We really need to rethink our attitudes toward adoption in this country, and our understanding of
how it works. There is so much misinformation out there.
Liberals and progressives should be champions of family preservation. We should be fighting the injustices committed against first families. And we should be defending legislation like the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is under attack by the Supreme Court.
This may not happen in my lifetime, but I will speak out for it none-the-less.
This is a good article on the subject:
~snip~
In their efforts to cure what they see as a moral crisis infecting our nation, the anti-choice movement has historically thrown their power, money, and influence behind their two favorite antidotes to abortion: abstinence-only education and adoption. In any era when reproductive rights are being rolled back, as they are now, feminists need to get stronger and clearer about where we stand and what we’re fighting for. We all know, both from data and from common sense, that abstinence education is not only a failure but wildly detrimental to the health and safety of young people. But there doesn’t yet seem to be a broader understanding, even in the mainstream feminist and pro-choice movements, that promoting adoption has its problems too.
Mainstream feminism — feminism by and for middle and upper-middle-class white women — has historically gotten behind adoption. Feminists have supported the rights of single people and same-gendered families to adopt, the rights of adoptive families in contested adoptions, and policies intended to get children into adoptive homes faster. What’s missing from mainstream feminism is any explicit support for families of origin: the parents who have to lose their children, the families that must be dismantled in order for adoptive families to be built.
When I was growing up, my parents always told me how brave and smart my birth mother was. How she loved me so much that she made the selfless choice to give me up because she wanted me to have a better life — because as an unwed 17-year-old, a high school senior, she knew she couldn’t be a good parent to me. She had made this choice, they said, selflessly and graciously, with the support of everyone around her, so that I could have the life I truly deserved. My parents did not invent this language, of course; it was given to them by adoption professionals, adoption books, and support groups, and they repeated it, lovingly, insistently, until we all believed it was true. Like so many adoptees, however, the truths of my beginnings are infinitely more complicated, more painful, and have nothing whatsoever to do with choice.
After finding my family of origin in my early twenties, I was able to piece together a more accurate, nuanced story of my beginnings. A story of a white, working-class girl who benefitted from racial privilege, but lacked any real financial resources or power of her own. A terrified girl. A girl who was pressured, demonized, and ostracized, by her own family and community. A girl who was told by loved ones and professionals that she was unfit to be a mother because she was young and unmarried, because she wouldn’t be able to give me the things I needed, like food or love or a moral compass. Though she wanted to keep me, her parents sent her away to one of those homes where they hid pregnant girls and shamed them into compliance — the kind of place people say didn’t exist after Roe v. Wade. Except this was 1978, half a decade after people who could get pregnant had theoretically won the ability to make more uninhibited choices about whether or not to become parents. My mother, in reality, did not have the ability to make a real, authentic choice. And many pregnant people still do not have this ability. Because a choice made in the absence of other choices has nothing to do with choice.
Read More: https://theestablishment.co/adoption-is-a-feminist-issue-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-think-93ba3824bcbb?gi=b14a08edc014
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