Transcript
A (0:09)
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Gretchen Sisson. She wrote the book the Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. It's National Adoption Month. I did want to ask you one sort of big picture question. How did, how did world events in, in the 20th and the 21st century change adoption? I have to imagine the wars changed adoption. I have to imagine Roe v. Wade changed adoption. What were the big points which changed the way adoption was done in this country?
B (0:46)
This is a very big picture question and I'll try to give the concise.
A (0:50)
I know, I know, it's a big question.
B (0:52)
It is, yeah. After. So, so after Roe v. Wade and as the norms around parenting changed, as I mentioned, you really saw a pretty significant drop in the numbers of domestic infant adoptions in the United States. So those numbers dropped pretty dramatically because adoption is really a demand driven system where you have more people who want to adopt privately than you have children available for private adoption. That meant that if the supply of children, and I'm using these market terms intentionally, and I recognize that it's uncomfortable to talk about people this way as supply, but it is also how this market functions once the supply of domestic babies dropped. That's when you started to see the increase in the 90s through about 2004, a tremendous increase in international adoptions. On the early side of that, you saw adoptions from Korea, after, you know, they went through the period of war and instability, more adoptions from China, then sort of the plurality of adoptions moved to Central and South America and then Africa, Haiti. That was sort of the very, very broadly speaking, the geographic shift. And what you see is that countries that are destabilized for whatever reason are more likely to export their children. One, because they are more vulnerable to people coming in to, quote, save their children, two, because they don't have enough reliable infrastructure to create a meaningful social safety net for vulnerable families. In the same way, and this can be on a broad level, recovering from wars, disruptive governments and social policies, it can also be a single catastrophic event. So after the hurricane, the landslide In Haiti in 2010, you saw a tremendous increase of adoptions out of Haiti. And a lot of those, looking back now with 15 years hindsight, were very questionable legally as far as what was done to remove those children, what their families were told when the children were removed. If people understood this was a permanent legal separation from their children. You see this also with children that were removed from Africa after enduring the AIDS epidemic, there where adoptive parents were told these children were orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. And then of course, stories came out that they weren't, that they still had living parents. We have this idea that adoption is meant to serve children who are in need. Adoption is actually really about meeting a market demand for children. And most of these children have living parents who very much want to care for them but lack the support, the resources to do so. And this is true in this global sense that we're talking about now, but it's also true for domestic adoption, where the vast majority of mothers who are relinquishing their children very much do want to parent, but they don't have the support and the financial resources to make parenting feel tenable to them.