Podcast Criticism Response

Here's my response to a comment I just received:

Kathleen said...

Hello, I have been following your blog for quite a while.

I am not surprised, but I am disappointed that this blogcast further stigmatizes international adoptive families.

Not all people who adopt internationally who live in the US are white, nor are they are all American born. Believe it or not, some people who chose to adopt internationally are people who immigrated to the US who were actually born and grew up in the country where they chose to adopt from. Not all people who adopt internationally adopt babies. Some actually adopt older children, sibling groups, and children with special needs and disabilities. Not all people who adopt internationally are elite, rich, entitled white people. Believe it or not, some people who adopt internationally actually have lots of family in the country they adopting from and are very well educated and informed about adoption procedures and are very very careful about avoiding corruption.

I am so tired by how often international adoptive families are clumped together as if they are homogenous.

Hi Kathleen. I don't believe that all international adoption should be stopped, and I have never said that. Neither have I said that all international adoptive parents are white and rich. In fact, I've posted before about problems facing Chinese-American parents adopting from China, and also talked about some research I did about adopting from Japan. And I would adopt from Japan if the conditions for it were better.

Are you sure your reaction isn't a part of something that is being discussed extensively in the Racialicious thread... responding to an institutional critique with an individual defense? It's just a pattern I see a million times when any critique of international adoption comes up.

There are now several blogs by white international adoptive parents that take more critical views of international adoption... they can handle critique of the practice, and even perform their own critique to various degrees, without taking it personally. E.g. chinaadoptiontalk.blogspot.com, thirdmom.blogspot.com, american-family.org.

Honestly, I do not have a huge amount of sympathy for international adoptive parents who are mad about being stigmatized. A small amount, yes, but not a huge amount, because the stigma doesn't really stick all that much. Parents who adopt from foster care have our own, arguably greater issues. Basically, because of international adoptive agency marketing, there's this idea out there that IA is the Cadillac of adoption and foster care is the freaking Yugo. There are ten times more weird myths and misconceptions about foster care adoption than there are about international adoption.

I can't lump together all parents involved in foster care adoption. My opinions exist on a scale. Some of us have opinions against international adoption that are way more negative than mine. Some of us are very pro-IA, and happen to be international adoptive parents as well. What I'm saying is a generalization based on observations in real life and in blogs... it's that many of us seem to have much thicker skin than the average international adoptive parent when it comes to institutional critique.

Is there corruption in the foster care system? Absolutely. I knew that going in.  I will not listen or enter into discussions with extremists who believe that every single removal is unjustified and children should always be left with their biological parents.  But I'll listen to almost any other critique, and look for statistics to back it up, and think hard about it.  Although it's public and state-controlled, there are still plenty of market-type issues in foster care adoption, there's a hierarchy of who is the most desirable child and who is the most desirable parent, and I've talked about those problems also. Many social workers or local systems are full of bias: racial/ethnic bias, bias towards removal, bias against warranted removal.

My problem is that a) the existence of corruption and inequality in international adoption is GREATER b) there is LESS impetus to admit that fact among international adoptive parent communities c) there is GREATER incidence of immediately jumping from "you are judging me and mine" when institutional critique emerges. Why is that? And why is international adoption the "default" in so many environments, even though the national incidence of foster care adoption is 2.5 times higher than international? It should be possible to talk about these questions and try to answer them without activating defense mechanisms.

I agree with you that focusing on elite white IA parents of non-special-needs children makes other types of parents invisible. So how do we help those parents? I have a lot of suggestions for that.

• Not being defensive about racial discussion so as not to drown out the voices of adoptive parents of color (e.g. Chinese-American adoptive parents). 
• Supporting adoption reform that encourages training mandates for all international adoptive parents so that they are truly educated about "invisible" special needs such as FAS and RAD.
• Supporting healthcare reform and mental healthcare parity so that these families can get the treatments they need without becoming bankrupt and falling apart. 
• Supporting transparency, a greater degree of statistics collection and open records: trying to figure out how high international disruption rates really are, and how many of these kids end up in the foster care system, then trying to figure out how to lower that rate.
• Until that support is there... not subsidizing these adoptions with tax credits or church grants, so that families don't bring home children without adequate resources in place to treat their special needs.
• Criticizing narcissistic attention-grubbers like Anita Tedaldi who exploit adoption disruption to sell books and look pretty on TV, when she could have used to the media attention to spotlight the need for support for specific special needs
  

And these are just things that I believe help families.  There are plenty of other suggestions of reform that are primarily centered on adoptees available at international adoptee blogs. I don't have a good track of recommending these types of reforms myself in communities with a lot of adoptive parents. For example, suggesting that non-Asian families should not be allowed to adopt Asian children unless they live in a demographic circle that has a high enough percentage of Asian-Americans. "That's too hard!" "That's unrealistic!" or "That would lead to more children dying in orphanages!" are the typical responses. Sigh...

I've heard many times about how a particular individual international adoption was justified. I believe my adoption was justified too. But I would never say that I was absolutely, positively, 100% certain of that... I'll quote myself from the Racialicious thread for my reason:

In my own adoption, I talk to my son’s foster mom and biological maternal grandmother every week on the phone. We share language, and a lot of culture. We get along great. My son’s life has been extensively documented and recorded and we have access to those records. And there are still weird mysteries surrounding how my son came into foster care that I don’t think are ever going to be resolved… there are stories that conflict, and relatives bending the truth as they try to present themselves in the best light. When you have this kind of situation in another country, the mysteries can become much deeper. Part of adoption reform means trying to show people that they are NOT certain, that the current standards of diligence are NOT enough, and that we should combat this by demanding open records, transparency and accountability.

I get tired too, of recycling bullet points and argument points and so on... but I've got enough energy to do it here on my own blog.  So I honestly appreciate that you expressed your feelings here without attacking me, and gave  me a good opportunity to respond.  But I'm too tired to actually hang out in larger adoptive parent communities and do this kind of stuff.