Suppositions and Assumptions in Adoption Justification
Since Round-Table Discussion About "The WOUND" and The Womb is going into all sorts of tangents, ranging from male-female antics in ATM handling to supposition and assumptions about what adoption is or should be. The latter I would like to discuss further in this thread, leaving our round-table discussion centered around the primal wound. The categorical gender generalizations assumed in ATM handling I see no need in further discussing, but I digress.
Bob wrote:
Adoption is supposed to be centered around the child and lets assume it is by intent. Then when the child becomes an adult these same insitutions, lawyers, the Catholic Church, and the NCFA, then claim adoption is crafted to protect the birth mother'd secrecy/privacy. These organizations are separate from the state and private agencies and even catholic social services wont support the church on this.
The suppositions and assumptions of the opening sentence, I already disagree with. Adoption didn't start centered around the child, but as a formalization of a practice of keeping pregnancies out of wedlock a secret. A formalization too of a practice of secretly supplying infants to married couples in a cover up of the shame of infertility. Either way adoption finds its roots in the cult of shame and maintains to do so, leaving the child often only a pawn in an adult's game of hide and do not seek. Infants have since the dawn of adoption been used to solve grown up problems and remain to do so.
Why burden a child with a couple's infertility issues? Why seek care and protection for an infant with people so desperate to have a child, they will blindly follow their own needs along the road of adoption? Why seek care and protection for an infant with people so rich they can avoid the "mess" of pregnancy and child birth by acquiring a child at the draw of a visa card? Why seek care and protection for an infant with people whose pathology can't but lead to punishing the child for having bad blood?
All sorts of motivations make people wanting to adopt and since there is an industry of adoption facilitators in every professional expertise thinkable, of every possible denomination around, many of these motivations eventually find a child. Even if the so-called ethical adoption agencies see reasons not to accept clientele, there will be other's who will deliver the required product.
Of course the industry is proclaiming their interest in the children trapped in the foster care system, their core business remains delivering, preferably white, preferably healthy, preferably infants for their clientele. The income from doing federal or state funded projects is of course most welcome in a market tidal due to international moratoria on international adoption. At the end of the month the professionals of these professional organizations need to get paid professionally.
In the mean time what is being done about the supply side of the economy. What is being done about the, for a civilized, or at least rich country, embarrassingly level of poverty? Why is the average age of first sexual contact a year and a half younger than in Western Europe? What's the hangup with marital status? How come so many kids don't finish school? Why is the number of people in prison 6 times higher than in other rich countries?
Sure the industry will not address these issues, it's in their interest to maintain status-quo, Churches being entangled with agencies. Latter Day Saints children's services, Lutheran Children's Services and Bethany Christian Services each being much bigger than the Catholic Charities, together prominently represented in the NCFA, which in two lumps of over $6 million received federal funding for promoting the adoption option in pregnancy consultation. There is very much an entanglement between state, industry and church, despite a few dissident Catholic voices.
Between the grown-up needs of the market place, the grown-up needs to fill the hole of childlessness, the grown-up needs of religious groups to promote a cult of shame, the child is left off-centre, not by intent but by neglect.