Broken Links, Enduring Ties

American Adoption across Race, Class, and Nation

Linda Seligmann

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780804786065, 9780804786058
• eBook ISBN: 9780804787253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Family-making in America is in a state of flux—the ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a compelling narrative on how adoptive families thrive and struggle to create lasting ties.

Seligmann observed and interviewed numerous adoptive parents and children, non-adoptive families, religious figures, teachers and administrators, and adoption brokers. The book uncovers that adoption—once wholly stigmatized—is now often embraced either as a romanticized mission of rescue or, conversely, as simply one among multiple ways to make a family.

1

Power and Institutions

Kimchee and grits, the Four Questions in Hindi, these are the fun, the joyous sides, of our diasporas and our ethnicity. We’re right to celebrate them. But we mustn’t forget to talk about power.

—Barbara Katz Rothman 2005: 171

To talk about power as it intervenes in adoption is to account for how it circulates in a society, giving rise to classification systems through which knowledge is organized, value judgments exercised, and laws passed and enforced. We must also consider how people come to challenge power and in what circumstances. This chapter looks at three key settings that structure the journeys of parents as they make their families through transnational and transracial adoption: (1) laws that govern adoption and that sometimes contradict one another; (2) the workings of adoption agencies and brokers; and (3) mainstream media outlets. It is intended as a general overview rather than an in-depth and exhaustive account. Schools and the Internet constitute two other major sites of power and are the subjects, respectively, of Chapters 7 and 8.

The economic and political conditions that structured transnational and transracial adoption were not immediately apparent to many adoptive parents. Even if they were able to articulate their concerns, they struggled to arrive at ethical practices in the face of state, national, and international laws that sometimes contradicted each other. Some laws tried to make the welfare of children a priority, yet what was in the best interest of children was a subject of ongoing debate. Other laws were a response to strong nationalist sentiments, yet remained rhetorical because countries did not have the resources to enforce them. Still other laws attempted to address identity issues but came up against entrenched educational and informal socialization practices.

An elaborate yet unpredictable legal scaffolding had to be climbed and maneuvered successfully in order to adopt a child in the United States. These laws had ramifications for how adopted children were socially and culturally defined. Some were intended to deal with the growing concern about child trafficking. A wealth of literature addresses the legal dimensions of adoption. What follows here is a discussion of two major laws—one international and one national—that structure the adoption process and have an impact on the status and identity formation of adoptees.

The Hague Convention

The most important law governing international adoption is the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. The Hague Convention was preceded by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), passed in 1989, whose intent was to put a stop to “wrongful” adoptions.¹ In the wake of media accounts revealing the horrendous conditions of Romania’s orphanages, where children were warehoused after the fall of Nicholas Ceausescu, also in 1989, together with the eagerness with which Westerners flocked to adopt them and entrepreneurs to capitalize on the situation, it became clear that the CRC was insufficient to enforce ethical adoption practices. In 1993, nations, including the United States, began crafting what became the Hague Convention in 1994. In order to become a signatory to the Convention, a nation had to commit itself to cooperate “to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children” for international adoption. The United States signed the treaty in 1994, yet waited until 2000 to ratify it, and did not implement its requirements until April 1, 2008.² The Hague Convention includes a passage requiring that nations make every effort to keep children with their original family; that a Central Authority be charged with overseeing international adoptions; and that parents honor their child’s cultural heritage.

The biggest problem with the Convention is that it allows signatories to the Convention to continue to transact adoptions with nations that either are not members (of about 195 countries, only 81 are members) or that have not yet signed the Convention. These include, for example, Ethiopia, Haiti, Korea, Nepal, Russia, Haiti, and Vietnam, from which many adoptions to the United States take place. Many “sending” regions also prohibit “receiving” countries from adopting from them if the latter have not ratified the Convention. This was true of the long period during which the United States had not ratified the Convention.

According to E. J. Graff, more than two-thirds of U.S. international adoptions come from non-Hague countries, where a significant number of adoption scandals have taken place. Graff (2010) lays out the loopholes and problems with the Hague Convention and with international adoptions involving non-Hague countries or those that have not yet ratified it, including the certification of adoption agencies as partners. Availability of resources, certification, the intervention of immigration offices and officials in non-Hague adoptions, training, and oversight of due process intervene in the effective implementation of the law and the prevention of corruption. In short, all participants in adoption processes are far more vulnerable to the violation of due process if both parties are not full members of the Convention, as the ban on Russian adoptions in 2013 demonstrated so well.

Weighing Social Justice: Ethics and Rights

Laws create the conditions for different kinds of rights to be either protected or ignored. Leslie Hollingsworth (2003) offers an analysis of what social justice means for the parties involved in transnational adoption, using three social justice frameworks—egalitarian, utilitarian, and libertarian. She argues that the differences in the frameworks rest on the interpretation of fairness, decency, and compassion. In an egalitarian framework, liberty, opportunity, income, wealth, and the bases of self-respect “should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to the advantage of the least favored.” In a utilitarian framework, the driving assumption is that the “distribution of resources is just when the parameters are directed to the greatest good for the greatest number.” Who is the greatest number and what constitutes the greatest good are matters for interpretation rather than objective facts. Finally, a libertarian approach to social justice assumes that if individuals have “rightfully acquired the resources they possess, they have the freedom to decide how to dispose of them” and the government should not intervene in determining the distribution of resources (Hollingsworth 2003: 211).

Hollingsworth embraces the egalitarian framework but modifies it to recognize that in many circumstances, including adoption, the playing field is not level. Adopting families may benefit from existing inequalities such as poverty in sending countries; the condition of disenfranchised children; gender oppression and discrimination that select for the vulnerability of some children and not others; the lack of access of children to knowledge about and contact with their birth families; the “interruption” of the right of children to identify with their racial, ethnic, or national group; and the growing abduction, sale, and trafficking of children.

The United Nations Convention and the Hague Convention represent efforts to address these injustices. Nevertheless, Hollingsworth concludes that they have not had much impact because they are difficult to implement effectively. For example, a critical dimension of social justice linked to adoption processes is the need for social change in sending countries that would alleviate poverty and diminish the probability that children would be abandoned by their birth families or taken from their birth countries. That is, in the best of all possible worlds, children would be able to be raised by their natal families and in their culture of origin. Given that this is not the case, Hollingsworth argues that parents who adopt internationally should recognize the “losses incurred by internationally adopted children and their birth families” and they should “be aware of the importance of culture to children and of children to their culture” (Hollingsworth 2003: 216).

Only gradually are adoptive parents coming to recognize the losses that make adoption possible for them. In contrast, many adoptees themselves are pushing hard to open the general public’s eyes to the conditions that led them to be adopted. In addition to wanting a greater voice in how adoption and practices associated with it are viewed ideologically, some are working to change economic conditions in their place of birth.

Adoptive parents I spoke with struggled with the binary oppositions and ethical dilemmas described above that went hand in hand with the laws that structured adoption, although they only recognized them as such after they had adopted. Almost all of them were uncomfortable with the fusion of monetary transactions and gifts in the adoption process, the unpredictability of regulations and their enforcement, the undercurrent of competition that structured how prospective adoptive parents were forced to present themselves as ideal parents, and the specter of child trafficking. CA and AA adoptive parents also found themselves confronting the complex issues surrounding the identity of their children, and the “plural and ambivalent” struggles they faced in the United States (Briggs 2006).

Some scholars who study the legal codes that underpin adoption argue that it should be viewed solely as an economic practice, a regulated “trading system.” Their view is that the discourse of regulation has simply been moderated or replaced by terms more palatable to Americans for whom the cultural domain of family formation lies outside of commodity exchange. Deborah Spar (2006), for example, thinks that supply and demand must guide the laws that determine transactions and that the causes for supply and demand need not be addressed. As she explains,

In purely economic terms, adoption is the most rational aspect of the baby trade. There is a vast unmet demand for children and a ready supply of them scattered across the world. By matching demand with supply, adoption would appear to be the ideal solution to infertility, a match of immeasurable value on both sides of the transaction. . . . The “buyers” don’t really want to purchase their babies. The suppliers don’t want to sell. And governments around the world consistently condemn baby-selling as a crime akin to slavery. But still there are surplus children in the world, and would-be parents who want to adopt them. And so adoption has generated an ersatz market of sorts, a system of structured trades. . . . Money changes hands in this market-without-a-name, but the money is rarely buying children per se and the system is subject to a labyrinth of formal controls—far more, in fact, than exist in nearly any other sector of the baby business. (Spar 2006: 176)

Spar lays out the paradoxical situation in which a highly regulated “business” has historically operated in a “laissez-faire” manner with a hodge-podge of regulations and public and private agents and institutions, and in which humanitarianism is well mixed with the dynamics of consumerism. Concluding that it is impossible to separate economics from politics in the “baby business,” she argues for more uniform and systematic regulations of adoption as a matter of “property rights” both inside the United States and internationally:

Embed this market in an appropriate political and regulatory context, to impose the rules that will enable the market to produce the goods we want—happy, healthy children—without encouraging the obvious risks. . . . If we can make the baby business work better—if we can match parents and children more consistently, at a lower cost, and with less uncertainty—then political support for the market is likely to grow. And if we clarify the politics, distinguishing what is acceptable from what is not, the market will inevitably work better. (Spar 2006: 197)

Spar relies on a neoclassical economic model. For her, the adoption market operates badly because of intractable political ideologies and uneven regulations, and her goal is to arrive at laws and enforcement mechanisms that make it work more smoothly. She does not address the context in which these ideologies arise and the baby business unfolds.

In contrast, a host of scholars, while they are concerned about the effectiveness of laws, argue that participants in adoption (and law-making) should recognize first and foremost that adoptions, especially transracial and transnational ones, are “neocolonial undertakings” that create impossible situations for adoptees (Briggs 2006; Marre and Briggs 2009). The very promotion of supply and demand as the best way to regulate adoption also reduces children to objects of exchange. In the spirit of critical race theory and legal studies, they point to the economic and political ideologies that then set the stage for facilitating particular kinds of transactions between sending and receiving countries and groups. They argue that while adoptive parents have become more aware of the geopolitical conditions that permitted them initially to adopt, and of the need, once they adopt their children, to prepare them for the consequences of racism in the United States, they are nevertheless insufficiently cognizant of the painful conditions of identity formation among adoptees and the myriad ways that the exertion of authority silences adoptees and censures the knowledge to which they are privy. Tobias Hubinette lays out his position along those lines:

My main argument is that adopted Koreans have been fully acculturated and socialized into a self-identification as white. At the same time as having a Korean body, they are incessantly liable to a whole regime of Orientalist imaginaries trying to fetishize them into an ethnic stereotype. Furthermore, being a non-white body, an ever-present discourse of Immigrantism wants to racialize them into an Asian and non-Western immigrant. Lastly as an ethnic Korean, nowadays they are also warmly interpellated by a Korean diaspora policy that essentializes them into and hails them as overseas Koreans. . . . I regard this acquisition of a white self-identification by adopted Koreans as a complete subordination to white hegemonic power, and as a magnificent symbol of the final triumph of the colonial project. (Hubinette 2007: 158)

Laura Briggs (2006: 345) expands on Hubinette’s arguments, pointing to the deleterious effects of media images, as well of child trafficking, but her thinking is based on the experiences of Chinese adoptees rather than Korean adoptees. She asks: “What burden does the “Chinese girl toddler” bear in commercials, Olympic promotions, etc.? What does it really mean to depict her in [the] context of the new ‘American family’?” She finds that globalization, while it has distributed wealth and information internationally, has created, once again, dualisms, but ones that differ from those of the past. Rather than presenting oppositions between pure/impure and white/racially mixed, the dualisms now revolve around the contradictory notions that “internationally adopted children can become the inheritors of their adoptive parents’ national culture and, on the other hand, understanding them as exilic, diasporic refugees whose inheritance is necessarily plural and ambivalent” (Briggs: 346). Briggs also states that people in general, and adoptive parents in particular, have “turned a blind eye to trafficking,” yet “none of this is particularly new. As Ann Stoler has continued to remind us, raising the ‘orphans’ of colonized people is a very familiar practice” (Briggs: 348).³

Thus, even as international law in the form of the Hague Convention attempts to address the heterogeneity of adoption practices and regulate them in order to protect child, birth parent, and adoptive parent, the law itself is enforced on a playing field that is already deeply saturated with histories of colonialism, economic inequalities, racial ideologies, and national reproductive policies. These conditions create unevenness within and between both sending and receiving regions that cannot be addressed by laws alone.

Multiethnic Placement Act/Interethnic Adoption Provisions

A second law that has played a major role in structuring adoption practices, especially AA adoptions within the United States, is the Multiethnic Placement Act/Interethnic Adoption Provisions (MEPA/IEP). In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed MEPA in light of the high number of African American children in the state welfare system without adoptive families. The law was intended to prevent the matching of children and to increase transracial adoptions. In 1996, Congress passed IEP (the Interethnic Adoption Provisions), more stringently enforced legislation that was part of welfare reform.⁴ MEPA, at a minimum, converted into law the notion that racial matching and, by extension, cultural commonalities, should be irrelevant in adoption.

The passage of MEPA was a direct rebuttal to the position taken by the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW). In 1972, the NABSW issued a statement that transracial domestic adoption was equivalent to cultural genocide for African Americans.⁵ The NABSW saw domestic AA transracial adoptions as leading to an absolute loss of black culture. They argued that because black children adopted into white families would adopt white culture, black culture would be further marginalized. They also believed that white parents, in their privileged position, were not equipped to teach African American children how to use the tools of racial navigation they would need in U.S. society, especially as they grew older. In 1984 and then again in 2003, the NABSW reiterated its position. MEPA/IEP has generated great controversy. The account given by AA parent Amber of her adoption process, which described the power of state agency workers in interpreting and implementing MEPA/IEP, was the norm:

I never decided to adopt a black baby. I just decided that I would be open to it. And I think once you say that at these agencies, they’re going to give you a black kid or Hispanic. I think it’s their kind of diplomatic language that they have to use—if you’re open to it. All these other people who want white only, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get a white kid. There are so few takers for the others. So as soon as you say you’re open to it, it’s kind of clear to me that you’re going to get one. (AA5)⁶

In practice, MEPA/IEP’s tenets contradict the Hague Convention’s emphasis on cultural commonalities and heritage, which are aimed at international adoptions (Ishizawa 2006: 1209–10). Smith et al. (2008) found that MEPA and IEP have made no difference in increasing the number of transracial adoptions from the welfare system (see also Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute 2008). Negatively sanctioning racial matching in an effort to encourage transracial adoption from the state welfare system has not worked. Deeper structural inequalities, demographics, and cultural practices may explain better why African American children are not being adopted in higher numbers out of the child welfare system. For example, among African Americans, informal kinship care is more highly valued than adoption (Stack 1974). For African Americans, adoption of African American children with a price tag attached to them also evokes a market model that existed all too recently under slavery; and many do not have as much familiarity with adoption as Euroamericans since they were excluded for many years as potential adoptive parents.

Infant adoption and adoption out of foster care have also too often been conflated. Children in foster care tend to be older and have more problems, regardless of their race, although it is tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Power and Institutions
• 2. Fate and Faith: Adoption and Popular Religiosity
• 3. China: Culture and Place in Imaginaries of Exoticism
• 4. White Russians
• Photographs
• 5. Black and White Crossings
• 6. Broken Links and Adoption Narratives: The Power of Storytelling
• 7. Doing School: Family Trees and Playground Banter
• 8. The Anchors of Virtual Communities
• 9. The Children’s Search and the Formation of Diasporic Communities
• Conclusion: Ties that Bind
• Appendix: Characteristics of Adoptive Families Interviewed
• Notes
• References
• Index