A Little Side Trip About Social Class

I’ve been keeping a little list of things that come to me that don’t fit into an entry I’m working on, and this is one: the Federal Adoption Tax Credit, and who it benefits.

The Federal Adoption Tax Credit provides almost $11,000 in tax credits to families who adopt. All adoptions are eligible. It was designed to make adoption more affordable, to help people who might not otherwise have been able to afford to adopt. Most states also offer adoption credits; Michigan’s is about $1100, and can used after the federal credit has been exhausted.

$11,000 is a lot of money. Our original estimate of our adoption expenses was only about $15,000: $11,000 for agency fees, about $1500 for our home study, around $2000 for birthmother expenses, plus travel costs to Chicago, four hours from home, to take custody of the baby and stay until receiving Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children clearance to remove the baby from the state. A federal tax credit of $11,000 would have paid for most of that.

However, the structure of the credit limits its usefulness for many families. It’s not a refundable tax credit; this means that in any given year, you can only receive as much of it as you have paid in taxes, with the remainder of the credit carrying over to future years. Originally, the credit was also time limited—you could only use as much of it as you accessed in four years.

By contrast, for instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit—this means that you get the whole credit even if it exceeds your withholding for the year. When I was eligible for the EITC, I often got, say, $4000 back on my taxes despite having paid only $1000 in withholding, The adoption tax credit doesn’t work that way; If a family has only paid $2500 in withholding, that’s the size of the refund they’ll get that year, with the remaining $8500 of the credit carrying over to future tax years.

Also, for mysterious reasons, expenses that quality for the credit cannot normally be claimed in the year in which they’re incurred, but in the next tax year. This is unlike every other deductible expense or tax credit; a friend of mine who does taxes for a living says she can't think of another instance where an expense can't be applied in the year it's incurred.

For our family, this meant that we paid adoption expenses as early as January of 2007—and received federal tax credit money to reimburse us for them in March of 2009. Furthermore, until three years ago when David’s income increased dramatically, our family had not had any federal tax liability for the better part of a decade. If we had tried to adopt during that time—and we weren’t poor, we were living on about $55,000 a year—we would not have been able to access the federal tax credit at all.

I know families who have not been able to use the tax credit because their federal tax liability is too low. I know families who have not been able to use the full credit because the time limit passed before they’d used it all (time limits have since been extended, or possibly done away with completely).

But even families for whom the credit is useable have to be able afford to pay expenses up front and then wait anywhere from 2 to 5 years for reimbursement.

The effect of the credit is, therefore, to make adoption more affordable for families who already could afford it, while continuing to exclude lower-income families.

People I know who’ve been involved with adoption since before the credit was instituted report anecdotally that agency fees went up across the board in the few years following its enactment. If agencies responded to the tax credit by raising fees, that means the money is probably going mostly to people who could, and would, have adopted anyway, rather than making adoption more accessible to lower-income families.

This is not about race; it’s about social class, and the way government either structured the credit to steer children into families with more money, or carelessly allowed it to happen. Either way, it’s a commentary on who deserves children and who doesn’t, especially when you consider that there is no corresponding Keep Your Baby Tax Credit, at least not for women like Yehva's birthmother.

One exception to the sweeping generalization I’m guilty of here is that the credit is available to families who adopt from foster care even if they have not incurred adoption expenses; out-of-pocket expenses for foster care adoptions are usually low, if there are any at all, so this could indeed be a big help to families interested in adopting some of the most hard-to-place kids.

Kicking the tires before you buy (p. 71)

Just as one would take a car off to one's own mechanic before purchasing, some potential adopters take the baby in for testing before final papers are signed. in a thoughtful and wide-ranging panel discussion on the ethics of genetic testing in adoption...a number of issues arose. One, of course, was the parity with prenatal testing: if parents by birth can test for and avoid a particular condition, then surely adoptive parents have equal rights, too?

... One participant in the discussion...compared this kind of testing with kicking the tires of a used car, or... taking a used car to one's own mechanic before buying it.

I don't think I know anyone who subjected their baby to extra testing or genetic screening before an adoption. But I do know that when our adoption agency called us with a possible match with Yehva's birthmother, they were honest with us about K.'s drug use. "She denies drinking," the director said, "and I'm inclined to believe her. Most people tend to choose one or the other--pot or booze. Of course, you don't have to make a final decision until after the baby is born; you'll be able to get medical information then and see how she's doing."

I got off the phone feeling a bit uncomfortable with the idea that we could change our mind about this baby after she was born and we were able to find out whether she seemed "defective" or not. A friend of mine described to me, a few months ago, one of her conversations with her daughter's birth mother, saying, "we told her we were committed to the baby, so long as it didn't have any disabilities we felt we couldn't deal with."

That sounds crappier than I mean it to--I don't mean to pick on my friend at all, only to say that this is one of the realities of adoption: that you get to meet the baby before you make a commitment. It's a luxury biological parents don't have.

I didn't want to face that decision, and was glad we dodged it by virtue of Yehva being perfectly healthy and sound. I did not want to discover that I was a person who would discard a baby for imperfection. And yet, at the same time, I recognize the many forces that would go into the decision, and sympathize with any parent who chose not to proceed with an adoption. Let me tell you a story.

When I was pregnant with Eric, I could not imagine terminating the pregnancy for any reason. I had an acquaintance who'd carried a baby to term knowing he wouldn't survive long past birth; he spent his entire short life outside the womb cradled in her arms and died peacefully there. I could see myself making that choice, too. I could not imagine myself terminating a baby for having Down Syndrome, or even more severe disabilities. David and I are committed to disability rights and generally comfortable with disabled people; we, especially David, would be good parents for a disabled child.

And then I got pregnant with Carl, and I felt differently, for a couple of reasons. One was that I was 38 years old and really wanted a second child. If I waited out a doomed pregnancy, and then waited to recover enough to try again, I might significantly reduce, or lose, my chance for a second baby. The second time around, I probably would have terminated a pregnancy if had I learned the baby could not survive past birth.

But the disability question became more vexed as well. I had a child already, and a responsibility to him. What if I found out my second child had a disability that would require extraordinary care, a hugely disproportionate measure of our resources of time, energy, and money? Again, with Eric in the picture, the equation shifted. I didn't know what I would do--I didn't think, "Oh, I would definitely have an abortion in those circumstances." But I didn't think anymore that I definitely wouldn't either. A family that learns the baby they plan to adopt is severely disabled has similar factors to weigh, as well as listening to their hearts. This doesn't make them bad people.

No one is allowed to make a binding commitment to adoption until after the baby is born; in most states, there's a waiting period after the birth before the birthmother can surrender her parental rights. And adoptive parents aren't committed until later than that. Even after we'd taken legal custody, when it became clear that problems with our home study were going to delay our clearance to bring Yehva home to Michigan (she and I spent two weeks and about $3000 correcting the problems, during which we had to stay in Illinois), the director of our agency asked me, "Do you want to give her back?" I was affronted. "We didn't promise to be this baby's parents only as long as it was convenient and didn't cost money," I fumed to friends.

But we could have. At some point--finalization, maybe? I don't really know-- the commitment is irreversible, it becomes the same commitment biological parents make. Of course, the commitment becomes irreversible in our hearts long before it reaches that point legally. But the gap between the birth and that point of no return introduces the possibility for adoptive parents to look for perfection, for the baby who is not inconvenient and doesn't cost money.

Both prenatal testing, and the evaluation after birth of babies placed for adoption, cut two ways. On the one hand, they allow parents, both biological and adoptive, to opt out, at least some of the time. On the other hand, they make the birth or the adoption of a disabled child, or one with a genetic predisposition to disease, a choice.

Rothman goes on to say, "In other words, it's not just that parents can choose not to raise a disabled child; it's that they can be judged for doing so."

I have seen this in action second-hand, in the community reactions to a couple who had a third child while their first was in treatment for leukemia. The new baby was severely disabled, and there seems to have been little compassion in many people's responses. Rather, there was a mix of "what business did they have having another baby," and "they got what they deserved." I have actually heard people say, "How did a baby like that get born, in this day and age?" about disabled children. That thought actually went through my own mind when I met a family at the park whose youngest son had no arms or legs.

This has gone all over the place, as so many of these entries seem to. But you see how tangled the skein is--pull on a thread and you don't know what you're going to get. I thank you for thinking about this with me.

Markers of Ethnicity (p. 50)

A baby is removed from its country of origin, an act that one of my graduate students...has pointed out to me is a form of forced migration, and the parents/purchasers work on turning that act into something cute. Something vaguely identified as "culture" or "ethnicity" displaces race and class... That may work for Asian children brought to the United States--but not for our own black children. Can you picture the motif white parents could use for their African American babies that would be the equivalent of pandas for Chinese babies? Watermelons, anyone? You could turn to Africa and kente cloth, but anything that would mark American black would be automatically offensive.

Rothman often has a tone when talking about parents who adopt internationally that suggests she has little sympathy for them; she almost seems disdainful. I hesitate to quote some of these passages because her tone can seem so judgmental, and I have many friends who've adopted internationally and I would not like to offend them. It seems hard for Rothman to see these parents as caught up in the same kind of web of good intentions, doubts, love, and sorrow that those of us who adopt Black American children are. Look at that sentence up there: "Asian children brought to the United States," versus "our own Black children." Who does she imagine herself speaking to? Why do our Black children get to be our own, while Asian children are spoken of differently? Why does she not see adoptive parents of Asian children as part of "us"? I know I do.

At the same time, I take her point about markers of ethnicity. A friend of mine recently referred to her daughter on Facebook as "the Khmer Princess," and I found myself wondering what similar nickname I could possibly give Yehva that would have the same note of playful acknowledgment of where she came from, without being horribly offensive. I won't tell you any of the things I came up with, because none of them seemed playful and they were all horribly offensive. It can't be done.

I did briefly play with calling Yehva "shorty" after we got the birthfather's deposition during which he called her "the shorty" or "my shorty" much more than he called her a baby or his daughter, and I would say to Yehva as I changed her diaper or combed her hair, "You're my shorty." But "shorty" is one of those expressions from Black Vernacular English that you just can't say in a white Midwestern accent without sounding stupid and pathetic, so I gave it up.

I wonder what it means to reference our children's ethnicity when it's different from our own? Is it empowering or distancing to call a daughter "the Khmer princess"? Is it both? Should comments about ethnicity or background be saved for serious discussion, or can they be playful? Should I correct Carl when he announces that Yehva is made of chocolate? How will our children hear comments about their racial and ethnic background? How will they hear our silence?

I think one thing Rothman is getting at is that when we adopt from Cambodia or China, we don't automatically overcome our cultural tendency to exoticize that part of the world and its people. At the same time, though, we don't have the same kind of direct and complex, ongoing relationship of living in a divided society with them--we may know what damage America has done in those parts of the world, but that's mostly history to us, perhaps. Race relations in America are something we struggle with and think about--or, if we don't, they're something we're aware of, we know we're choosing not to grapple with them.

Rothman talks in this chapter on "Motherhood in the Marketplace" about the commodification of babies. She seems to see parents who adopt internationally as complicit in that--look at that "parents/purchasers" comment there, something I don't think she'd ascribe to those of us who adopt in the US. And yet Black babies are commodified here; we have a similar relationship to our children and their culture. I'll try to say a little bit about that.

When David and I were preparing to adopt, we had to take a course on "becoming a transracial family." When the materials for it arrived in the mail, he and I looked through them and were frankly offended. They seemed to assume that we had never thought about race at all, that we had to be told that race was a vexed subject. There was a list of "bad reasons to adopt a black baby" ["because little black babies are so cute," for instance] and another list of nicknames you should not call your black baby ["brown sugar" is one I remember].

Then we had our first class, and except for one lesbian couple, the parents were overwhelmingly clueless about race. "Well, there are no black people where we live, but racism really isn't an issue here," one woman said. "We figure people are just people." And I realized that the teachers of the class, knowing who their students were, had made the class for them.

Last year, a woman said to me guilelessly that she and her husband were thinking about adopting interracially "because little black babies are so cute." That's a piece of the commodification of black babies--this idea that they are something cute we can acquire, like a doll or a Pomeranian. And I sometimes feel, uncomfortably, that there is a little of that even among those of us who know better. Yehva gets a lot of attention everywhere we go--much more than Eric or Carl ever did, cute as they were--and a friend who has also adopted transracially and I were talking about the suspicion that, in a primarily white community, there's a element of not just "what a beautiful baby" but "what a cute black baby you have there."

Rothman's going to have a chapter on The Trophy Child in a bit, and we'll revisit some of these themes in a bit of a different way.

Erasing the Birthmother, pp. 46-47

It is not only the availability and almost-whiteness of the children that draws Americans to international adoption; it is also the almost complete erasure of the mother. The children appear to come from orphanages, not mothers. Barbara Yngvesson did a study of a “roots” trip, a journey back to the land of origin for international adoptiees and their parents. She studied a trip to Chile by Swedish adoptive parents and their children. Yngvesson quotes a Swedish social worker who recognizes a tension inherent in such a journey: a roots journey to the country is one thing; a journey to the mother would be something else again. Background and country and decoration are all fine—they are the sanitized “ethnicity” we find so charming. But the reality of a grieving mother, a woman who birthed and bled and lost, is far more than most adoptive parents want. Some, perhaps particularly the lesbian mothers who are drawn to Chinese adoption because it rescues girls qua girls, have particular reason to feel vulnerable. They know that whatever power an American birth mother might have could be used to threaten their already threatened families, and so prefer the anonymity of the Chinese adoptions. And some adoptive families to actually seek out birth mothers. But most do not, and adoptions that promise anonymity are marketed for their reassurance to adopters.

In that way, by denying the mother herself, many adoptive parents participate in this erasure of mothers and simultaneous commodification of children. Adoptive parents, and I myself am one, bristle and feel genuine anger and revulsion when people ask about the costs of adoption, imply the cost/worth of the child. But only a comparative few of us have taken that position to its logical conclusion and opened adoptions up.

Open adoptions are becoming more common; there is quite a lot of research that shows they are better for both birthmothers and adopted children. But they can be messy. In general, a birth family is going to be less stable than adoptive families; they may have different ways of relating that are challenging to middle-class people used to middle-class ways. There is no guarantee that birth families will negotiate the challenges of adoption in good faith.

When I was researching adoption, I spent time on a bulletin board for adoptive families. I was alarmed by some of the stories I heard of challenges with birth families. One woman was accosted at the mall by relatives of her birthmother and accused of stealing the baby; another birthmother regularly showed up for visits with a string of friends and relatives in tow, showing off “my baby” and calling her by a different name than the adoptive family had given her; birthparents disappeared without warning after having been part of the child’s life for years.

On the other hand, there were wonderful stories of adoptive families and birth families sharing the first few days of the baby’s life and struggling together through all the joy and sorrow of it; of birthmothers and adoptive mothers sending each other mother’s day cards; of children happily spending time with their biological grandparents and cousins. I was terrified of the risks associated with open adoption, but at the same time dreamed of a good open adoption, and envied those who had them.

I didn’t know what to think about open adoption, and when our agency asked what degree of openness we wanted, we said we’d consider it on a case-by-case basis and follow the birth mother’s wishes. But I was relieved when K. chose letters and pictures only. I’d have waded into the mess, certainly; I was glad not to have to.

At the same time, though, I feel a loss. K. was supposed to give us a picture of herself; she didn’t. I wish I had one for Yehva. I still harbor some hope—more in the realm of fantasy, really—of more contact between us and Yehva’s birthparents, When it was time to send this year’s update to K., I sent pictures to Yehva’s birthfather, too, to the address he gave in the court papers, and a note inviting him to contact us through the agency if he wanted us to keep sending yearly reports, or if he wanted to write to Yehva or send a picture. I end every letter to K. with the reminder that the agency will forward letters to us. But I don’t expect to hear from her, and I doubt she’ll be able to make the kinds of changes in her life and behavior that she would need to for us to open things up beyond that—to plan a meeting, or allow a visit.

I don’t think Rothman is wrong about the erasure of the birthmother. It would be a lot more comfortable not to have to think about K.; I don’t want to have to think about her broken heart, but I also don’t want to have to think about Yehva, three days old and withdrawing from drugs—her hospital record is hard to read, two days of “took 35 cc of formula, good suck and swallow reflex, infant alert and pink, sleepy most times, WD [withdrawal] score 2-3.” And then suddenly: “WD score 14-17. Baby has been awake, crying and tremorous, baby has slept little since 1500, not consolable. Resident MD notified. Will continue to monitor, consider morphine if WD persist.” And then, finally, after about 36 hours: “Baby is sleeping comfortably in nursery. Feeding isomil 40-45cc. Alert and pink. no signs of distress.” And a few hours later: “doing well. DCFS has approved adoption; discharge patient to home today.” “Home today.” That was me and David and the boys and Uncle Scott in a hotel suite in Oak Park, Illinois: home.

However: in Rothman’s narrative adoption is something that happens between mothers. She doesn’t talk about birthfathers, and the near-conspiracy to pretend they don’t exist, among agencies, adoptive parents, and even the birthmothers themselves; and by not talking about them, she participates in the erasure. Our own birthmother lied about the father of the baby, turning him from a man she had lived with for six months into a one-night stand whose name she never knew. This is not uncommon, and it led directly to the 22 months we spent fighting the birthfather’s attempt to gain custody of Yehva when he later learned she'd placed the baby with us.

I don’t like to think about him too much, either. Or, rather, I do, in a certain way. I like to think I know him and that his lack of fitness as a parent is obvious. And maybe it is: he’s young, poor, jobless, inarticulate. Much of our custody dispute hinged on his failure to fill out forms correctly, to read instructions and meet deadlines. I felt sorry for him, and at the same time thought, “Anybody who can’t show up for a hearing they think is the most important thing in their lives is not going to take good care of a child.” In fact, I held it against him that he said in his deposition that he had no plan to care for her, that she would go to his mother.

“It’s just all about ownership for him,” I thought, “about male ego. He doesn’t really care about the baby; he’s not really interested in her.” This was very clear in his deposition, when he answered questions about why he thought he should have the baby by saying, “Well, that’s my seed!” and “That’s my shorty.” I remembered him saying these things, but I didn’t want to misrepresent him here, so I dug into my six-inch stack of adoption paperwork and pulled out his deposition, to get exact quotes.

And he did say, ‘That’s my seed.” He did say, “K. sold that shorty for $1500.” He did say that he had no means to care for the baby, and would leave her with his mother. He did say that he called the agency repeatedly and was abusive and profane: “I guess I maybe made 15 calls to the agency, you know, saying give me my damn baby.”

I remembered all of that exactly right.

What I forgot was this other stuff. I forgot that he also talked about commitment, to the birthmother:

K. just starting, you know, smarting off or something but I never intend to throw her out or nothing, you know, I always be, you know, I told her, when we first got pregnant, I’m going to be with you, I want to marry you and everything, you know, because you got my shorty.... I never knew she had any doubt about the shorty, you know.

And to Yehva:

Q. If this court should somehow find that indeed it is in the child’s best interest that you have custody, where would this child live?

A. For right now with my mother.

Q. OK.

A. For right now. When I, you know, everything get better for me, we live together. I was going to school though, you know, when she was in K.’s stomach, I was still going to Malcolm X.

He was sad:

A. K. calls. I don’t say—I didn’t answer, I say she calls.

Q. OK, does that mean if she calls you you do not talk to her?

A. No.

Q. OK. What do you do when she calls you?

A.: Look at the number.

Q. OK.

A. And think about my baby.

And finally, he said this:

That’s my daughter, ma’am. She belong to me, ma’am. I want her to know—I love all kids. I planned this baby since the beginning. I want my daughter, you know.

I liked C. better when I only remembered his anger, his repeated assertions of ownership, his “that’s my seed.” I let myself forget that he also talked about love, about commitment, about liking kids. That he wanted Yehva to know he loved and wanted her. This is not what I meant to write about today; I meant to be all theoretical about notions of ownership. I meant to be able to dismiss C. because he saw Yehva as a possession he was entitled to. I didn’t mean to look back into the deposition and discover that I mis-read it a year ago.

Listen: it’s 61 pages long and I highlighted the parts where he comes off like an asshole so I could show them to my friends, but I’m not even sure I saw the parts where he comes off like a person who has lost something he cares about and is in pain.

But I saw them today. I saw them and it broke my heart. And I wondered for the first time if we did the right thing in fighting for custody. I had never doubted it; I had never considered any possibility but that Yehva belonged with us and had to stay.

I’m not saying we were wrong. I know Yehva is better off here, better cared for, more secure. I know that C. failed to do the things he had to do to protect his parental rights, and his prospects as a parent are not great. I know that I fought for custody in part because I feared that to let C. into Yehva's life would be to let K. in, too, and that would be dangerous. But I am saying--I'm sorry. I am sorry.

I know that some of my reason for reaching out to C. with pictures and a note is not just compassion for him. It's the desire to make things right for myself by making things somehow OK for him—to un-break his heart and in the process resolve my own remaining doubts. A birthfather at peace is a burden lifted from me.

OK, I’m going to go have a little cry and say a little prayer of healing for C., and for forgiveness for me. And then I’m going to put Yehva in the bath and watch her have fun playing in the water. And them I’m going to oil her up, stroking every little bit of her until she shines, and get all the tangles out of her beautiful thick hair. Precious, precious, I’m going to say with my hands. Loved, loved.

And someday I'll tell her: I have a message for you, from your birthfather.

We do the best we can in a fallen world.

Children are Priceless (pp. 33-34)

This is from a chapter called "Motherhood in the Marketplace."

Children are priceless. And yet we know they are costly. We know that getting and maintaining children is about as expensive as anything in this society. A child costs more than a car, less than a house. There really are price tags here. If you just get easily pregnant the old-fashioned way, there are still the costs of pregnancy care, birth attendants. One adoptive mother, rightly offended when asked how much the baby cost, replied, “Less than a Cesarean section.” But if you can’t get pregnant, there are often serious costs: reproductive technologies, adoption—these are big-ticket items.

This is a tension we live with. Viviana Zelizer expressed it perfectly in the title of her book Pricing the Priceless Child. She talked about the sentimentalization of children, their pricelessness, and the necessity of putting price tags on them. A kid is killed in a car accident and we sue. A dollar value is assigned. An infertile woman or a man without a woman wants someone to get pregnant, grow them a baby. A dollar value is assigned. And the costs are not the same for all babies. A minister at the Antioch Bible Church is trying to raise money for a billboard that will show a white baby, a Latino baby, and a black baby, and next to each the fee charged by adoption “facilitators,” of thirty-five thousand, ten thousand, and four thousand dollars, respectively. “I raise thoroughbred racehorses. I sell them by supply and demand. I’m not going to let people sell children by supply and demand.”

Most people don’t have any need to know much about how adoption works, and so they don’t. People I’ve spoken to about adopting Yehva are sometimes surprised to learn that adoption law varies state to state; since you do not have to adopt in the state you live in, this means that it is possible for adoptive parents to choose to adopt in a state whose laws they prefer. We, for instance, adopted in Illinois, which allows no revocation period once the birthmother has surrendered her parental rights; we didn’t choose our agency for this reason, but were glad not to have the risk of bringing the baby home and then having the birthmother change her mind and take the baby from us. Dan Savage, in his book about adopting his son, The Kid, says that many people choose to adopt in Oregon because Oregon has very weak birthfather rights laws.

[On the other hand, birth parents can only place a child for adoption in the state where they live. A couple I know recently lost the potential for a birthmother match because she was in a state that does not allow same-sex couples to adopt. Our birthmother could not have chosen, for instance, to place her child for adoption in Michigan, which has a much longer revocation period during which a birthmother who has placed a child can change her mind. I know there are reasons for this restriction, that have to do with child trafficking. But here is a case where adoptive parents have much more freedom and control than birth parents do.]

You can also choose your agency, and policies vary widely between them. We chose ours in part because they will work with single women and men, unmarried opposite-sex couples, and same-sex couples as well as married opposite-sex couples like us. We also chose them because on their website they decried the practice of charging different fees for babies of different races. During my research, I had seen many agencies that listed graduated fees on their websites: lowest for black babies, a little higher for partially-black babies, a little higher still for Hispanic babies, and a whole lot higher for white babies.

Supply and demand certainly drives this. White newborns are in such high demand and low supply that agencies can be very choosy about the adoptive parents they work with. In my research, I found that most agencies placing white newborns would have excluded us, for instance, for any or all of the following reasons: being over 35; having biological children already; being fat; not having medically-documented infertility; having a mood disorder. Meanwhile, the adoption e-mail lists I’m on regularly include appeals from agencies that place children and babies of color, expressing the need for more adoptive families.

[Another digression: David and I recently received such an appeal from our Michigan agency. Although we are both entirely clear about our family being complete, each of us, independently, upon opening the e-mail, had a knee-jerk reaction: “We should update our home study!” And then we laughed at ourselves.]

I understand the social forces that lead agencies to try to give economic incentives to adopt children of color. But adoption rhetoric says that the fees we pay are not funds for the purchase of a baby; they’re payment for services provided by the agency. Why then should it cost less to adopt a baby who is hard to place? Shouldn’t it cost more, if the agency has to work harder to find a home for that baby? (Or, if adoption is driven by the desires of adoptive parents, is the current fee structure partly because agencies have to work harder to find birthmothers of white infants?)

Nonetheless, I was not willing to work with an agency with a graduated fee structure. “Why did you pick me, Mama?” I imagined my future child asking. “Well, honey, you were on sale.” No.

Would I have preferred to adopt a white child? Oh, what a question. Easily set aside now with the answer that I cannot imagine anyone but Yehva being my third child; comfortably evaded three years ago by the knowledge that we were excluded from the marketplace of white newborn adoption.

I want to say no, though, for a number of reasons. One is that I really do think a black kid is just as good as a white kid; I don’t aspire to the kind of faux anti-racism that claims to be color-blind, and I know that adopting a black baby brought a different package of challenges and concerns than adopting a white one would have. But I could not imagine it making any difference to my love of my child and my delight in her.

Also, there is a part of me that wanted the adoption to be visible, as a way of asserting that I see this way of building a family as entirely valid. That adoption is not something to hide. (But what about the Twelve Swedish Women? Am I somehow trying to express publicly my valuation of something that is a symbol of the high costs of racism and poverty? Gaaagh! It's tangly and it hurts my brain.)

Finally, I did not want to adopt a white child because I did not want people to think it mattered to me to have a white child.

(I’d be interested to hear friends who have adopted white children talk about how this is for them, especially when they’re surrounded by so many white parents who have adopted interracially.)

Twelve Swedish Women (pp. 17-18)

There are several streams that feed into transracial adoption, each of which is deeply problematic at its source. Adoption itself is one: Why is there ever a child being placed for adoption? Adoption solves, in a wonderful and satisfying way, the problem of infertility for so many people that we tend to forget that adoption itself is a problem and not just a solution. I once led a student reading group on adoption…. We read widely, bringing in books and articles to share with each other. One evening a man brought in a table of international adoption statistics. Sweden—not Utopia, but a place with good social services, readily available contraception as well as abortion, decent services for single mothers, along with all mothers and children—Sweden had twelve domestic, nonfamily adoptions that year. Twelve Swedish women found themselves in a situation where placing their babies out for adoption was their best option. Twelve. When you take away most of the social forces operating upstream that put women in that awful position, you are left largely with personal idiosyncrasy, personal reasons. Twelve.

The United States is bigger than Sweden; if we had the kinds of social supports the Swedish have, we would still have more than twelve babies available. But we would never, ever have anywhere near the number of babies we currently have placed “voluntarily” for adoption, and we would never have enough to solve the problem of infertility. Adoption is the result of some very bad things going on upstream, policies that push women into giving birth to babies that they then cannot raise.

Rothman goes on to talk about race; class; gender bias that leaves more black boys than girls without adoptive homes (perhaps one of the reasons that, not long before we started working with them, our agency stopped allowing adoptive families to specify what gender baby they wanted).

But I want to pull out that notion of “voluntarily placing a baby for adoption” that Rothman interrogates with her quotation marks. Previously I mentioned concerns about coercion of birthmothers, and here Rothman is arguing that the whole system is coercive. “Racism is of course the other feeder stream,” she says, and “A lot of what adoption is about is poverty… And a lot of what poverty is about in America is racism.”

I am stuck here. I have, on the one hand, so much to say; and on the other hand, I want that image of the Twelve Swedish Women to stand there, for people to just hold that image for a bit.

This is one of those bits that I found convicting—that say to me that I could not choose to adopt a black baby without being complicit in a coercive system. People have commented many times about my compassion for our birthmother, about my compassion for the birthfather even when we were in a custody dispute with him (“You seem like a really compassionate person,” my lawyer said to me one day, not unkindly, “But it’s time to cut that shit out.”). But what does it mean to have the luxury of compassion because other people, because a system of racism and entrenched poverty, have already done the coercing?

This is not news to me—I’ve been able to talk glibly about how white people who are not racists nonetheless benefit from racism for twenty-five years or more. But something about this, about the way Rothman speaks so plainly—“adoption itself is a problem”—and about the embodied reality of Yehva here, and not there, that hits me viscerally, that takes it to a deeper level of reality for me. Again, I don’t feel guilty, and I don’t think I’ve done wrong. But I am trying not to shade my eyes from the glare of truth.

I'm going to have more to say about coercion. But this is all I want to say right now.

For the Fun of It (pp. 12-13)

[T]o make a long story short, I started with great skepticism. Prove it, I said to one adoption advocate backstage. Prove to me that there really are more black babies than homes, prove the need is there. And he did. I was convinced that, yes, there were black babies available for adoption, babies who were headed into foster care.

My first two kids were growing up, and I could see the end of my active parenting years approaching, all too quickly. Hesch, my husband, and I hadn't planned on having any more children. Like many couples of our generation, we first thought "just one," and then "went for the second."...We had a complete, lovely family. And we loved it. We loved raising our kids, being an active child-rearing couple. But we knew all about world overpopulation, and besides, kids are expensive and time-consuming, and we shouldn't just be doing this for the fun of it. The idea that there might be a good reason to have another child was enormously appealing.

I am interested in this, that Rothman and her husband were so happy to have an excuse to have another child. I hear that three-child families are on the rise in America, and read analysis that claim it’s a status symbol, because raising a kid is about the most expensive thing you can do. But I like to think that people have more kids for the same reason I did: for the sheer joy of it.

What gave them permission to have their third child was the conviction that they could do good by it, that they would be making a home for a child who needed one.

People often seem to assume that our motivation was similar. “That’s a good thing you’re doing,” people have said to me. And it is true that Yehva’s birthmother was a drug addict; she showed up high to the hospital to deliver Yehva. And her birthfather was young, poor, inarticulate, semi-literate; he’d never held a job. So, yes, I would agree that she is better off here than there. But I did not adopt Yehva out of altruism. I did it out of selfishness, greed, and an excess of maternal love. I wanted more than what I had, plain and simple. I liked the two children I already had so much that I couldn’t imagine anything better than having one more. If Yehva’s birthmother had been a professional with a stable relationship, a stable home, and as many children, already, as she wanted, I’d have taken the baby just as gladly. I would not have turned away to look for one who needed me more.

Rothman’s concerns went beyond her own feeling that it was somehow wrong to have a third biological child—she was concerned about racism in the adoption process. A colleague of hers, an African-American woman, had been turned down as an adoptive parent because she wasn’t married, and Rothman didn’t want to take a baby who could have been in a black home. She did extensive research to reassure herself that there really were more black babies than black homes for them (and we’re going to go deep, deep with her later on about the forces that make this true, the inequality that underlies the entire adoption industry in this country, so fear not! We’ll get there. It’s a challenging stretch of the book, and, in the sense of that great old Christian word, convicting.)

I’ve been asked how I feel about adopting a black baby into a white family, into a community that is, while not entirely white, overwhelmingly so, and where the black people we know tend to be in mixed-race families themselves, and more like “us” than different when it comes to class, profession, and culture. (This could be argued with…maybe I’ll write more later about the ways this seems both true and not-true to me). My answer is: Do you think that if there had been a black family available, the birthmother wouldn’t have picked them? in an ideal world, sure, she’d have gone to a stable black family, or been born into a community which was overall stable and functional so that she could have been cared for within her extended family if her mother wasn’t able.

We don’t live in that ideal world. Do I think we are the best possible family for Yehva? No. But I think we were the best available family for her. I think we are a more-than-good-enough family for her. And I think it’s OK to want a third baby just for the fun of it, for the joy of watching a small person unfold and grow. When people credit me with more altruism than I felt, or was motivated by, I correct them. If I have done a good deed by adopting Yehva (and that’s arguable), it was accidental, and I was more than repaid the first time I held her in my arms.

I like that previous sentence as an ending, but re-reading, I think I need to point out how problematic it is that adoption today is driven to such a great extent by the desires of adoptive parents, especially newborn adoption and some international adoptions. One of the fears you have as an adoptive parent is that the birthmother was somehow coerced to place her baby, and stories out of Cambodia and other places about babies being taken against their mothers’ will don’t help [Added later: at the library the other day I came across an article about coercive practices among pro-life Christian adoption agencies here in the US. Very disturbing if true.]. It is heavy on my heart that, as of this spring when she spoke to a case worker at our adoption agency, Yehva’s birthmother had not stopped regretting placing her for adoption and feeling she’d made a mistake. Never mind that it is completely unreasonable for her to think that, if she had not made an adoption plan, she’d have been free to leave the hospital with Yehva. Never mind that she has two older children who are not in her care any longer. She may be an unfit mother but that does not change the fact that she is a woman with a broken heart.

You have to wonder, too—and Rothman gets to this later, quite deeply, as I mentioned before—to what extent the system, the culture, itself is coercive. Friends have heard me say this before, but when I look at Yehva, who is the happiest little person I know, who is graceful, strong-willed, and smart, I have to assume that her birthparents were the same. The conditions of her environment took young K., probably just as beautiful, smart, and graceful, and so diminished her opportunities that she had, it seems to me, little chance to become many things other than a drug addict, a woman whose tragedy is that she wants to be a mother to her children and can’t. At the same time that I am glad—so glad—Yehva is in a place where her gifts are nurtured, I look at her and cannot help but imagine K. at the same age, much the same but with little hope or opportunity.

Meanwhile, I am a woman—a white woman—who has been so accustomed all my life to getting what I want that, when I decided I wanted a third child, it never seriously occurred to me not to have one. The only question was how we would go about it. I wasn’t even pushed to adoption by infertility; I chose adoption over having a third biological child. I am in the habit of making choices; I am accustomed to having options.

Maybe there was no direct coercion between me and K.—we never even met, and the $1500 in birthmother expenses we paid is probably not enough to wrest a baby away from a woman who wanted to keep it (though C, Yehva’s birthfather, asserted repeatedly during a deposition that K. had “sold” the baby to us for $1500, so maybe it is). But given our relative social positions, I didn’t have to exert direct pressure on K. for her to become the producer, the manufacturer, the provider of my heart’s desire.

I do not feel guilty for having Yehva in my life. It is not wrong that I am her mother. But it is not entirely right, either. Being adopted was by any measure better for Yehva than staying in her birth family, and that tips the scales of this story to “good.” But there is a broken heart somewhere in every adoption; it’s one of the ingredients. In all my joy at being Yehva’s mother, I can still never forget that K.’s loss is precisely the shape and size and heft of my gain.

I really want to dig into this more, and Rothman is about to do it for me, in a great passage I may have to quote extensively and then leave to create its own ferment. Next post: Twelve Swedish Women.

Performing Family (p. 4)

We don’t look like a family. I’m white, and Victoria is black. So we’ve learned, over the years, to make you see us as a family. I learned to stand behind her with my hand clearly on her shoulder when we rang the violin’s teacher’s door. “Hello, I’m Barbara and this is my daughter Victoria,” I say before the teacher can so much as open her mouth. And put her foot in it. I call Victoria “my daughter” like a newlywed on a fifties sitcom said “my husband.” Often. With a big smile. Straight at you.

Victoria and I “do” family, “present” as family, the way that a transsexual does gender, presents as female [sic—or male] We’re just doing what normal people do, but we know we’re doing it.

Rothman is talking about something that people who live near boundaries, or transgress them, have in common: the need to assertively self-define, and the burden (and gift) of having to be aware of what people who dwell in the middle have the luxury not to notice.

It can be necessary to assert who you are, when you live on a boundary, or people will invent a story about you that they are more comfortable with, and they can go to great lengths to do so. When I was a young lesbian in college, my lover and I used to hold hands around campus. Eventually, a classmate of hers told her that, for some months, she had seen us get on the bus together holding hands, and thought, “Isn’t that nice of Joey, to help that blind woman.” Eventually, she had a lightbulb moment, but this is one of my favorite stories about how far people will go not to see what they don’t expect—or in some cases, want—to see.

One of my female lovers used to introduce me as “my lover Su,” always, to everyone, by way of saying, “Just so there’s no mistake, just so you can’t pretend you don’t know, just so this doesn’t have to be on of those unspoken things between us..” I used to have a business card that said, “Su Penn: Writer. Storyteller. Lesbian,” for much the same reason.

This idea brings up so much for me that I was about to veer off here into more about being a lesbian, about my experiences with transsexualism, about what it’s like to be a queer woman in an opposite-sex relationship and how hard it is to make that visible to people. But this is supposed to be about interracial adoption, so I’ll rein myself in and focus on that.

So far, I have been fascinated by the variation in how Yehva and I are seen. When we’re out alone together, we are (so far as I can tell; this is based on people who make comments to me) universally seen as mother and daughter. When we were still in Chicago, the two of us waiting for clearance to come home to Michigan after she was born, people didn’t even assume she was adopted. “What are you doing up on your feet?” more than one solicitous person asked me, after stopping to admire her. Back home in mid-Michigan, “adopted” seems to be the first thing people think of, rather than “black male partner,” but in Chicago the latter possibility seemed more available to people.

I have three kids altogether, two boys who are my biological children, and white, and my daughter, who is black. They are spaced neatly, at three-year-intervals, like the proverbial stair-steps but with a very high rise. So far as I can tell, nobody mistakes us for anything but what we are: a family with two biological children and one adopted child (though I could digress—again—to my own mistaken assumption about another racially-mixed family I know, that their white daughter was biological). But if we have one extra kid with us, I start getting asked if I’m a daycare provider, and I wonder to what extent Yehva’s race contributes to the perception that we might not be just a family, or that I might be a professional caregiver rather than a mom with an extra kid.

It’s also true that the assumed tie between me and Yehva attenuates remarkably fast with distance, and seems to disappear completely if she gets ten feet or more away from me, or about the width of one aisle in a big-box store. This is the distance at which, twice now, a concerned and angry employee has mistaken Yehva for an unattended toddler, and I have had to speak up and say, from just a few feet away, “I’m her mother! She’s with me.”

Another digression: I can’t help wonder what the presumed race of the missing mother has to do with the mix of anger and concern the employees display. It makes me want to abandon a white toddler in the same store and watch through a hidden camera as the store employees interact with her. More concern, less anger? Or do they deal with so many unattended toddlers that they have a build-up of frustration about it that has little to do with race?

I wonder, too, to what extent I’ll have to be more assertive about “performing” family with Yehva as she gets older.. A woman with a baby or toddler seems presumed to be the mother—at least around here, where nannies aren’t common—but as Yehva gets older, it seems to me that more options would come to people’s mind: daughter of a friend, Little Sister, something else unspecified. Perhaps I’ll have to perfect the hand-on-shoulder, the dazzling smile, “this is my daughter….”

I don’t think those of us on the edges should be too hard on people who make mistakes. Of course people are going to revert to the most available possibility. We should be honest about our own mistakes in this regard; besides the above-mentioned assumption that a certain couple’s white daughter was not adopted, when I knew that their black children were, I have in the not-too-distant past assumed that a lesbian couple’s child was conceived by donor insemination—only to learn, to my chagrin, that at least one of them didn’t identify as a lesbian, that they were polyamorous, and that their son was a happy mistake resulting from a relationship one of them had with a man. So, gentle with the people whose assumptions we bump up against, OK? Gentle—but firm. Oh, so firm.

Welcome and What I'm Up To

I recently read Barbara Katz Rothman’s book Weaving a Family: Untanging Race and Adoption, in which she writes both as a sociologist and as the white mother of a black daughter. So far, this is the best book I have read on race and adoption; Rothman seems to understand the many threads that snake out from the act of making a family in this way, and she follows them fruitfully. It’s not that I agree with everything Rothman says, but that she raises questions I think are worth considering.

As I read, I put a tape flag in the book every time something struck me as thought-provoking or especially well-put, and ended up with several dozen. Not sure what to do next, I let the book sit around for awhile, and then it occurred to me to blog my tape flags, as a way of “thinking out loud” about Rothman’s observations and arguments.

This blog is called “Tape Flags and First Thoughts” because that’s what my posts are going to be: first thoughts in reaction to bits of the book. Please read them accordingly; nothing here is my final word on anything. It’s just my next step in thinking about my family and the choices we’ve made.

Comments will be welcome, but moderated, so if yours doesn’t show up right away, it’s because I haven’t approved it yet. I will not accept comments from anonymous posters; if you prefer to post anonymously or under a screen name, I’ll do that for you—but you need to tell me who you are. I’m not interested in arguing, and while I look forward to hearing comments as food for thought, I probably won’t participate in comment threads, and I reserve the right not to approve comments that strike me as argumentative. In the manner of Quaker worship-sharing, I invite people to speak from their own experiences and insight; think of the Rothman quotes I’ll begin each entry with as a prompt or query and my post as simply the first comment on it. To discourage argumentation, I probably won’t approve more than one comment per person per thread. If anyone other than me reads this, I want this to be a place for thoughtful, open-hearted listening, not persuasion or argumentation.

Also, of course, I reserve the right to post about other things, like my cute children. When I finish with Weaving a Family, I plan to continue with another book on my shelf where the tape flags almost outnumber the pages: Liz Oppenheimer's collection of Quaker blog posts, Writing Cheerfully on the Web.