On Discussions of Transracial Adoption
by Latoya Peterson
Reader Carleandria sent us this LA Times article over the weekend:
The telephones kept ringing with more orders and although Duan Yuelin kept raising his prices, the demand was inexhaustible. Customers were so eager to buy more that they would ply him with expensive gifts and dinners in fancy restaurants.
His family-run business was racking up sales of as much as $3,000 a month, unimaginable riches for uneducated Chinese rice farmers from southern Hunan province.
What merchandise was he selling? Babies. And the customers were government-run orphanages that paid up to $600 each for newborn girls for adoption in the United States and other Western countries.
“They couldn’t get enough babies. The demand kept going up and up, and so did the prices,” recalled Duan, who was released from prison last month after serving about four years of a six-year sentence for child trafficking.
When we post articles about taking the time to consider children in the adoption discourse, I am always surprised at the number of comments that assume we are anti-adoption (or as one amusingly put it, leaving these poor children to rot) when we believe in listening to perspectives from adult adoptees and adoptive POCs. The perspectives are quite different from the standard narrative on adoption. Just check out what Paula, of the Heart, Mind, and Seoul blog had to say:
[W]hy do so many people casually accept (and perhaps even secretly celebrate) it as fate, good karma, a higher power at force, destiny, luck, etc. when a woman who is without a true, just selection of choice or is told that the only real choice she has is to place her child, and believe this to be perfectly acceptable so long as it benefits our agenda? Our plans. Our lifelong hopes and childhood dreams. Why is okay for other women to find themselves in a position to have to make arguably the most God-awful and heart-wrenching, hellish choice or worse – to find themselves WITHOUT choice – when it suits us or those we love? And why aren’t more of us or more of those we love willing to make the same kinds of sacrifices that we expect, assume, hope and accept that other women will do?
Please let me be clear. I am not trying to make adoptive parents feel guilty, ashamed or regret over their decision to adopt. I myself, along with my husband, made the very conscious and intentional decision to adopt our son and I know that we personally did not cause or create the circumstances behind our son’s relinquishment. However, that being said, I absolutely accept responsibility for my role in the collective mindset that this society too often has about portraying first moms in the image that we want them to be, so long that it suits the needs of those who feel that they deserve to be parents, too. People might not come out directly and say, “Thank God there are women out there who cannot parent their own kids, because without that, I’d never be a mom”, but instead we might hear a more politically correct spin ala “I know that the world is an imperfect place. But it is what it is. Should we just let these poor kids starve and die in orphanages? They need a family and we want a child. Adoption is the very best solution for everyone.”
And so while we may not exactly be rejoicing in the fact that children are available for adoption, we’re certainly not doing anything to prevent it from happening here or in other countries; well, at least not until we’re able to adopt ourselves.
Maybe at the heart of the issue is the belief amongst many that as long as we love adopted kids “as our own” and promise to do our very best by them and to give them the world and have them not want for anything, that it’s somehow okay to keep averting our eyes away from the cultural, socio-economic, political, societal and religious reasons that we cite to help justify to ourselves why it’s “unavoidable” that women are continuously forced or asked to give up their children.
And when one does a bit more digging into why so many children are given up for adoption, the realities can be grim. Last year, the New York Times published a piece on the stigma mothers in South Korea face when they have children out of wedlock:
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