Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / December 2007

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/12/international-adoption-one-way-di
alogue.html

International Adoption, It's a One-Way Dialogue
News: When adoptive parents like myself try to keep the lid on
controversy, we do ourselves--and our kids--no favors.

By Elizabeth Larsen
December 12, 2007

November was National Adoption Awareness Month, and the media--
including Mother Jones, which recently published my story Did I Steal
My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption--have been doing their
best to bring fresh ideas to a much misrepresented topic. The New York
Times has joined the fray with, among other things, "Relative
Choices," an engaging series of personal essays to which readers can
post comments online. As an adoptive mother, I'm delighted with the
variety of perspectives (though I do wish more birth parents had been
included and feel that the title "Relative Choices" is off tone--most
adoptees don't have a "choice," nor do birth mothers buckling under
economic or societal pressures).

But there are viewpoints that aren't given a lot of real estate, most
notably the perspectives of people--adoptees, birth families, adoptive
parents--who are deeply critical of adoption. Novelist Tama Janowitz's
essay, published on November 12, unknowingly highlighted this
disparity. Intended to be a humorous look at generational resentment,
the essay employs the term "Mongolian" to describe her Chinese-born
daughter's features and refers to a recently published book in which
Midwestern adoptees in their 30s and 40s "complain bitterly" about
their experiences and as a result blame their parents. (The book,
which Janowitz doesn't name, is Outsiders Within: Writing on
Transnational Adoption.)

It didn't take long before the blogosphere was buzzing not only about
the Janowitz essay, but also the fact that when some of those very
same "bitter complainers" tried to post their reactions, they couldn't
get past the Times' digital gatekeeper.

In its FAQ for posting comments, the Times makes it clear that its
criteria for allowing users to post comments are subjective and that
abusive, vulgar, or ad hominem comments are not tolerated. In the
opinions posted for stories that were not related to adoption, it is
clear that the website favors measured language over anything that
tilts toward pissed off. But how do you explain that a post that
included the line "The term Mongolian to describe Asian features went
out of fashion the year your book was published" was nixed when a
response to an article about Camille Paglia saying "Camille, dear.
Return to your Madonna-lust and leave the rest of us alone" did make
it through? Several of the responses that were not published are
posted on Harlow's Monkey, a blog by Jae Ran Kim, who was adopted from
South Korea and is now a social worker specializing in adoption. While
some of the comments might not be personally gratifying for Janowitz,
none that I've read are, in my opinion, anything that the general
public needs to be protected from. In the days that followed the flap
over censorship, more dissenting voices were included in the comments,
including a posting by Kim.

The online scuttlebutt behind these omissions is that the "Relative
Choices" editor Peter Catapano, who is an adoptive father, is
censoring critical voices. I have no idea if Catapano had anything to
do with the filtering--neither he nor anyone else at the Times returned
my phone call or emails. But whether or not this incident was an
example of an adoptive parent censoring dissent, I think it's vital
that we recognize why some adoption critics would not be surprised if
it was so. The truth is that it's almost impossible to find those
voices in American media. When The Language of Blood author Jane Jeong
Trenka--a Korean adoptee and award-winning writer who tackles the
difficulties she faced growing up in a small Minnesota town with
heartbreakingly gorgeous prose--tries to submit her writing to
magazines and newspapers, she gets virtually no takers. Meanwhile,
Korean editors print everything she writes.

Why? I think when it comes to adoption, American adoptive parents
(myself included) steer the discourse. We direct adoption agencies and
think tanks. We write the home studies of prospective adoptive
parents. We are policy experts and doctors and academics and
journalists. We are passionate about adoption--an institution that has
given us so much--and therein lies the problem: In our passion, we
sometimes shield ourselves from larger discussions about the toll that
adoption can take, a discussion that is in fact gaining traction
across the globe. And in doing so, we are preventing adoption from
evolving.

When I attended a reading of Outsiders Within last winter, I was
struck by how much the intensity and the passion of the writers
recalled the pioneers of second-wave feminism. That movement upended
our opinions about marriage, and the institution survived for the
better. Any adoptive parent knows that the adoptive bond is not
fragile. So why do we protect it from the same kind of scrutiny?

Reading through the comments posted on "Relative Choices" and other
adoption blogs, it's clear to me that if you are an adoptee and want
to say something critical about adoption, you had better make it
abundantly clear that you truly, absolutely love your mom and dad or
you risk getting berated. (A notable exception to these "quit whining"
directives are the respectful comments posted to Sumeia William's
"Relative Choices" essay titled "I Am Not a Bridge," the most hard-
hitting selection in the series.) In fact, expecting adoptees to
publicly pledge their gratitude to their parents is holding them to a
standard no one else has to adhere to. Isn't it true that even if we
hate our parents, we still love them?

Similarly, in some adoptive-parent communities, anything questioning
the current practices in the adoption universe leads to a virtual
stoning of the messenger. When UNICEF publicly states that they
support intercountry adoption--but only after all efforts to keep
children in their birth countries (through family preservation, foster
care, or domestic adoption) have failed--or the State Department weighs
in with critical assessments of Guatemalan and Vietnamese adoptions,
tirades rain down. Meanwhile, a Guatemalan adoption attorney who
allegedly offered money to a teenage birth mother's father in exchange
for the baby is praised by some adoptive parents for her dedication.

I'm not saying that I want all adoptive parents to agree with the
steps UNICEF or State is taking to reform intercountry adoptions. But
we need all perspectives to get more space in the conversation--
otherwise, we parents are just patting each other on the back.

Since Mother Jones published my story, I've taken my own virtual
knocks. (Unlike the Times, Mother Jones only filters hate speech and
propaganda.) There's not much reward in being called an egotistical
colonizer whose self-hating tendencies have rendered me a horrible
mother. But I will admit that even some of the more stinging
criticisms have made me pause long enough to rethink my assumptions.

This is a difficult time for transnational adoption, with troubling
news stories increasing and the future, at least in some countries,
unclear. But whatever the solutions may be, I don't think we'll find
them by closing ranks.

Elizabeth Larsen has worked for both Sassy and Utne Reader. She wrote
about her daughter in this year's Choice: True Stories of Birth,
Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion,
and in the current issue of Mother Jones.