Black Friday Baby, Part One

Or Better Late Than Never, Part Two: Part One!

I can’t stand it, Y’all. I can’t stand the way children are not people, but objects to acquire and then mock. Because children never grow up and watch Daddy’s stand-up routine…and if they do, they’ll keep their mouths shut unless they’re pretending to laugh, because this is Daddy, and Daddy couldn’t really mean all the things he said, could he?

Of course he could. Just ask Pastor Boob Job Baby how side-splittingly funny it is to bring a different-race child into your white white white family. No, really, it’s a riot! Suffering? Racism? Shut up. Know what you are if you think racism exists? A RACIST THAT’S WHAT.

[deep breath] Sorry, it’s been awhile. I get worked up easier than I used to. I’m also pissed off because I can’t find a transcript of the below, which means I’m gonna have to watch it over…and over…and over again in order to do it justice. Mercifully, it’s short. It’s a clip from a side-splitting standup comedy routine entitled “Black Friday Baby.”

SO. This funny man got married, wanted a family, couldn’t make a baby, and purchased one from Kenya. Sorry, “brought home [his] very own baby” from Kenya.

(Very own? Of course it’s their very own. They have the receipt!*)

“And folks,” adds Mister Funnyman, quite emphatically, “We could not. Be. Happier!” A new dad always has to say that, doesn’t he? When you get a child that’s really Your Very Own, nobody just ASSUMES you’re happy your wife gave birth, do they? Hell no! You have to make it. Very. Clear. How. HAPPY! YOU!! ARE!!!

Of course you don’t. The only reason Funnyman Dad here says this is because he knows it is assumed by others, including his audience, that he can’t be happy with this inferior Kenyan replacement baby. Naturally, to prove how not-racist they are and how great adoption is, the audience goes wild. Woo! Yeah! What a wonderful man you are, Sir, to stoop to taking in that black African…no, wait, we don’t believe that at all. Why are we acting like we believe that?

Funny, Funny Daddy goes on to say how thrilled he is that his wife “gets to be a mommy” and that he will have a token Negro in his family for basketball jokes. No, he doesn’t say he’s glad he gets to be a daddy. He says he’s glad to have a family member who “can dunk.”

“Can dunk.”

“Can. Dunk.”

“Can dunk” means “is black,” because everyone ever born with a certain amount of melanin in his or her skin not only can, but wants to, play really good basketball. Isn’t it amazing how not-racist this man is? And funny!

After a pause to say again how happy he is with his precious black baby and how he doesn’t at all whip it for not picking enough cotton, Daddy spoils the secret for us by mentioning that he’s from Virginia. Whaat?! A man with that accent and that black baby is a white Southerner? But if he were a white Southerner, he would already have lynched this baby! That’s what white Southerners do. ALL OF THEM. Except for this one guy who is So Special he finds it acceptable to, apparently, start an entire family just to prove how racist he ain’t. Sheeeit.

I kept waiting for him to say “Now, Y’all know we could totally have got us a white one.  I mean, they wuz ovair in Keenya just thowin white babies at us. But we dodged’em, because we are Very Good People, not like the racists we expect our baby to deal with all her life.” Yes, those racists: The ones in Virginia, the ones she would never have encountered at all if it weren’t for you and your wife’s perfect white love.

ANYWAY these white people in Virginny, unlike white people anywhere else, sometimes “ask  stupid questions” when they see a white man in close proximity to a black baby. You see, all the racism in the world has been concentrated in Virginia and other Southern US states. This is why black people outside of the Southern US never have trouble with cops unless they have committed a crime, never have trouble exercising their right to vote, and, as a group, have the same amount of property, money and political power white people do.

Bullshit, Sir. The only reason you were able to purchase an African baby is that they are seen as less valuable than white ones, and you know it. The system is racist. You are racist. I am racist. If we can’t admit that, nothing will ever change. But you got the baby your wife wanted and you’re making money on this, so maybe you don’t care.

Let’s get back to stupid questions.

Funny Daddy insists a white person asked him how his baby could distinguish him from other white men. You know, the way white racists can’t tell one black man from another! I have lived my half-century-plus life in the South, and I have never heard anyone ask this question or any question like it. I cannot imagine anyone asking this question. In order to ask this question, a racist would have to assume black people act and think the way s/he does because black people are as human as s/he is, which is not traditionally how racists think. It’s a bit too self-aware–obviously so. And that’s why I suspect Daddy made it up. For laughs.

If I were his daughter, I wouldn’t find this funny at all, because Daddy, I’m not a lion and I’m sick of representing the entire continent of Africa to you and everybody else, Daddy. I’m tired.

(She’s also tired because he made his Lion King joke too way long. I hope Seth McFarlane fries in Hell.)

Then Funny Daddy points out that it’s 2017 and people still say dumb things can ya believe it!? It’s not like we put a dangerous  racist maniac in charge of our country ten minutes ago. It’s just dumb people saying dumb things, and Daddy has fun with them, because they can’t hurt Daddy. They can only make Daddy look good and get Daddy paid. (I sure hope Daddy never did a routine about how bullshit white privilege is.) But it gets worse.

It gets worse when Funny Daddy says he snaps back at people who say dumb things because they make him “feel inappropriate.”

They make his white Virginia ass. Feel inappropriate. In Virginia.

Sir, nobody can make YOU feel inappropriate in Virginia without your consent. Your child, OTOH, will always not only feel but BE inappropriate. No matter how much you yourself (o thou white angel!) do to spread the gospel of anti-racism, which you are not doing, you will never be able to keep her safe. Especially not as long as you try to do so by laughing at the predicament you put her in. I don’t think that’s funny at all, and I find it very scary that you do.

The second dumb question Funnyman Daddy says he was asked is  “When’d’ja get’er?” This question is not “dumb.” It isn’t even offensive. It’s mere curiosity. It’s nosiness, which is rude at worst. It’s only “offensive” because a supposed Wal-Mart security guard supposedly said it, supposedly while patting his gun at white Funnyman Daddy.

Funny Daddy wants us to believe his black baby turned him black and therefore made him vulnerable to police violence. This is, of course, pure bullshit. White people who adopt black babies, while they are certainly inconvenienced and may experience racial discrimination, do not become black and do not lose their white privilege.

And that is really all of this mess I can deal with in one blog post. Stay tuned for Part Two.

 

*The lovely hair that Galla wears/Is hers–who could have thought it?/She swears ’tis hers; and true she swears/For I know where she bought it! — Martial.

 

“It’s generally believed that the transaction is purely commercial”

…by the purchasers, of course. Because I’m sure I don’t know who else could believe this nonsense. Carrying, nay constructing, a future human being in one’s own body for nine months doesn’t involve anything other than money…just ask people who’ve never done it! (Shit, I’VE never done it, and I know better than this!)

Now, assuming any of you fine, fine parents-by-surrogacy out there really want to know, which you nigh universally do not, this purely commercial transaction bullshit is bullshit. I mean, was it “purely commercial” for you to finally get the baby you dreamed of all these years? No emotions involved at all? Oh, that’s right, you’re not “birth mothers” or “rental wombs”–you’re real live humans! How DO I keep forgetting such an obvious and vital distinction?

Anyway, this article tells the stories of three rental wombs who had the brazen (and fertile!) ovaries to Feel Things about their vending machine status and the products it produced. Who would have thought? And isn’t the progressive and compassionate BBC just swell to give these vessels a voice? I mean, otherwise, how would anyone who matters know that poor and/or Indian womanshapedthings have emotions?

These women’s stories sound eerily familiar to me, and there’s a reason for that. S. Sumati says

I was still under sedation when they removed the baby. I never set eyes on it. […]

When I gained consciousness, my first words to my husband were, ‘Did you see the baby? Is it a boy or a girl?’

He said he hadn’t seen it. I asked my doctor, but she didn’t answer my question.

‘You are a surrogate mother, you shouldn’t ask these questions,’ she said.

But I want to know about the baby. I want to know where he or she is and what it is studying.

The second interviewee, Anandi Chelappaun, describes being sent away:

While I was in the hostel, my family was allowed to visit only once a month and that was very hard for me.

I was warned that whatever happened, I couldn’t go home, but then thankfully nothing untoward happened which required me to visit [my family].

Jothi Lakshmi says

My mother and mother-in-law [..] didn’t speak to me during my pregnancy.

I never laid eyes on the baby and I think maybe it was for the best because if I had seen it, I would have felt very guilty giving it up.

But it was hard, I had felt the baby move in my belly, I had become attached to it, and I couldn’t see it. It just disappeared.

For about two-three years, I felt very bad and I lost a lot of weight.

But now I don’t want to see it. At home, we don’t talk about it. I even discourage my husband from talking about it because I know it belongs to someone else.

I have made peace with myself.

Tell me you can distinguish these three stories from the accounts of many BSE-era relinquishing mothers, because I can’t. Isn’t it wonderful how adoption has changed? Now you can purchase your child outright, without the least wisp of worry that you’re doing anything wrong (just like before, when you could tell yourself you were doing that slut a favor in helping her get on with her life). And you get to leave that incubator on the other side of the planet where she belongs and never worry think about  her again (just like the good ol’ days when you could be sure that shame would keep your baby’s adoption delivery system-thingummy from ever looking for your child).

This is what parents-by-surrogacy want and what they pay for. The Baby Scoop Era, with its thousands of suffering women and confused children, remains the gold standard in *adoption. All these decades later, it is what almost anyone who hears the word “adoption” believes the word means. The average PAP will pay any amount of money to attain this experience, or one as close to it as they can get. (Some, of course, will do worse.)

Surrogacy is actually superior to gold standard adoption in that you may very well receive a baby who’s genetically your own. So here’s another BSE question for you parents: Are you going to tell him/her? Don’t you think it might confuse him/her to know s/he was purchased out of a brown womb on the other side of the planet?

Adoption will never change unless and until those who pump money into it and benefit from it want it to change, and they don’t seem to want that at all. Why aren’t more people ashamed of themselves?

* (or “reproductive choices,” or whatever we’re supposed to call the buffet of child-procuring methods rich white westerners get to choose from)

 

Make-Believe Make Believe is Too Damned Real

I’ve been writing this blog on no particular schedule for over five years now (I can’t believe it either). Sometimes I go dark for month after month, and when I do, I ask myself, “Snarks, what’s it gonna take for  you to post again?” And then something like this comes along, and I can’t not.

Mrs. Kristy Aldridge of Winchester (?), Kentucky says she wanted to share her adoption story and teach children about adoption. But how? Should she start a blog? Write a book? Write a press release? Set up an interview? No, none of those.

No. She opened a fake hospital-cum-baby store for little girls. (So her “adoption story” is yet another one told from the POV of the AP. What a surprise.)

Two weeks ago, Kristy Aldridge decided to start Choosing To Love Babies, a baby doll adoption program in an infant nursery room at the Kids’ Discovery Center.

And, being an a’mom, surely Mrs. Aldridge knows the importance of telling the truth about adoption. She isn’t just doing this to be cute. She’s there to “educat[e] them on adoption.” Sure she is. The education these little girls are getting from her is that adoption is a rainbow of perfect newborns put on earth for their benefit, their amusement, their selection, and their *purchase.

Interested children and parents can schedule an appointment to meet at the Kids’ Discovery Center at 9 S. Bloomfield Road in Winchester, which has been transformed into a mock hospital wing.

That’s right. Adopted children Come From The Hospital (not out of a woman’s body), just like your little brother did. They’re never not newborn. They’re never special needs. You don’t have to wait for them. You just pick your favorite one:

“So basically what it is the girls get to come in and they get to choose a baby that they want,” Aldridge said. “We have different races and different genders for them to choose from.

Pet peeve alert: Genders? Really? Why are we so afraid of the word “sex”? (Or can you really tell an epicine baby doll from an agender version one baby doll? cause I can’t.) You don’t have different genders of baby dolls, you have dolls that represent babies of two sexes.

[“]And we’re educating them on adoption and they have to make the promise of taking care of the baby. That’s a big part of it.”

Little girls don’t know babies need care if they aren’t told so by Mrs. Aldridge. And promising to take care of the baby is “a big part of” adoption, but it’s not the most important part. If it were, it would probably be discussed first. The most important part is customizing your fresh new baby, just like real adoptive parents get to do!–Only not so much. Not anymore. Not if they aren’t filthy stinking rich. Settling for a child who really needs you sucks.

 “We convert one of our infant rooms into the nursery and all of us have scrubs on,” she said. “I mean we really try to make this feel like an adoption.

Again, this is nothing like an adoption, unless it’s one of the ones done by rich, coercive people who don’t care who they hurt as  long as they get a newborn. Why not require the girls to take the doll from the arms of its dolly mother? Why not give the dolls fake umbilical cords for the little mommies to cut? (Why not just sit at home and watch reruns of Adoption Stories?)

These little girls come with their baby carriers and we have babies in another room, so when we re-stock and bring them in we act like they’re just born.”

Straight from the baby store to you!

Part of the adoption process after a baby is chosen is a 15-20 minute medical routine. Aldridge and her team of volunteer doctors teach the children proper care of their baby, such as how to hold the baby and how to change a diaper.

And that’s all adoptive mommies really need to know, isn’t it?

[…]

The program quickly became much more than Aldridge imagined. Part of the program was to raise awareness about adoption, but it has become educational in other ways as well.

“Another thing that is kind of awakening that we didn’t expect is that the children don’t see color.

Again with this color blind horseshit. Of course children see skin color. Before a certain age, they don’t realize it means anything, but they certainly see it. And so do lying grown-ups who want to deny systemic racism.

While they are going through and picking their baby I get to educate them on the true meaning of adoption is just loving the baby.

Wait, didn’t you just say kids are devoid of racism due to their tragic, somehow-universal optical impairments?  Then why do they need you to lean over their shoulders crooning “It’s about luuuuurve, so annny color you want is juuust fiiine” when they literally can’t tell the difference? They don’t, but I bet doing that makes you feel good, Ms. Aldridge.

[“]I have an Asian daughter from adoption and that’s what I bring up that it doesn’t matter. A white family doesn’t have to have a white baby.”

Certainly not. A white family can have pretty much any child it can pay for, sue for, or otherwise acquire, whether they’re in the legal right or not.

[“]Pets are also available for adoption and include a lesson on proper pet care and responsibility.

“The pets we also put in the cribs.

(I originally thought they meant real live pets. They mean stuffed animals, which is bad enough.)

[“]It’s about teaching them responsibility and not just ‘Let’s go to Walmart and get a pet,’” Aldridge said. 

Let’s go to the fake maternity ward and get a baby–or maybe a sea turtle!

Although, of course, “adopted” pets and adopted children do have some things in common: Some people will judge them for being adopted even though it was no fault of their own; and, if you get bored with one, you can easily discard it. I know you promised to take care of Baby, but grownups break their promises to pets and children all the time. It’s fine. You did your best. Your dolly or pet had RAD, or was otherwise simply unlovable. This currently happens to 25% of adopted children in the USA, but I’m sure Mrs. Aldridge doesn’t mention that at these events.

[…]

Adoptions are made through the week by appointment. The adoption experience includes a baby blanket, diaper, bottle, birth certificate, adoption certificate, baby and mom matching medical bands, a medical exam with the doctor and ends with the adoption promise for the baby or pet. Pricing and other information can be found on the Choosing To Love Babies Facebook page.

Ho lee shit. Holy shit, it IS like a real adoption! You, adopting little girl, are somehow both the adopting mommy and the doll’s only mommy ever. You have a birth certificate that says so and a hospital bracelet to back it up. Yet you also have adoption papers. If I were a little girl, I would be incredibly confused about all this, whether I already knew Where Babies Come From or not. In fact, as a little girl, I was confused about all this. I thought for a brief time that everyone was adopted. I also thought I had been brought home from a sort of combination supermarket and auction house. You know, kinda like this-here educational setup.

My cold and prickly heart is very sad for any little adopted girl who gets roped into this charade. Becuase you know it’s going to happen (if it hasn’t already).

I think if you want to give little girls dolls and impress on them the Whateverwhatever of Motherhood, that’s…OK, as long as it’s OK with the girls. I also think calling it adoption, and claiming to educate children about actual adoptions by saying this is what they are like, is preposterous and evil.

Now here’s the worst part: Mrs. Aldridge, who is busily teaching little girls (and, no doubt, her own adoptee) that adoption is a funsie wunsie visit to a hospital vending machine, is…well, you guessed it:

The Aldridges run Choosing to Love Ministries, where they help families during the adoption process. A portion of every Choosing to Love Babies adoption helps fund the ministry for those families. 

She’s grooming little children into future consumers at the expense of reality and of other little children (and their mothers). I can’t help but suspect her adult clients expect the same experience.

PS–How do I know it’s adopting families her ministry helps rather than relinquishing ones? Silly girls, adoptees don’t have families! Not until you pick them out and put them in your baby carrier!

*Fees aren’t quite mentioned in the article, but I think they’re strongly implied.

WHISKEY. TANGO. FOXTROT.

Readers, I apologize for what I’m about to lay on you, and I apologize for any vomiting, dislocated mandibles, or headdesk-related injuries it causes. Brace yourselves for the stupidest, most offensive question ever asked on Planet Earth.

These authors are serious, and they answer their question in the affirmative. Naturally they’re both men. Men doing a “thought experiment” they conclude is a splendid idea.

Imagine a world in which all the babies born each day were randomly redistributed among the biological parents. The infant assigned to any given set of parents could be white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, or any combination thereof (and that’s just the US); the baby could be perfectly healthy or grossly deformed. Parents would know only that their child was not their biological child. Let us call this social mixing.

No. Let us call this what it is: Imaginary barbaric social engineering by a couple of white guys who think racism can be imagined away if people only let go of the idea that women and children are human. Nobody who thought they were human could imagine something as horrific as swapping kids around at random. The authors propose this because it would hurt “lesser people” more than it would hurt them and because it sounds easier to them than actually confronting their own racism and privilege. (Also, “grossly deformed”? Isn’t that a delightful thing to call infants with drastic birth defects?)

This plan is of course politically impossible, perhaps even repellent.

You bet your ASS it is, Sirs. But hold on a sec–guess why it’s repellent? Because it would subject women and children to unspeakable cruelty? Because it would put the onus of fixing society’s problems on minority babies who would be raised in a racist society by people who may or may not be able to comprehend that racism or help the kids navigate it in any way? No, of course not. It’s because one’s own precious child might end up in the arms of a crack whore. No, seriously:

Is the idea so frightening? Yes it is. It is a frightening thought that your own biological child, the one sitting there now doing her homework, might have gone to an impoverished mother or a drug addict, perhaps have been beaten, perhaps starved.

It gets worse, though:

But why, save for genetic chauvinism, do we view with comparative equanimity the everyday reality of other people’s children subject to the same treatment by their own biological mothers?

What’s the “we” shit, you heartless pricks? How dare you? The reason you don’t care is that you lack human empathy. Assuming you’re white, which doesn’t seem  like much of a stretch, people like you run the country that lets women die in childbirth at a higher rate than any other “civilized” one, that blames women for their own rapes, that lets children grow up in poverty and go to jail because they’re the wrong color and/or their mothers weren’t married. Don’t throw your baggage on me, Sirs, because I fucking well do care.

You may argue that genetic bias is indelible in human nature. Social mixing would not only disturb the comfort of this fatalistic attitude,

Loving and wanting your own child is fatalism. Sure it is.

but also use genetic chauvinism for ends beyond mere economic equality, providing grounds for a compassion that goes beyond the wellbeing of our immediate families.

“[M]ere economic equality.” Pfft. Who cares about something that piddling? It wouldn’t fix anything OH YES IT WOULD. Go eat a bowl of bees, you dipwads.

Since any man might be your biological brother, any woman your biological sister, concern for them would have to be expressed by a concern for a common good.

Again you admit you don’t give a fuck about anyone who isn’t related to you and presume the same of everyone else. Yes, let’s doom everyone (except your generation and the generations before them, of course) to a lifetime of genealogical bewilderment because it would magically give you Yahoos hearts (not that I believe it would).

A second effect of social mixing would be to generate a strong interest in the health and wellbeing of expectant mothers, which would ultimately translate into an interest in the social and biological welfare of everyone. Since any child might end up our own, we would provide the social and educational environments that would best enhance their development. Ghettos and slums would be an eyesore for us all. Poverty, drug, and alcohol addiction are already everyone’s problem, but this fact would be more meaningful than it is now. The child of that addict might be our biological child. Every victim of a drive-by shooting might be a member of our genetic family. Each of us would see the link between our fate and the fate of others.

Worse and worse and worse. How can it go on getting worse? No point in giving a rat’s ass about women and children if there’s not a microscopic chance the women are carrying your future biological or adopted child.

And if you’re as heartless as you seem, then what you’d really do is tell yourself the chances of being biologically related to or being given the child of one random person are astronomical, so to Hell with that ghetto drunk and her prenatal check-ups: you still don’t want your tax dollars supporting the likes of her.

Third, the superficial connection between colour and culture would be severed.

SUPERFICIAL?!?! Also, that would be horrible. It would not result in white people sharing in black culture or Asians partaking of Latino culture. It would result in a homogenous, generic boring-ass cultural blandness of the kind white USAian people already have–and already hate so much that we’re prone to going around trying to steal other people’s cultures (white “Native American shamans,” white dreadlocks, white people using Cinco de Mayo as an excuse to drink too much beer, etc). Plenty of adoptive parents currently feel entitled to parody and degrade “honor” their internationally adopted children’s cultures already. Y’all need to quit kidding yourselves.

Racism would be wiped out. Racial ghettos would disappear; children of all races would live in all neighbourhoods. Any white child could have black parents and any black child could have white parents. Imagine the US president flanked by his or her black, white, Asian and Hispanic children. Imagine if social mixing had been in effect 100 years ago in Germany, Bosnia, Palestine or the Congo. Racial, religious, and social genocide would not have happened.

Just like when white slaveowners raped their slaves and sold their own children, right? and just like being raised by a “mammy” rendered white children not racist? Just like Hitler’s Jewish ancestry kept him from hating Jewish people? Even if this would work,  you are jumping ahead to the ends without considering the very human means to those ends, because apparently women and children only exist to fix your broken evil selves at the cost of their offspring and identities. You don’t care. I mean, here you are discussing what it would take for you to care.

[…] There are, of course, many natural objections to this idea. It will be said that one of the joys of marriage is for lovers to see the product of their love. To this we say that the product of one’s love lies not in the genetic production of a human being but in the mutual cultivation of the life of a child. But isn’t it true that either the genetic match between parent and child or a bond formed between mother and child in the womb makes each parent uniquely fit to raise his or her own child and less fit to raise another child? The evidence for such idiosyncrasy is slight.

OH IS IT REALLY. Spoken like true men–true unadopted men, possibly ones without children.

True, adopted children tend to have more mental and physical problems than non-adopted ones. But

we don’t give a flip!

…children are often adopted at relatively advanced ages, after they have formed close attachments with caregivers. Children adopted during their first year are at no disadvantage relative to non-adopted children.

Speaking as a person who was adopted before age one: You have no idea what you are talking about.

The authors rush to assure us there is no risk that under social mixing people will be as indifferent to their own *real children as they are now to the biological children of others. …[T]here are no grounds for such deep pessimism. Look at the behaviour of adoptive parents now, or look at the practice of surrogate motherhood. The many apparently infertile parents who adopt a baby only to have a biological child subsequently do not tend to reject the first child.

Except when they do, you chowderheads. I know many adoptees who were rejected or given short shrift when that biological child came along. And most couples who use a surrogate mother have her carry their own egg and sperm, so that doesn’t even count.

[…] It may be objected that parents’ desire to have their own biological children is so strong that they would be blind to the public good, that they would have babies and bring them up in secret. But those babies would not have birth certificates, they would not be citizens, they could not vote, serve in public office and so forth. If discovered, the children might be taken away after the strong bonds of psychological (as opposed to biological) parenthood had been formed. Few Americans would risk these penalties.

You two are officially horrible. You’re cruel, you’re monsters, I don’t even have words. You’re Frankenstein, you’re Nazis. You imagine and argue for a world wherein other people get rid of your prejudices for you no matter how much that hurts them. You have your brazen balls talking about “the public good.”

It will be objected that incest would occur frequently in a society where biological kinship was obscured. In answer to this, we now have the ability to test prospective parents and to forbid marriages between people with close genetic overlap – whatever the cause.

Who’s gonna pay for all those DNA tests, Doofuses? And in a country where people continue to spread STIs and experience unexpected pregnancies even though condoms are freely available, do you really think horny people are going to wait for test results to come back before they get it on?

But even if we did not have this ability, is it likely that incest would be more frequent under our plan than it is now (notwithstanding taboos) among close biological relatives living together? […]

I dunno. Why don’t you ask all the adoptees who have experienced genetic sexual attraction, Assholes?

It may be objected that people would not want to bear children only to have them raised by strangers.

YA THINK?! As it is now, desperate girls and women have to be coerced and purchased or paid to do it.

But genetic narcissism may not be the optimal motive for having children. There may be no correlation between the biological capacity to have children and the ability to cultivate the optimal development of a child. It may be a good thing if only people who passionately wished to be an integral part of the life trajectory of another human being raised children.

It would be, and that’s why women need better access to birth control and abortions, not an excuse for you to snatch their kids for great victory over racism. You do realize “people” includes women, right?

Genetic chauvinism lives on very strongly in our culture. Modern fiction and cinema often present adoptees’ searches for biological parents and siblings in a highly positive light.

How very tragic and unfair NOT.

The law in child custody cases is biased towards biological parents over real parents.

You really, really don’t know what you’re talking about.

You might claim that this bias itself is ‘natural’. It is so common as to seem part of our biological makeup.

It’s also the cornerstone your stupid argument rests on, but don’t let that bother you.

But subjugation of women was also common in primitive human cultures and remains so in many cultures today.

You are literally arguing for the subjugation of women to your wishes.

Unnatural as it sounds, social mixing promises many advantages.

Perhaps it does. But I find it very interesting that you propose this convoluted mess instead of simpler solutions, like eliminating redlining and otherwise arranging things so minorities can live next door to well-off white academic types like you. You could move into a “ghetto” neighborhood anytime you wanted, you know. But that would involve your taking a risk and your being inconvenienced, and those things are for women and babies.

If we are not willing to adopt it, we should consider carefully why. And if naturalness is the key, we should ask ourselves why on this matter, ungoverned nature should trump social cohesion.

Look, there is no magic racism eraser. There never was one and there never will be one. We–white people, because we have the power–need to get rid of racism by doing the hard work of educating ourselves, examining ourselves, and then putting our money and energy into  effecting change. And we don’t get to decide what the changes will be. If we are so lucky as to win their trust, underprivileged people of color will determine what help they do or don’t want from us. In the meantime, hands off other people’s kids.

White people made racism. Expecting minority women and babies to fix it for us is just another form of racism.

 

 

 

*YES, “REAL.” THEY ACTUALLY WENT THERE. They suffer the same genetic chauvinism they intend to erase by using genetic chauvinism.

Hand Over the Uterus and Nobody Gets Hurt

From Australia comes this thinly veiled threat of an article about how unfair it is that Australians aren’t allowed to rent the wombs of other Australians. You see, there are people out there who “require the services of a surrogate.” Not desire: require as they require food, air, water, shelter, and sunlight. Yet all “Australian states and territories, except the Northern Territory” have banned binding Australian women to a nine-month slavery contract. So the people who require the use of a woman’s body are forced, forced I tell you, to go overseas and take advantage of poorer foreign women. “[B]ecause the only surrogacy permitted in Australia is altruistic surrogacy,” and, as it turns out, the average woman doesn’t want to make a free baby for someone else. Funny that.

“This is true,” the article points out, “even in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT, where it is a criminal offence to enter into a compensated surrogacy arrangement overseas.”

Obviously these lawbreakers must be given what they want. I mean, if we make nice things expensive, thieves will steal them. If we buy a house, burglars will burgle it. That’s why we have to allow anyone who asks to kick us out of  our houses and take our stuff. Obviously.

The article declares laws against foreign-womb-renting a failure. Why? Nobody enforces them: “There has not been a single prosecution, let alone a conviction, for pursuing extra-territorial surrogacy.” Then the problem here would seem to be the lack of prosecution rather than the law itself, wouldn’t it?

Is anyone else reminded of certain arguments for prostitution? I know I am. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is when the author invokes the UN Rights of the Child in defense of surrogacy:

“Article 7 provides that children have a right to an identity and to know and be cared for by their parents. Children born through surrogacy may have up to five parent-like people: two intended parents, a sperm donor, an egg donor and the surrogate. In this context, Article 7 is best understood as meaning that children have a right to know their biological and gestational parents and to be cared for by their intended parents.”

PARENT-LIKE PEOPLE. If anyone called any of my four parents that to my face, I’d pop’em right in the snoot.

“With many overseas surrogacies, the record-keeping is poor or non-existent, making it impossible for a child to find out their genetic origins.”

Then, once again, the problem is with record-keeping, not with a ban on being able to rent local and/or foreign wombs. Don’t you think that if the legal and lawbreaking womb-renters of Australia really found this record-keeping so important, they would already have demanded and gotten it? I know I do. I don’t think the average womb-renter gives a rat’s ass about the incubator they purchase, her identity, or the child’s right to know where s/he came from. If they did, they wouldn’t do overseas surrogacy, especially since, as the author tells us, Australia is scrupulous about such things:

“Australia has one of the best systems in the world for recording persons who donate eggs and sperm. This ensures that children born through surrogacy in Australia will be able to identify all the people associated with their creation.”

But PAPs don’t really care because, again, they will be forced to do unethical, illegal things if they can’t buy a woman’s reproductive system outright.

“We need to acknowledge and address the legitimate fears that people have about surrogacy. But rather than trying to stop these scientific advances, we should put in place safeguards to prevent exploitation of vulnerable women and protect the rights of children born through surrogacy.”

Help US help YOU sell us your body! Paid surrogacy IS the exploitation of vulnerable women, FFS. What “safeguards” would you propose? Because allowing only altruistic surrogacy seems like a very good safeguard to me.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, the author has the brazen gonads to quote Gibran on how “your children are not your children.” Of course they aren’t–they’re ours. Sell us your children now, Australian women, lest we be forced to commit crimes in the name of parenthood!

“This reminds us that how a child is conceived, and how a child is born, is largely irrelevant. What is important is that children are loved and their inherent dignity respected.”

And that is why, when a woman gives birth in Australia, she tenderly places the baby in a random crib in the maternity ward, blindfolds herself and spins around until she’s dizzy, and then takes home the first baby her hand happens to light upon.

For the millionth fucking time, how a child is conceived and born is not irrelevant in any way to anyone. Even people who are willing to hurt anyone and pay any price in order to get a baby they can call their own are lying to themselves about this, and they know it. They know damned well it’s important to them where they came from and who they look like. (In fact, didn’t you just argue that it is important that children know these things because it’s a human right?) The reason adopting/womb-renting couples want a baby rather than a waiting child is that they want to replicate the experience of raising one’s biological child from day one as closely as possible. Because it matters.

The article’s author is a professor in “Human Rights Law.” There is no human right to rent another person’s reproductive system.

 

Some Pedestals Are Higher Than Others

A friend called my attention to this blog post. I don’t want to critique the whole thing, because I don’t find it 100% horrible. But something really struck me about the way the a’mom involved chose to describe herself. So:

Has anyone else noticed The Adoption Process Moral Pedestal has levels? That it’s more an Adoption Process Totem Pole? Andrew MacDougall got to climb it because he brought a whole kid from overseas instead of just sending money for food. The maker of the “adoptees dodged a bullet” graphic got to climb just it for not being a relinquishing mother, which seems like a lower level to me. Pastor Boob Job Baby got to climb it for being just a little less ignorant about international adoption than the average person who isn’t involved with adoption is–fairly low, but probably still higher than Graphic Maker. Deb Goldberg got to climb it for presuming to tell the poor they need to save their money, which any non-adopting slob can do. And Jeff Gates got to climb it just for being insulted about being taken for a pedophile. (His pedestal’s probably pretty low, but he can still lord it over Masha Allen’s “adoptive dad,” right?)

So I’ve been thinking about the pedestals and how they’re measured. Here’s what I’ve gathered from the way I’ve seen people react online and IRL to adoption stories about APs (hey, is there any other kind?).

Rich couples who advertised themselves to “birthmothers” and scored a white, domestically adopted newborn get the lowest pedestal. Not only is there a chance they waited less than nine months to get their baby, they didn’t even have to get a passport. And they didn’t have to settle for a lesser product, the way people who get foreign or older or otherwise special needs kids do (did you know not being white is a “special need” in adoption?). All they had to do was put out a lot of money and get chosen by a “birth mother” who didn’t change her mind. Hell, they probably didn’t even do it because god told them to.

As the adopted person becomes less ideal (less white, less healthy, older) the pedestal gets higher. The pedestal also gets higher to the extent that the adoptive parents talk about religion.

International adoption is complicated: The pedestal might get higher because the APs have rescued an orphan, often for Jesus. But it might get lower because “American kids weren’t good enough for you?!”

The pedestal gets higher the longer the APs wait to adopt, and it grows a yard or more for every adoption they don’t complete because the first mother changed her mind. And if they ever had physical custody of a child and lost it because that custody was not entirely legal, their pedestal shoots into the clouds, borne aloft on a fountain of righteous anguish. Your pedestal grows if you claim your adoptee has RAD, and it gets taller the more out-of-control, dangerous, or even murderous the child becomes while in your care. Oddly enough, it retains its height should you decide to get rid of such a child. And, as we’ve learned recently, having one’s adoptee search still boosts the pedestal in some people’s eyes.

But the very highest pedestal is reserved for those for people like Megan (sorry: Megan!!!). Not because she adopted six times. Not because at least one of her children is from overseas. Not because she is a cheerleader for adopting older children, as if everyone were equally prepared to do such a thing. (Yes, it really is that simple–do it.)  Not because she has adopted four older children, and not because she congratulates herself for doing such a “simple” thing. (Most would snarl their faces with the thought of adopting an older child, let alone an older boy but not us.) Not even because, at least in one case, she and her husband had “paperwork approved for an infant” but instead chose to adopt an older kid (and let me tell you, very few things ramp up a pedestal in most people’s minds like turning down an infant in favor of an older kid).

No, Megan is the best kind of AP because, for her, adopting was never “plan B.” If there’s one thing that sets my alarm bells off, it’s the AP who takes pains to point out that s/he didn’t have to adopt. Not like those infertile slobs who had to settle for less…wait, not for less, because adopting is universally wonderful and your kids rock! So what the Hell were you doing just now besides taking potshots at people who couldn’t have their own kids?! I mean, isn’t that kinda…low?

I know, I’m silly expecting this stuff to make sense. So I’ll accept it. Nothing (except maybe ditching a kid you adopted) proves your worth as a human being and an adoptive parent like bragging about owning the functioning reproductive system most people take for granted. AdoptoLand is a strange place.

 

Oops, Part Two

The answer, of course, is that nothing has changed. Read this article. Read how horrible it makes Mariette’s adoptive mom look.

Mariette was adopted in October 1986, at a time when adoption in Haiti was barely regulated. Most of the children in Haitian orphanages had at least one living parent, and the concept of signing away rights to see children was foreign, and still is.

Mariette’s adoptive parents were Sandra and Albert Knopf, at the time empty-nesters in their 40s with three grown sons. Sandra said she felt God’s call to adopt.

“I believed that I was doing it for the Lord,” she said. “I was not doing it for the children and I was not doing it for me.

Really, Sandra? I mean… you know you’re supposed to pretend you’re doing it for the children, right?

So they found a man named Henry Wiebe who could arrange an adoption from Haiti for $3,500 per child, or $6,000 for two.

He came by with photos of older children, but Sandra only wanted girls under 2.

Because fuck the Lord’s opinion, right? Sandra wanted what Sandra wanted.

He called the next day. He had found them. She was going to call them Christa Gail and Jennifer Lynne, but they already had names: Mariette and Patricia.

This is the worst kind of pile-all-over-the-shitty-a’mom clickbait, isn’t it?

Sandra never met the Haitian lawyer who processed the papers, or went to the hearing where the judge approved the adoption. Platel handled all that while Sandra got visas. It took a month.

As the plane took off from Port-au-Prince, she felt overwhelming relief.

“Circling the airport, I just looked down and thought, ‘God, I never want to see this place again.'”

Sandra’s awfulness is the point, surely? Because when Mariette discovered she had never been relinquished for adoption,

her adoptive mother didn’t seem surprised. Yes, she conceded, there had been red flags about the adoption. The fact that Mariette’s age was off, the way the birth and other documents weren’t available at first and then suddenly appeared, at night, some filled out by hand.

We’re supposed to hate Sandra and her pious hypocrisy, aren’t we? The article could not have been written to make her look any worse, could it?

Now read the comments. Read the comments and tell me how much our attitudes about adoption have changed.

Some USAian APs Really, Really Suck

…because they do so little to educate themselves and/or give a shit about their adopted children that this is necessary.

Seriously: Click the link. Read. Then ask yourself what kind of fucked-up society would allow this situation to arise in the first place.

Well, I guess you needn’t really ask yourself. It’s obvious how big a lie our “nation of immigrants” rhetoric is and always has been, isn’t it?

Not what i promised, but

…too good not to share is this portrait of the adoption industry by Julie J.

God Even Rewards People for NOT Adopting

Sometimes, just for wanting to adopt, he gives them their very own baby!

The Jensens had a child, but they wanted another. So after they spent lots of money on fertility treatments and went through two *miscarriages, they decided to adopt because some of their friends got cute little Ethiopian orphans-or-were-they-who-cares?

Like many people who started out wanting Ethiopians, they chose Congo instead. Pardon my suspicious mind, but why not Ethiopia? No more babies, too much money, too much waiting? I mean, that’s what happens when everybody gets there before you: The country gets wise to the lying, cheating, child-purchasing  international adoption game, er, runs out of kids worth adopting, er, waiting children.

Admitting they just didn’t know any better (and didn’t bother to find out), the Jensens turned to the so-corrupt-it’s-been-closed-but-we-won’t-mention-that-either Congo. A Google search would have turned up horror stories, but that’s too hard. So is keeping in touch with one’s adoption agency, which didn’t contact them often enough. The Jensens believed everything said agency told them, including that the girl was Really Truly Theirs. Then

The adoption failed.

Their little girl’s grandmother intervened and took custody of the child and her brother

Um, didn’t you guys want to help a child who really needed a family? You didn’t say so, of course, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt since this story is about your good intentions.

…because she feared they were being brought to the United States for slavery. […]

You know, if I were a grandmother in the Congo, and some Nice USAian White People wanted to spend lots of money to take my grandchild away from me forever (and I’m assuming here she wasn’t promised the kid would come home again at age eighteen as so many foreign relinquishers have been), I might think that, too. Because if there are two things everyone knows about the USA, it’s that we perfected race-based chattel slavery and that we almost never do nice things without expecting anything in return. We certainly don’t often spend money without expecting anything in return. But on to the happy ending and god’s mysterious ways.

When the agency sent a caseworker to the village to try to explain that the Jensens wanted to make a new life for the girl, the grandmother wouldn’t believe it. According to Jennifer, the woman told the agency members to never return.

Despite the heartache, Jennifer said she is convinced that God wanted them to attempt to adopt.

“I honestly don’t think we would have gotten pregnant with Makenna if we didn’t send in those adoption papers. I think (God) wanted us to trust him.” […] Makenna was born in January 2013, six months before the adoption failed.

Well, the Jensens are wiser now, and if they had it to do all over again, they’d do it differently. For one thing, they didn’t get all their money back. For another, they’d definitely nag the agency more so they didn’t get such a nasty shock. In other words, they have learned nothing. Nothing about international adoption, nothing about corruption, nothing about the folly of trusting people who take their money, nothing. Which is exactly what readers will learn about adoption from this article. Which wouldn’t bother me so much if it didn’t pretend to do otherwise:

Accurate data on failed adoptions can be difficult to find because a child’s records may be closed or personal information may be changed during the adoption process.

Is it really? …May they REALLY?! How do such things happen?! And how is it an audience can be as ignorant about adoption as this article’s readership is presumed to be?

Also, adoption dissolutions and disruptions may both be categorized as failures […].

Because they are failures, damnit.

Dissolutions and disruptions often happen because the adoptive family identifies behavior problems they did not foresee or find themselves incapable of handling.

And they often happen because APs who adopt in order to “save an orphan” can be entitled people who act on impulse, do no research, lack all foresight (like the woman yesterday who couldn’t believe her new child jumped on the sofa), and can’t finish what they start. But, like pretty much anything factual about adoption, that’s not something this article talks about. It talks abut being rewarded for such ignorance, and that is all fucked-up. (Forgive me for pimping that post again; I think its brilliant.)

*which is really horrible and I am truly sorry