This essay was actually a post to alt.adoption back in (I believe) 1997 in response to numerous stories about potential adoptive parents who were “heartbroken” after investing huge amounts of time and money in pursuing “adoption situations” that “fell through”. (In other words, they paid a lot of money and attention to an expectant mother who then decided to parent her own kid.)
I’ve always felt that adoption professionals who encourage this investment of time and money between strangers are being horribly irresponsible. This (slightly revised) essay remains a call to common sense in adoption practice. While I am less enamored of infant adoption than I have been in the past, I also still believe that prospective adoptive parents are also vulnerable to the machinations of the adoption industry (though not so vulnerable as first parents and children). It is for them that I reprint this piece.
Lotto Tickets (2008 Edition)
If you are thinking about adopting, or are trying to adopt, you’ve probably spent some time getting scared by all of the horror stories out there. Many a prospective adoptive parent has written about spending huge amounts of time, money and energy in pursuit of adopting a child, only to have things “fall through”. Something has always bothered me about these stories, and finally I figured out what it was:
Adoption has become a lotto ticket.
Potential adoptive families find (or are found by) a prospective birthmother. Prospective birthmother has something they want, and something they are willing to risk money, emotions, and energy to get.
So the prospective adoptive parents buy a lotto ticket, in hopes of winning the “prize” of the baby. They pay for an apartment, furniture, maternity clothes, food, doctor’s visits, etc. They drive the prospective birthmom around to appointments, listen to her tales of woe for hours on end, and take her out to the movies. Each time they take her out, each dollar they spend, is another lotto ticket for the “chance” of parenthood.
Finally, when the big day arrives, and the baby is born, the big draw takes place: Will she or won’t she relinquish? If she doesn’t relinquish, it is back to square one, with more lotto tickets being purchased for other “prizes” or giving up on the lotto entirely. If she does relinquish, well, hot dang, they’ve won the friggin’ lotto!
Frankly, this whole system seems wrong to me. For one thing, when people are willing to be parted from their money, confidence games abound. Women who have no intention of relinquishing their children or who aren’t even pregnant have found that the “adoption” con is one of the easiest, because most states do not require a prospective birthmother to repay any support given to her. Plus, if illegal payments to the prospective birthmom were made, the prospective adoptive parents are unlikely to incriminate themselves by reporting her.
If we want to clean up this mess of exploited prospective adoptive parents (and birthparents, who are more often the losers in the adoption industry, anyway) we need to stop this nonsense of potential adoptive parents paying for the care and upkeep of a pregnant woman. Potential adoptive parents should stop greedily buying lotto tickets for babies, and instead insist on working with an ethical adoption agency that provides pregnant women with the assistance and support that they need. If prospective adoptive parents insist in only working with ethical agencies, women will start using agencies themselves, which is probably a better way of handling adoption in the first place.
Prospective adoptive parents need to stop being so involved in the lives of prospective birthparents. They need to stop being best buddies during the pregnancy, stop being present at labor and delivery, and stop taking custody of the child when s/he is only a few hours old. Mothers, even those who are considering relinquishing their children for adoption, need to feel empowered as mothers: Having someone in the hospital room assuming care of one’s baby is not empowering.
(In fact, I often wonder if those mothers who change their minds days or even weeks after relinquishment would NOT be changing their minds if they had been permitted to be the sole parent of their child in the beginning, and to relinquish the baby on their own terms, on their own time. I truly think that many of these women “change their minds” because they were not permitted to mother their children completely, and thus panic when they realize that they never had control over the child and their situation.)
To those trying to adopt a child, I say: Please, in your desire to parent a child, be sensible. Don’t give money tostrangers because they may give you something you want. Don’t assume the role of “parent” with all its emotional baggage before a child is even close to being yours. Don’t set yourself up for disapointment: The lotto has terrible odds.
Stumble it!
