Jessaca Leinaweaver,
"Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families"
(page 3 of 5)
Disassembling a Family
It may be more comfortable to imagine that adoption happens because
the "reproductive laborer," or the person who worked to bring the child
into the world, is deceased, or in other words, that all adoptable
children are orphans. However, the overwhelming majority of children
adopted today do have at least one living parent. This became all too
clear during the response to the Haitian earthquake of 2010, when some
adoptions were facilitated even as U.S. Baptist missionaries' efforts to
"rescue" children with parents were vilified. The New York Times
cited a UNICEF spokesman who noted that "In orphanages in Haiti there
are an awful lot of children who are not orphans."[13]
In the absence of orphans whose parents are dead, the transfer of
reproductive labor that adoption represents is regulated by the state,
the federal government, and international conventions and agreements. In
this highly regulated context, the person who gave birth to the child is
for some reason determined not to be capable to take care of him or her
(further discussion on this below). Meanwhile, the person who is
receiving a legal relationship to the child has been for some reason
determined to be able to take care of him or her. Once again, this is
stratified reproduction in action. Some larger entity—perhaps a
national government represented by a social worker—has identified one
person as an unfit parent and a second person as a fit
parent.[14]
To identify someone as an unfit parent is a crucial piece of the
politics of contemporary reproduction. It is also a process which is
complex and difficult to clearly analyze. On one hand, it is essential
to raise the possibility that good parents are being mislabeled as
unfit—by state representatives or even by themselves—due to racial,
cultural, or class prejudices deeply embedded within governments and
local social structures.[15]
On the other hand, it would be
disingenuous to forget that many parents are, indeed, unfit by any
reasonable measurement and that many adoptions are thus not fodder for
an analysis of stratified reproduction but rather measures that protect
children.[16]
In what follows, I hope to maintain this sense of
ambiguity and complexity.
Racial, cultural, and class prejudices have historically been closely
tied to policies and administrative decisions that are ostensibly in a
child's best interests. One particularly compelling example comes from
aboriginal and Native history. In the U.S., Canada, and Australia,
indigenous children were removed from their families on the premise that
Indians could not be suitable parents, and that the children would be
best off if placed in boarding schools or with white
couples.[17] Along
with child removal, child abandonment can also often be shown to be
related to such prejudices. For example, at the beginnings of
international adoptions in the 1950s, children were available from Korea
not because they had been orphaned by the war but because neither their
Korean mothers nor their U.S. soldier fathers were able or willing to
raise them. Korean women who had been in relationships with GIs were
stigmatized by a society which valued ethnic purity, and their mixed
children were no exception to this.[18]
Thus, even parents who abandon
their children may be doing so in a context where there is no social,
moral, or economic support for their parenting.
When adoptions are not making the news courtesy of corruption-related
scandals in Haiti or Guatemala, they do so in the tabloids and magazines
that cover celebrity reproduction. An analysis of reporting around
Madonna's most recent adoption reveals something about the politics of
disassembling families.
In March 2009, Reuters reported that Madonna was hoping to adopt her
second Malawian child, Chifundo Mercy James. This was immediately
controversial for two reasons. First, Malawi does not officially allow
international adoptions. For Madonna to initiate proceedings was seen by
some as special treatment.[19]
Second, almost immediately, a man named
James Kambewa identified himself as Mercy's father and stated that he
did not want her to be adopted. He claimed that when Mercy's mother
became pregnant he had no money to marry her, and had to move to live
with extended family, hundreds of miles away. He was informed that the
child died, and he stated that he had never met Mercy, all of which is
plausible, if not provable.[20]
In May, the Malawi appeals court ruled that Madonna could not adopt
Mercy due to the residency requirement for
adoption.[21] Judge Esmie
Chondo stated that, "By removing the very safeguard that is supposed to
protect our children, the courts could actually facilitate trafficking
of children by some unscrupulous individuals who would take advantage of
the weakness of the laws of the land. I must confess that there is a
gripping temptation to throw caution to the wind and grant an adoption
in the hope that there will be a difference in the life of just one
child. However, it should be borne in mind that inter-country adoptions
may not be and are not the only solution."[22]
The following month, the
Malawi Supreme Court overruled the appeals court and allowed Madonna to
adopt Mercy. The court's ruling included the statement, "In our
judgment, the [child's welfare] will be better taken care of by having
her adopted by the foreign parent rather than for her to grow up in an
orphanage where she will have no family life, no love and affection of
parents."[23]
What is particularly interesting about this case is the way that the
media reported what had happened to cause Mercy to end up in the
orphanage. CBS reported that Mercy's mother died in childbirth. Her
maternal grandmother, Lucy Chekechiwa, raised her for several months but
eventually Mercy "was put in the orphanage because there was no one to
breastfeed the baby."[24]
The way that Mercy's grandmother relied on
the orphanage to take care of her reminded me strongly of what I had
seen in Peru, where I conducted two years of research on adoptions and
orphanages. I learned that orphanages are not exclusively places where
government or philanthropic workers raise children whose parents have
died. In very poor countries, where families often cannot afford to quit
working and take care of a child, or to feed every child that is born,
orphanages are often used as a safety net. In Peru, people could leave
children with the orphanage for up to six months as a relief measure,
and adoption proceedings would not be initiated unless the parent or
guardian did not visit the child at all during the six-month period. So
"orphanage" was really a misnomer—many of the children residing there
were there temporarily, and two-thirds of the children in orphanages
that recorded numbers of visits had relatives who came to visit
them.[25]
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