Yesterday sucked in Adoptionland. After sitting on it for awhile and considering it in depth, MrsBroccoli Guy and I made the difficult decision to post a controversial annonymous blog post over at VVAI that outlines some pretty extreme corruption and baby-buying.
Unfortunately this is really only the tip of the iceberg. I’ve finally made a realization about why there are so few advocates in the adoption community. Like any other advocacy for situations in which corruption flourishes, it is exhausting and often feels futile and hopeless. Sometimes it feels downright scary, often it makes me nauseous. There are legal risks, there are emotional risks, there are spiritual risks. I don’t get paid for this job yet at the end of the day I often feel like I’ve run a marathon! I’m beat.
Is this the best way to incite change? Is this what I’m “supposed to be” doing?
Last week weas the Ethics in Adoption conference in DC, of which I was invited to sit on the blog panel. I couldn’t go and I was both extremely disappointed (I spent most of Mondday and Tuesday frantically checking for blog updates from other bloggers who went) and relieved. I’m not sure I could stomach an entire two day conference about nothing but how much work has to be done in adoption ethics. I think, right now, it would just serve to depress the hell out of me rather than inspire and empower me.
The hardest thing for me is that, by virtue of this “job”, I have a sort of mainline to inside information that most people will never see or hear. Most of it can’t be shared, some of it can. Trust me, I’m not bragging. If you’ve ever carried around someone’s awful secret then you know how this feels, a bit. It affects every part of my life. It’s necessary but its awful.
And then there is the “anti-adoption” name-calling. Nothing is more bizarre to me than being called or inferred as anti-adoption because I’m advocating for infants (as opposed to parents). Sometimes advocating for infants means advocating for birth parents to be able to stay with those children. Sometimes advocating for infants means applauding NOIDs because it means a child’s real history will be examined and hopefully honored. Do these things mean a child will not end up adopted? I hope so. Add to that the threats and feras that something I might say or do will shut down the Vietnam adoption program. First of all, this is totally ludicrous. If I had power like that, I woudln’t be writing this blog post!!!! But if the program was shut down due to corruption, I would sleep ok at night. It isn’t my goal and it certainly didn’t help last time, it seems. But not tolerating corruption is important to me and if babies are really being bought and shutting down the program would halt that practice to a certain degree then I could sleep at night. Hence the anti-adoption comments, I guess.
But how can any of us be so selfish as to hope that a child would not be kept with their biological parent if at all possible? How can it EVER be BETTER for a child – or a family or a community or an entire culture – to lose a willing biological parent, no matter how wonderful the adoptive parents are? I guess part of it is that I do not see poverty as being the dividing line between good parents and bad. I know plenty of good parents here in the good ole US of A who are impoverished and are fantastic parents. I saw it everywhere in Vietnam. The fact that I am not impoverished does not make me automatically a better option for a child than their birth family. And yet there is this undercurrent in the adoption community that adoptive parents have a fundamental right to a child at any cost, including the child’s familial foundation if that foundation includes poverty. This undercurrent feeds the hell out of adoption corruption. It is blinding!