Adoption is Good

against the monstering of everything

Essayists are pack animals; journalists move in herds. There’s a reason that, for example, the mid-2000s saw the publication of a truly exhausting number of pieces that took the thesis “Selling out is good,” all of which were written as if to imply that their authors were the first to settle on that little pearl of wisdom. (It didn’t help that they were wrong; selling out is in fact still bad.) There’s a reason that “Is monogamy realistic??? Is romantic love possible?!?” pieces spring up every six months or so like dandelions in spring, clustered, like cells in a lymphoma. Writers are copycats and publications are risk-averse. Like 21st-century movie studios, our more high-falutin’ periodicals are often willing to invest only in known properties, which is why reading the opinion pages of national newspapers and magazines often feel like watching the latest cinematic retread of already well-worn intellectual property. The easiest way to get published is to swim with the tide.

Recently, I’m sorry to say, there’s been a trend of essays in such high-rent places that “trouble” adoption, that regard adoption with a Marge Simpson “hrmmmm” and a lot of fretful just-asking-questions-here-ing. The pieces may or may not engage in some half-hearted caveats, reassuring us that they’re not entirely opposed to adoption in general while relentlessly fixating on its ills and pointlessly doodling on about an ideal world where every child lives with their biological parents, who are universally fit to parent and unfailingly dedicated to that charge. If they do throw adoption a bone in that way, it’s a limp and half-chewed one. What they can definitely be counted on to do is to bring the latest academic political fashion on board, frowning darkly towards cross-racial and cross-ethnic adoption, evincing a kind of blood & soil approach towards family and love that’s become all too common in this era of CULTURAL IMPERIALISM. (You must be multicultural, but you must never transcend the boundaries of your culture, like some postmodern volkisch movement.) They unfailingly take specific and idiosyncratic stories and situations and hold them up as somehow emblematic of the entire world of foster parenting and adoption. They fret and they fret and they fret, they vaguely wave at the obvious and yet pointless truth that ideally a child will be raised by both biological parents, they imply that a better way than adoption was possible while rarely ever articulating exactly what that better way may have been, they speak in the hushed tones and elliptical phrasing of those who are Just Asking Questions… with gravitas.

The New York Times, of course, is a thought leader in this regard, as the paper has never found a basic human good it couldn’t ponderously criticize with the shuffling-foot smarm of the ideas festival class. There’s “I Was Adopted From China as a Baby. I’m Still Coming to Terms With That.” There’s “World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud.” There’s “Given Away: Korean Adoptees Share Their Stories.” (In easily-digestible video format!) There’s “I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict.” (Subtle.) The New Yorker, a $12,000 espresso machine transformed into a magazine by a mischievous wizard, has “How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams,” “Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath,” and “Where is your Mother?” (The answer is that she has been separated from her child by a cruel and fickle child welfare system despite being perfectly fit, which I’m sure is how it usually goes.) The Atlantic has “No One’s Children: America’s long history of secret adoption.” (Would you be shocked to learn that said history isn’t a good one?) They’ve got “The New Question Haunting Adoption,” the question being whether adoption is really a secretly selfish act, you know, the selfish act of taking a severely-disabled toddler into your home to provide them with support and love after their birth parents smoked meth throughout pregnancy. They also have, incredibly, “What Adoption ‘Salvation’ Narratives Get Wrong,” “Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending,” “The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption”…. I could go on, and that’s just three prestigious publications. There’s a whole world out of this out there.

This is all, for the record, a really excellent example of what we used to mean when we used the word ideology. Once upon a time, one wouldn’t say “My ideology is…” because ideology referred to the hidden, unexplored, unconscious politics that lay beneath the public, open, explicit politics. An ideology was those pre-political assumptions and beliefs which conditioned and limited political thought, which made the conscious political philosophy of any individual what it was. Ideology is the skeleton that hides unseen within the animal of politics but nevertheless determines the structure of that which is seen. Ideology exists in both the macro and the micro; this bizarre upper-caste antipathy towards ideology is a good example. If you asked leadership at these publications if they had any particular interest in leading a charge against the practice of adoption, they’d say no, of course not, what a weird question! If you were to show them just how repetitively this particular set of critiques and questions and hrm hrm hrm noises gets published in their pages, they’d swear to you that it reflects no underlying party line. And yet there it is, the evidence, in black and white. Something about the current constitution of the anxious educated urbanite liberal soul cries out inside of them: the real problem is adoption.

For a new classic in this genre, please consider this recent New Yorker piece by Barbara Demick, in advance of her book on similar themes. It has all the hallmarks. There’s some sort of vague acknowledgement that perhaps not every adoption is a world-historical crime carried out by corrupt agencies on behalf of greedy and uncaring adoptive parents, but this concession is never really articulated and exists in a space of limp disinterest. There’s a fixation on real and sad/bad practices by some figures within the world of Chinese cross-national adoption, but no information that could demonstrate how prevalent this bad practice was within the system, in fact very little in the way of an attempt to demonstrate such a thing. There’s a subsequent reliance on our ignorance of that prevalence to enable a broad bad-vibes skepticism of Chinese adoption into American homes in general. Again, there’s no straightforward “Adoption is Bad” sentence, no putting the piece’s finger on its obvious locus of interest, just a lot of nibbling around the edges and engaging in guilt by association. We have the face of the aggrieved Chinese-American adoptee who feels justifiably burned by the system; the thousands like her who came here and found loving and supportive families that they would not trade away for the world are, as always, not represented. You take all of this together and add it up, you pile one just-asking-questions question on top of another, and you end up with the monstering of adoption, the congealing upper-middlebrow wisdom that says that adoption is an archaic practice that the world would be better off leaving behind. And somewhere, right now, a kid is being born addicted to fentanyl.

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Adoption, where a child who needs parents is taken into the custody of some even though they share no genetic ties, strikes me as one of the purest and best of human stories. Children need parents and many adults want desperately to raise children. The former is a practical need that nevertheless results in intense and beautiful love; the latter starts and ends in love. There’s all sorts of difficulty and damage and complication and some families are unhappy and I’m afraid that some adoptive parents are abusive or neglectful or just shitty, in the way of parents. You can be adopted into a happy home and live a happy life with a family you love and still have profoundly conflicted feelings about it all. I would never shut my heart to that. But in the final analysis, you have a world where kids can get adopted or where they can spend their lives bouncing between foster homes or living in depressing institutions. I know which I would have preferred. And sometimes adoption is a lesson in uncomplicated and unqualified love.

This is, of course, exactly the kind of reality that the big thinkers who write and read tony liberal rags like The New Yorker exist to “trouble.” You see, to be a good member of the ideas class is to search constantly for an excuse to ask “What if this good thing is actually… bad?” Counterintuitivity remains the Spice Melange of national media, the grease that slicks the axles of the car of journalism and commentary, a car which coincidentally is sputtering around with a blown-out tire and bad alternator. And so while they’ll grudgingly publish Bad Thing is Bad, and once in a decade or so Good Thing is Good, Good Thing is Bad is what really gets them hard. It helps when you have a topic like adoption, which is uncritically embraced as an act of God’s love by flyover country people and which is easily folded into narratives about the New Colonialism, which is just like the old colonialism except instead of going to foreign countries and murdering and enslaving brown people in order to steal their resources, adoptive parents take on the lifelong responsibilities of parenting vulnerable children to whom they have no genetic ties. Adoption is monstered because many people believe passionately in the good of adoption, giving the affair what we call a “hook” in the biz, and in this way over time all good things will be monstered.

There are several major reasons that children are typically adopted into the care of parents other than their birth parents.

Their birth parents are unavailable. Their identity is unknown; they are missing; they are imprisoned; they are dead.

Their birth parents are unfit. They are drug-addicted; they are guilty of serious and repeated felony offenses; they are too mentally ill or otherwise incapacitated to parent; they have a demonstrable history of child abuse or neglect.

They are unwilling. They don’t want to raise their children. They gave them away because they have no interest in raising them.

Can I quantify the percentage of adoptions that fall outside of these three reasons and into the realm of coercion and fraud? I can’t, though of course neither can the people I’m criticizing. But there’s every reason to think that it’s a rounding error compared to the broader reality, which is that adoption happens because it has to. Kids need parents. Sometimes their birth parents just can’t or won’t do that job. A wise, mature culture would take that as the first and most essential point in all of this, would start each and every one of these pieces with a diligent admission that most stories of adoption are uncomplicated in fact if not emotionally, and that being adopted into another home was ultimately the best or only choice for the adopted child. Because that is true. Of course there have been plenty of ugly stories and sad twists of fate, of course some adoptive parents are abusive or cruel or racist or worse, of course you can find these rare examples where adoption wasn’t chosen by the birth parents but rather forced on them. But that’s just not reality most of the time.

And in China and South Korea, during the periods of widespread Western adoption, you had massive poverty, to an extent that I think most Americans don’t even understand. After the Korean War and for decades after South Korea faced a level of sheer destruction that’s impossible to wrap your mind around; it’s estimated that something like 80% of the buildings in the country were destroyed, not merely damaged but destroyed. It took decades under a totalitarian government for conditions to improve to the point that South Korea could be regarded as a developed country. And China has a history of poverty and famine at a scale that Americans just can’t comprehend. Today, after several decades of economic growth, there are more Chinese people in poverty than their are Americans total. Lots of American kids get adopted out because of truly bleak poverty, but as brutal as their conditions can be, they aren’t located in a broader context of societal near-collapse, as was true in China and South Korea. Many parents in these countries simply could not care for their children, and in some cases girls particularly were not wanted and were sent away. Some of the luckier of these lost children were adopted into American households. Is that ideal? Who cares? What does ideal ever have to do with anything in a broken world?

Unfortunately, attacks on adoption are spreading, and unsurprisingly they’re enabled by the affordances of online life. A year or two ago I was researching for a freelance piece that ultimately didn’t go anywhere. I found myself looking through a bunch of forums related to adoption, on Reddit and all manner of independent message boards. What I found was deeply human, deeply sad, and deeply unhealthy. On so many of these forums the community was engaged in a relentless effort to convince any unhappy adoptee that, in fact, their birth parents had always wanted them, that the adoption was a result of malfeasance, that it had to be…. You can probably find these places yourself, if you care to look. Again and again, based on barely any information, these forums will light up in a chorus telling new arrivals that of course their birth parents didn’t give them up, that in fact their parents are no doubt out there looking for them right now…. When you give people the digital tools they need to find each other online and to form exclusive communities you’re essentially ensuring that they will all start telling each other what they want to hear. In these adoption communities those dynamics lead to particularly sad community practices. “That dream you have, where your parents were the good king and queen, and you are secretly a beautiful princess,” they whisper, “it’s all true, it has to be.”

There are many things that I hate about modern American culture, especially as expressed in its elitist media, but there is nothing I find more toxic than this: the unwillingness to accept that some thing in life are bad and will always be bad. The simple reality is that many people who are biological parents are unfit to raise children while many others simply have no desire to do so. I know it’s a very sad thing, to be rejected by your parents. Very sad indeed. I wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone. But it’s a thing that happens, all the time. Dogs die and moms get cancer and, sometimes, parents don’t want their kids. You have to be able to tell that truth when it is true. It’s the same reason why I’m not willing to let anyone sugarcoat the reality of severe mental illness, the same reason that I insist that the profoundly autistic remain part of the conversation on autism, the same reason that I find the world of inspirational Instagram memes so ugly. Because you have to be willing to tell people the painful truth; because telling someone pleasant lies is one of the worst things you can do for anyone. And our newspapers and magazines have fallen into this morass of trying to protect people from the truth, of trying to spoon out a more pleasant narrative than the one that is true, in order to spare feelings. We will regret it in time. That this also has the obverse consequence of monstering good things is just the way it goes.

The review of Demick’s recent book in The New York Times, like The New Yorker a publication in which liberals fret and sigh and ruefully swirl their flat whites, says that in finding such juicy tales of families rent apart by adoption, Demick “knows she is in possession of gold” - journalistic gold, that is, book sales gold, attention economy gold, the kind that can be spun into lucrative careers telling childless urbanites that hicks in the hinterland who cross-racially adopt brown children are the real imperialists. And oh, does she seem pious about mining it! Reflecting on her efforts to unite a Chinese adoptee with their biological parents, Ms. Demick says, admirable brevity doing nothing to hide her crusading white lady righteousness, “I wanted to help.” Well you know what, Ms. Demick, almost all adopted parents wanted the exact same thing, and almost all of them did. You could write a story about that. But can that story get printed in The New Yorker, in 2025? No, I really don’t think it can. There’s no percentage in it. No gold.