Jessaca Leinaweaver, "Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families"
(page 5 of 5)

Conclusion

Popular representations of such cases beg us to consider what is in the best interests of the child. This powerful phrase ostensibly guides social workers, psychologists, and judges when they make determinations about where and with whom a Native American child in the U.S. in the 1950s, or a Malawian child in the 2000s, should grow up. What we think is best for that child is key in legal thinking about the disassembling of families, removing children from their birth families. But my focus here is not on the politics of children—it is about the politics of modern families. So I offer here a mildly radical suggestion—what if, instead of or alongside the idea of what is in the best interests of the child, we consider what is in the best interests of the family? Or what is in the best interest of the nation? Or the world? What if we think about some alternative people, groups, collectives, or ideas that we also value, along with children?

I don't think that reconsidering the way we make these decisions will solve everything, of course. Prioritizing the best interests of a family is just as much a political choice. And a family may not be a unified entity: if women still have a "second shift" in two-income heterosexual couples, members of a single family can surely have opposed or divergent interests.[29] But perhaps taking that variety, hetereogeneity, and diversity of the family into consideration—as well as the broader questions of social justice that we must also consider—will help us to make better decisions at individual levels, and policies at political levels, for our modern families.

Talking about family in this way is often unpopular with feminists, not only because it rests on an assumption that family is a women's issue which we usually try to contest, but also because focusing attention on the power inequalities underlying "choices" like surrogacy, international adoption, or hiring a nanny can be upsetting to women who are convinced that these "choices" are the only ones that will allow them to do what they want to do. Seeing the shadow side of those "choices" can reveal that one woman's choice is made at the expense of another woman's reproductive integrity. And because people assume family is a women's issue, drawing attention to the sometimes exploitative implications of family choices—to the ways that reproduction is stratified—can end up placing blame on women, which is far from what I want to do here. Instead I want to ask us to think a bit about how what we've been taught to see as family choices may seriously affect other people's lives.

Many white, middle-class families eagerly embrace the narratives of the new kinds of families that are emerging as empowering, positive, choices. But this self-congratulation comes with a reluctance to confront the ways in which such creative family configurations as in-home child care, surrogacy, or adoption are constructed on global hierarchies of inequality. I want to suggest that we should, in the words of Roger Sanjek, "be suspicious of analyses in which everyone benefits,"[30] like those of the Indian fertility doctor or of Madonna speaking of the positive outcomes of their own reproductive strategies. I want to suggest that we try to re-think some of our assumptions about reproduction as apolitical, or certain choices as unproblematic. But we also need to recognize that these are real decisions that people must face every day, and there is no perfect answer.

What are the broader, political and economic constraints that push some mothers into situations where any choice they make is going to be viewed unfavorably, or where they truly have no choice in the matter, while other mothers get to make choices without fully understanding the implications and consequences of their choices for other people around the world? These are hard issues for present-day feminists to deal with, I think, but in order to really confront the politics of modern families we have to consider both how these politics constrain what (white middle class) women can choose or feel like they can choose, and in what ways these politics may be constructed on the unstable foundations of other people's suffering.

Endnotes

1. This paper was first presented to the Fortnightly Women's Study Club in Eugene, Oregon. I thank the members of that group for their invitation and comments. I am also grateful to Rebecca Young and Gisela Fosado for the invitation to join this issue and their comments on earlier drafts. [Return to text]

2. Laura Briggs, "Adoption, Immigration, and Privatization: Transnational Transformations in Family," S&F Online 7:3. [Return to text]

3. Shellee Colen, 1995. "'Like a Mother to Them': Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York," In Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). [Return to text]

4. Alex Kuczynski, "Her Body, My Baby," The New York Times Magazine 28 November 2008. [Return to text]

5. Joanne McCarthy, "Letter to the Editor," The New York Times Magazine 14 December 2008. Slate contributor Nina Shen Rastogi also highlighted the barefoot-and-pregnant trope in her critical commentary: Nina Shen Rastogi, "She Rented a Woman's Womb and Then Was Rude to the Landlady," The XX Factor 1 December 2008. [Return to text]

6. Clark Hoyt, "The Privileged and Their Children," The New York Times Week in Review 7 December 2008. [Return to text]

7. Stephanie Saul, "Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules," The New York Times 12 December 2009. [Return to text]

8. Hoyt, 2008. [Return to text]

9. Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). [Return to text]

10. Amelia Gentleman, "India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood," The New York Times 10 March 2008. [Return to text]

11. Shilpa Kannan, "Regulators Eye India's Surrogacy Sector," BBC News 18 March 2009. See also: Kalindi Vora, "Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Commodification of Vital Energy," Subjectivity 28: 266-278. For an in-depth discussion, see Kalindi Vora's piece in this issue. [Return to text]

12. The reporter may also be drawing on imagined liberal readers' reactions against the legislation of sexuality to add a layer of racialized judgment. I thank Rebecca Young for this point. [Return to text]

13. James C. McKinley, Jr., "53 Haitian Orphans Are Airlifted to U.S.," The New York Times 29 January 2010. See also: Ginger Thompson, "Case Stokes Haiti's Fear for Children, and Itself," The New York Times 1 February 2010. [Return to text]

14. While I do not discuss it here, I recognize that it is not an easy task to prove oneself a fit parent. There are probing, privacy-demolishing interviews with social workers, financial and education requirements, and even, in the case of China, weight limits. Many countries prohibit gay couples from adopting, so these prospective parents—like the Israeli men using a surrogate in India quoted above—are often "forced" to lie about their sexuality and adopt as single people, in direct violation of the policies or moral positions held in the birth-country of their child. See Jessaca Leinaweaver, "The Medicalization of Adoption in and from Peru," In International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children, Diana Marre and Laura Briggs, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2009): 190-207. [Return to text]

15. See Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003). See also: Jessaca Leinaweaver, "Foster and Kinship Care: Historical and Cultural Perspectives," In The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion, Richard A. Shweder, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). [Return to text]

16. Adoptive parents may also be found to be unfit, as seen in the recent case of Torry Ann Hansen, who sent her son back to Russia to much publicity. Hansen's case is quite complex and raises issues of special needs in adoptions and adoptive "rupture." See E.J. Graff, "Preventing Adoption Disasters," The Boston Globe 17 April 2010. On ruptured adoptions, see the work of Ana Berástegui: Ana Berástegui, "Adopciones rotas: el peligro de un nuevo maltrato," Revista Española de Pediatría 63(4): 314-321. [Return to text]

17. See Pauline Turner Strong, "To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adoption, and the American Indian Child Welfare Act," in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001): 468-93. [Return to text]

18. Tobias Hübinette, "Korean Adoption History," In Community: Guide to Korea for Overseas Adopted Koreans, Eleana Kim, ed (Seoul: Overseas Koreans Foundation, 2004): 12-19; 25-47. [Return to text]

19. Missy Schwartz, "Madonna's New Adoption: Malawian Court to Review Her Request," Entertainment Weekly 27 March 2009. [Return to text]

20. "'Dad' Opposes Madonna Adopting Daughter," CBS The Early Show, 4 May 2009. [Return to text]

21. According to CBS The Early Show, "Malawi requires prospective parents to live there 18 to 24 months while child welfare authorities assess their suitability." [Return to text]

22. Anita Singh, "Madonna Appeals Failed Adoption Decision," The Telegraph 4 April 2009. [Return to text]

23. "Madonna Wins Adoption Appeal in Malawi," CNN 12 June 2009. [Return to text]

24. CBS The Early Show, 2009. [Return to text]

25. See Jessaca Leinaweaver, The Circulation of Children: Adoption, Kinship, and Morality in Andean Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008): 79. [Return to text]

26. CBS The Early Show, 2009. [Return to text]

27. CBS The Early Show, 2009. [Return to text]

28. CBS The Early Show, 2009. [Return to text]

29. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (New York: Avon Books, 1990). [Return to text]

30. Roger Sanjek, "Maid Servants and Market Women's Apprentices in Adabraka," In At Work in Homes: Household Workers in World Perspective, Shellee Colen and Roger Sanjek, eds. (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1990). [Return to text]

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