Web Letters | The Nation

Save the Children?

I am an adoption abolitionist

I am the author of Swimming Up the Sun: A Memoir of Adoption. Thank you for publishing this article. As an adopted person and author, I've concluded that, with rare exception, adoption should be abolished. It's barbaric, especially closed adoption. It harms adopted people and our mothers and original families. Adoption is complicated and a lifelong existential dilemma for those of us affected, regardless of how good our "fit" is in our adoptive family. Adoption, especially international adoption, is too close to human trafficking to be ethical. Human children aren't fungible. We suffer great losses. As Professor Williams points out, much of our suffering could be prevented by channeling people's impulses to "rescue" poor children through adoption into helping communities keep their families together. This is the path the Netherlands has taken in prohibiting international adoption altogether.

Save the Children?

Professor Williams doesn't understand

As my family and I prepare to celebrate the second anniversary of our adopted daughter's joining our family, I cannot help but feel that Professor Williams lacks any real understanding of what most adoptive parents go through when making the decision to adopt.

Adoption is not an issue taken lightly in my family. My mother and her siblings were adopted after they lost their mother. A very close childhood friend of mine is adopted. My wife's family has run a number of homes that served children who were severely disabled and unable to be cared for by their families.

After having our second biological child, my wife and I had a discussion if we would want to have one more. We agreed that we wanted three children but felt that with so many children needing a family, we would adopt instead of having another child of our own.

We did six months of research and decided that an international adoption was best for our family. After a year of paperwork, openning our home and entire family to visits from social workers and ensuring that we had enough economic resources to provide for another child, we were blessed with our daughter.

My wife, daughter, son and I traveled to Ethiopia and spent a week there finishing all the documentation. While there, my wife, who is a physician, and my sister, an RN, volunteered at the HIV orphanage. In addition, my wife organized a medicine drive before our trip to bring much-needed HIV medications to that orphange for those children.

We took this voyage of adoption very seriously. We wanted to ensure, to the best of our ability, that we could help a child who needed a family.

When I read Ms. Williams's attempt to express concern about domestic and international adoption, I was taken back by her complete lack of understanding of what adoptive families feel and go through during the adoption process. Her (what I believe to be) careless remarks about how to make the world a better place by "plowing a field" are so sickening that I truly am speechless.

While I may understand her view and her point of making the world a place where families are not lost and can stay together, that is not the reality of the world we live in today. It is a world full of war, disease and poverty. The children that lose their families because of this are not at fault. We in the "first world" are at fault. We create the wars, famine, disease and poverty. We look the other way and think sending a bag of rice will help solve the problems we created. What should those children do while we sit in comfort and do little to change the world? Should they not have a family? Should they not be able to be held at night and feel the love of a parent? Should they not have a family support structure that will help them find success as adults? I know, we should all wait for another thirty-second commercial and give the cost of a cup a coffee each day to keep a child institutionalized. Yes, professor, that is the solution. We can all just go "plow a field" and these children will have a happy-ever-after life.

Let me share with you what my daughter's life would have been like if she had not been adopted. She was very ill when we received her and had she not gotten medical attention in the USA she would have died before her second birthday. Even if she had been healthy, my daughter's life in the orphange would have been harsh. Most of these orphanages are overcrowded and don't receive the funding they deserve. (I wonder if Professor Williams is willing to donate a year's salary to the orphange my daughter came from to try to make it a better place?) If she had lived to see 16, she would have been put out on the street. She would have had no shelter. No job. No family. No hope. In fact, many of the girls at this point get pushed into the sex trade. Now, I ask Professor Willams, is that the life that my daughter should have had? Maybe my daughter would have been OK if my wife and I had just gone to "work for an NGO and plowed a field"? Really Professor Williams, this is what your years of study has brought you to?

I also would like to take a moment of your time to address the issue of color/race that Professor Williams raised. I do agree with her that race/ethnicity/color has been and still is an issue in the USA. But my wife and I are an interrcial couple. Our own children, like the president of the United States, are of mixed ethnicity. They are what America is supposed to be, a melting pot of cultures. My children dont see race/color. If you ask them what they are, they proudly say Americans of African and European ancestory.

I would argue that is the likes of Professor Williams that help keep the race issue going in the USA. The racists on the left show the same intolerance to multiculturalism as those on the right. I have no doubt that Professor Williams was right there with Jesse Jackson when he challenged if then–presidential candidate US Senator Obama was "black enough."

Finally, I will say that although Professor Williams's column is her opinion I am truly disgusted by The Nation for publishing it. What my wife and I see is that the left and right are not that far apart on issues of race/ethnicity as people may believe. On the "right" you have those who mask their racism in attacks on the president by challenging his citizenship, calling him a communisit or saying he is a Muslim—all code for him not being someone of European ancestory. On the "left" you have early comments from them saying that President Obama was not "black enough." Or columns such as this by Professor Williams stating that interracial adoptions may be an issue.

The world is changing. Younger generations do not have the issues with race/ethnicity of those that are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. Next time Professor Williams wants to pen her "opinion" on adoption, she should take a moment to acknowledge her own racial/ethnic issues and reach out to adoptive parents and listen to our stories.