How Much Is That Baby In The Window?

When is stealing a child socially acceptable?  In America, the answer is tied up in issues of class and race. Adoption has many faces. When we think of it we prefer to think of children saved from abusive homes. We embrace the celebrity model of Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie while trying not to look too closely at the more common Madonna model. In my own life I know several adoptees who are thriving.  I've also taken part in too many conversations where the potential adoptive parents frame their desires in understandable but problematic ways. With an international adoption, I've been told, there is no chance of having to give the child back. I can't ignore the underpinnings of race and wealth in these discussions of the 'good' countries from which to obtain this desired item, this child. The discussions don't center around the countries with the cleanest records. If the child is actually available for adoption is obscured under the cover of giving them a better life. 

What happens when you adopt an older child? One who reveals that the story told by the adoption agency isn't true? We'd like to think that a child who, upon learning English, asks after her parents and siblings is quickly returned to them. Sadly, that's quite rare. While I've read a few stories where the child is returned I've read far more where the adoptive parents justify retaining the child. How many stories go untold? In the case of a child adopted as an infant the truth may never arise. This is where our complicated feelings about race and wealth lead us. Frame a potential abduction as an adoption and all the sympathy reverts to the adoptive parents. It is nearly impossible for parents from the country of origin to reclaim a child adopted into America. In some cases it may seem cruel of the parents to even try. 

While we import these lighter skinned children, we export adoptable babies and children of darker skin.  The myth that America has a shortage of children needing homes, that adopting a child in America is too difficult, is disproven by our own standing as a source of children on the international stage. While adoption in America can be a long and frustrating process, the alternative is potentially being complicit in a child's abduction. I can't read about a Chinese father tirelessly searching for his missing daughter without wondering if she's taking a dance class in my town. The desire for a child, the complicated myth of saving a child, the text of a better life changes from county to country and from household to household. Is the African American child in Chicago likely to live longer in Ireland? Is that a better life? Is the Guatemalan mother working here illegally automatically unfit to raise her child? Who decides what better means?

There's a case working it's way to SCOTUS right now that illustrates the conflicts of color, wealth, and truth in a way that motivated me to discuss them. While the facts are in dispute, a few things seem clear. A child of the Cherokee Nation was offered by it's non Native American mother for adoption. The father, serving in the Iraq War, disputed the adoption when the child was four months old. For two years the adoptive parents fought to retain the child.  She was recently returned to the father under the ICWA. The birth mother did not disclose the child's Native American status during the adoption process, claims the father did not support her and that he signed away his rights. The birth father claims that he did not understand the papers and that the birth mother refused contact with him during her pregnancy. Regardless of the legal truth of the case most of the reporting focuses on the ICWA law, it's intentions and the percent of the child that is Indian. On one side, the case is that the child will have a better life surrounded by her heritage and her birth relatives. On the other, that the child will have a better life in an open adoption with parents chosen by the birth mother. Whatever the ultimate result the child is going to pay.