Jacksonville.
Florida-area Family Law attorney Michelle Sweatland says in the October 14, 2019, Jacksonville Daily Record, that she’s worried that not enough newborns are being tossed into the adoption spammer. Of course, she isn’t that crude; rather, she promotes bribery “incentives” — including education funds –to encourage women to “choose” quick and dirty adoption as their life path.
I would like to see more pathways to private adoption where incentives are put in place for birth mothers to choose adoption. One example might be providing birth mothers with stipends for education in addition to the allowed birth mother medical and living expenses. I would also like to see cases move through the system quicker. Many times, urgent parenting issues just cannot be addressed timely.
So, what is so awful about women (and men) keeping their own children? Dare I sound radical, but isn’t that the natural thing to do? Advocating that one family be abolished in order to create another family is…well..pretty weird. (Didn’t that happen in Argentina’s Dirty War?) Taking this a step farther,why even bother with adoption–or “parental dissolution” as Sweatland so neatly calls it in another part of the profile– if you can just pass newborns out the backdoor of the hospital to a line of worthies–especially if they are white Christians of means who qualify for tax rebates?
It’s no secret that adoption as we know it, is a capitalist op. Years before intersectionality was hot analysis I was arguing that adoption not only intersects with economics, rights, class, sex, race, gender, consumerism, therapuetocracy (among stuff)., but is a microcosm of domestic colonialism and imperialism. Scratch any marginalized group and you will find adoption in theory and practice. for “the greater good” of the marginalized.
Adoption is a class war that touches everything, whether we notice it or not. Adoptees ourselves are the lab rats of genetic and cultural disfranchisement. Remember that Harvard Law neolib “adoption expert” Elizabeth Bartholet argues that economically exploited deprived countries owe it to their children and country to send them to the US or other wealthy Western nations. to better themselves. individually and collectively. This attitude extends to America’s purposefully underserved class- and now asylum seekers of any provenance who owe taxpayers (I guess) something: their children. It’s a Rumplestiltskin device. (Gotta think more about that!)
Moreover, I have argued that adoption is rooted in early 20th-century scientific socialism and progressivism. and its concomitant eugenics. A good introduction for this is Fallen Women, Problem Girls by Regina G Kinzel.
Without getting long-winded, adoption, as practiced in the US especially, is the marriage of the worse aspects of capitalism and socialism. Redistribution of wealth (children) through capitalist institutions.bound in a veil of “charity.” and mass equality. Adoption is the technocrat ‘s wet dream.
I had more to say but got way off the track, so I am letting this end here for now. Just a few thoughts for #NAAM2019, perhaps to be revisited later.