged more directly. This is what he says:
International adoption is dwindling because no one can agree on what constitutes an ethical adoption. As Karen Dubinsky, a professor of history at Queens University in Ontario, who is the adoptive mother of a Guatemalan child, and the author of 'Babies Without Borders,' put it to me, 'Adoption, of whatever sort, works better in miniature than on the big screen. In the abstract it is hideous, but individually it can sometimes—even often—make sense.'
Unfortunately, that's how Seabrook treats it, too. When he acknowledges the problems with international adoption, it's in the macro sense -- over there. He doesn't acknowledge it as a potential issue when it comes to his own future family except to wonder whether Rose will grow up to hate him and his wife for adopting her. The closest he comes to wondering about his own role in international adoption is this:
It was a gloomy processional to my introduction to Rose. At the back of my mind was a thought I didn't even want to articulate—that we were benefiting from this tragedy.
But he should articulate it, because it's somewhat true. To some extent, all parents who adopt are benefiting from someone else's tragedy, and it's hard not to get over that. The only real way to get over it is to acknowledge it in a head-on way. But the tone of Seabrook's piece is elusive on this score. I get the sense that how he really feels about it is this way:
The Holts had only love, good intentions, and a higher calling to guide them. Their radical notion—that love could transcend any cultural barrier—was ridiculed within the adoption profession, but it resonated with many Americans, including Pearl Buck, the winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature, who had adopted seven children, two of whom were biracial. Although Buck disliked the Holts’ religious views, she defended the couple against the child-welfare establishment, arguing that the science of matching was just a form of entrenched racism and class bias, based on ideas left over from the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement. 'The real barrier to adoption of mixed-blood children was not that no one wanted them,' she wrote, 'but that adoption practice demanded child and adoptive parents to match.'
But we know now that that's not entirely true that love transcends all, or that all these families have to give is love. A whole generation of adoptees have grown up to found organizations like Transracial Abductees, and we know that, domestically, the rate of black boys being adopted is so low that it takes much lower adoption fees to get families interested.
It's not that we should be entirely against interracial or transnational adoption. It's that we have to acknowledge the problems that go along with it. Seabrook talks about women who are coerced into giving up their children with money, or are forced to out of poverty so desperate that they have to give up their children just to care for them. But those aren't the only icky influences. Residents of rich nations, especially America, have a hero complex, and that especially comes into play with children from developing countries. There are stereotypes at play, and trends, all of which essentialize and exoticize the children coming into this country from elsewhere.
Those problems probably can't be overcome, and at the end of the day it might prove as simple a thing as matching children who need homes with homes who want children. You could argue that it's better, overall, for a child to grow up in a home than to grow up in an orphanage in an earthquake-wrecked country that is the poorest in its hemisphere. But it also does no one any good to ignore the problems, or acknowledge them only in a side-noted manner. They're pretty central, and I hope that families who acknowledge their centrality do better than those who do not.
-- Monica Potts
