Across the world, countries are announcing that they’re stopping all international adoptions. These include China, Romania, Vietnam, Chile and South Korea. A thread that runs through all these accounts: reports that children were trafficked. That is, these were not children “willingly given up” for adoption, these are children, often infants, who were stolen from their birth parents and sold to more affluent families in the U.S. and other western countries.
One adoptive mother in the U.S. has stepped forward to say she has regrets. Marjie Alonso, writes that she “willingly, joyfully” adopted her two sons from Paraguay, but that she would “never do it again.”
It’s a bracing admission. It reminds me of the responses that advice columnist Ann Landers used to get, floods of letters, when she would ask mothers if they regretted having kids. There’s actual research on that now, which suggests that the extraordinary pressures placed on mothers in neoliberal societies to BE the social safety net make it certain that many women will regret their decision to have children. That’s not Alonso’s take, though. She’s regrets that she became a mother through adoption for the the damage done to her sons.
Alonso’s two sons struggled with learning disabilities, which happens more than twice as often with adopted kids as with children raised by their birth families. And, one of her sons dealt with thoughts of suicide, another way that adoption makes children more vulnerable. Those who are adopted are four times more likely to attempt suicide. As she observes, “simply being relinquished is a trauma that can cause abandonment issues that last a lifetime.”
Alonso seems most critical of the adoption industry, as when she says:
“But the adoption industry isn’t propelled by altruism. It is a multi-billion-dollar business. The product they sell is children. There is no money in the family-saving business. There are untold riches in the family-making business.”
What remains unexplored in any of the writing about this “adoption crisis” is the role of white moms who drive the demand for this industry. I don’t fault Alonso here, really. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for her to do the kind of personal excavation on her decision to adopt and find that it did harm.
The question at hand is a larger one, about what Nancy Chodorow famously called The Reproduction of Mothering. Why is it, Chodorow wonders, that it is those of us gendered femme who are tasked with being the primary parent? If we don’t believe that biology is destiny, then it could be men who do the work of being the primary parent. But that’s not how society is organized. Chodorow argues this creates a kind of object-relations need to repeat the pattern: women want to be closer to their mothers, so they have a child to recreate the triangle of connection between themselves, the infant, and their mother.
But, Chodorow never deals with whiteness in her analysis. So, why is it that white, or white-passing, mothers are the ones fueling this industry? As with the “helping professions” I discussed yesterday that are a dominated by white women, it’s no coincidence that white women are the primary ones who are driving the international adoption industry.
I think that we have to conceive of other forms of kinship outside the model of the (white) nuclear family, which is the building block for settler colonialism. That’s intergenerational work, of course, and not an easy fix.
In the shorter term, white women must recognize the very real harm that our “white benevolence” does in the world and ask difficult questions about how we benefit from that.
Otherwise, we risk repeating the destructiveness of white motherhood, passing on the trauma and sadism to the next generation.