During National Adoption (Awareness) Month, the US media is full of adoption porn: a cloying, romantic, fantasia about the wonderful world of forever adoption.
Adoption porn hits its peak around the third week of November as National Adoption Day approaches when hundreds of babies and children get their names changed, their birth certificates sealed, and are legally and forever (supposedly) transferred to what are now called “real parents.” You know, the people who feed change and kiss booboos since the birthers are irresponsible yams. GOTCHA!
This year is no different, though, I haven’t seen as much flibberty-gibberty as usual. Then, I’m not looking for it either. Most of what I see comes from grossed-out adult adoptees who like to spread their disgust around social media.
I know that there are children who are happy to find security and permanency with adoption, and I hope they find that–along with being allowed to acknowledge their loss, trauma, and feelings about their complicated situation, as new-fangled as that sounds to the not-adopted.
National Adoption Day and its hoo-ha, of course, is never really about children. or for that matter, their bio or adoptive parents unless they fit into a joint media-framed adoption industry narrative. You’ll never see a news story about any of those parties talking about the tragic situation that brought them all to the point of adoption. I believe, in fact, that America’s attitude toward adoption and adoptees is media driven.
Not look-alikes. Greer Garson and Edna Gladney
For instance, before most of you were even born, Blossoms in the Dust, the fictionalized account of the life of adoption powerhouse Edna Gladney, made in 1941`during the Golden Age of Hollywood adoptions, opened up a hunger for infant adoption –bigger than had existed before. Subsequently, public policy and laws, including sealed records, were made to cover the demand. (More OBCs were sealed in the FDR years than any other time.) I actually know people who were adopted because of that movie. Greer Garson, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress) pretending to be Edna Gladney sold it.
Of course, print media had its share of adoption sob stories. I have copies of approximately 200 popular magazine articles about adoption written between 1919 and 1960. Except for four or five, all had happy endings, and were told from the POV of adoptive parents or adoption professionals, such as they were.
Nothing much has changed. Adoption is still all rah-rah-rah. The narratives are now, however, firmly rooted in consumerism, capitalism, and white Christian saviorism; whereas the older story focused on bourgeois family building, charity, and “fitting in.” My own birthmother adopted two kids after she married. She believed that she and her husband were not a family without children.
I had intended to use this opinion piece, After Dobbs: A Thanksgiving for the Brave Love of Adoption,” by anti-abortion advocate, Leigh Fitzpatrick Snead, in this blog today, but it won’t open on my computer. I can read it on my phone, but that’s not much help since I wanted to cut and paste some of it. Published by The National Catholic Register, it is, granted, a biased media source, but it is not any different from stories that show up in MSM. It illustrates much of what is wrong with adoption and how it is portrayed and believed today. Snead depicts the birthmother repeatedly as “brave,” and ignores the trauma of mother and child separation. I don’t see anything that even hints that Snead thinks the decision for the mother to surrender is difficult. The new baby is, to Snead, a “gift.”
…I am grateful for the choices his birthmother made that led him to become a part of our family. I am thankful for the radical hospitality she showed by carrying him for nine months and doing all she could to keep him health and safe….I am also thankful that she knew this was a choice she could make–a good choice__and an exercise of her own agency. I am thankful for those around her who supported her and her choice to place her baby with us. …I am thankful for the brave love shown by all my sons’ birth mothers and for all those women who choose life for their children. Being asked to be the mother of another woman’s child is the greatest gift I have ever received.
Snead shows no genuine compassion for the baby’s bio mother or why she felt, three weeks before his birth, that she needed to surrender him to the author and her husband. Her words, if studied carefully, play with the term “choice,” and infer that the agency of birthmothers that do not employ the adoption “choice” is less. That having an abortion or even keeping her baby under less-than-ideal conditions is not a real choice. Somebody or something is pulling her strings. This is one reason why consumerist “choice” needs to be barred from adoption and abortion discourse.
Also disturbing is Snead’s tie of the pregnancy and birth of the baby to the Dobbs decision, which happened there months after the baby’s birth. She calls forced pregnancy and adoption surrender “empowering” for women. Apparently, abortion is not. Nor does she mention the reasons women abort and what could be done–economic improvement for instance– to prevent abortion.
Now we go to Glastonbury, Connecticut where Adoption Day is all about them–and we don’t mean babies. In fact, I’m not sure if it’s all about the adoptive parents Lori and Jay Catubigor or Eye Witness 3 Reporter Audrey Russo. Russo flies so far over the top in metaphors that she needs to adopt a baby to insure a safe landing for herself or get a box of Legos. I’m worried about her!
- When something is lacking from your life, you’ll try every tool to fill that hole.
- A tiny 1-year-old removed from his home, Elias needed a family with the tools to help him thrive.
- Building their lives with a toddler.
- The empty spaces were filling up with new toys, new people, and new names.
- People have different needs and require different tools to make their lives complete.
- DNA may not have been the building blocks of this family, but that doesn’t matter when love is the foundation.
Should I make this a found poem and sell it to Hallmark?
Lastly, we come to Detroit. Now the story itself contains nothing really outrageous. It’s the header that got me: “This child is very cute.”
“This child is very cute.” Sounded like it came from a HAP browsing through an Adoption Associates Wish Book at the beauty salon. Turns out it was a compliment from the judge.
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Ultimately, NAM/NAAM adoption porn i about “gratitude” These kids are too young to express the proper thankful attitude, but one day they will be expected to, if not by their adoptive parents, by the public. You can bet that some Karen on the social media of the future, or snooping over the hedge, will demand these little ones, now grown up, to show some gratitude and respect You coulda been in a dumpster!
My friend Lisa Munro, recently started a Substack, Adoption is Politics, which I highly recommend. One of her first pieces is On giving thanks and the g-word (gratitude). Close to the end of it, she writes
If you happen to be adopted and stop performing gratitude for your adoption for the benefit of others, people may label you as “ungrateful” as if this is the worst possible insult. (See also: “I’m sorry you had a bad experience,” and “You’re so angry!”) It says a lot that other people get angry at us when we stop performing gratitude. We’re not holding up our half of the life-long and legally binding bargain that we never actually agreed to as children. We’ve broken a taboo because we’ve made choices to listen to our own emotional experiences and dare to have actual feelings about a very major part of our lives. And our emotional experiences don’t always line up with social expectations about our lives. It’s hard to feel grateful for what we have when we’ve lost so much and those losses remain unacknowledged. I wonder how grateful I should be for the things I’ve lost through adoption.
NAM/NAAM will soon cease to exist for another 11 months. Each year we gain power and they don’t
Poke the Bear?
We Poke Back!
Day 26 NAM/NAAM/NanoPoblano
Originally posted: The Daily Bastardette, November 27, 2022
Only 3 more days