International Adoption, Globalization & Family Designs
BY LINDA SELIGMANN
In her most recent novel, Digging to America, Anne Tyler spins a tale of two Baltimore families whose paths cross at the airport where they go to greet their Korean adoptive girls. As the story unfolds, the children’s status as transnational adoptees matters less in building social ties between the families than the fits and starts of intercultural communication and rituals, the experiences of being immigrants across generations that alternately clash and coincide with the practices that constitute “American” individualism and tolerance, and the more universal experiences of illness, aging, death and loss.
What distinctive qualities of transnational adoption have an impact on American family culture? Media accounts suggest that the increase in transnational adoption has changed social views of adoption and alternative family formations. Yet the emphasis on celebrating transnational adoption raises questions about how people in the U.S. think about family formation. Anthropologist Kath Weston notes that such accounts bring to light competing interpretations of the family in Western societies. My analysis below is based on interviews, participant-observation, and on-line discussion materials involving adoptive families with children from China and Russia, respectively, transracial families with African-American adoptive children, and with non-adoptive families, in different parts of the U.S.
Few white, healthy infants are available for adoption in the U.S. The economic correlation among income, race, and sexuality creates greater choices for white, heterosexual prospective parents who are middle- and upper middle class, dramatically stratifying adoption. A market model transforms human babies into pseudo-commodities priced by race; adopting a black child might cost $6,000 to $7,000; a bi-racial child, $15,000; an internationally-adopted child, $20,000- 30,000; and a white infant, up to $100,000. It is nevertheless facile to suggest that children have become commodities and social workers argue the market model provides “non-desirable” children a chance of adoption.
Fears about domestic racism, open adoptions, due process, and cost catalyze parents’ decision to adopt internationally. This is not a simple question of preference for white rather than black children, since many parents are adopting from Haiti and Africa, but parents nevertheless allude to racism against African-Americans as a principal reason to adopt from China or Russia. Prospective parents adopting from China acknowledge, but reinscribe a hierarchy of racism regarding contemporary Chinese-Americans as a model minority, contrasting their children’s more optimistic future with that they imagine for African-American children confronted with racism. Prospective parents adopting from Russia are also concerned about racism and therefore choose to adopt Caucasian children, despite the well-documented health problems of Russian adoptees.
The very invisibility accorded to families who strive to pick internationally adopted children that “look like” the adoptive parents phenotypically creates an “as-if ” scenario of biological family formation. It appears that among Russian adoptive families few shifts have taken place in assumptions underlying family formation despite their adoptions’ international dimension.
Transnational adoption and the ability of receiving parents within more developed countries to pick and choose children also creates stratification within sending countries. Money is exchanged and then invested in bureaucratic processing and in particular orphanages where Western child-rearing practices are encouraged. As Sara Dorow points out, in the early decades of Chinese transnational adoption, few distinctions were made between different kinds of children. With the increase in transnational adoption, marked preferences for healthy, well-fed, fostered children have developed. All the participants in transnational adoption, including the children, become “ambassadors, gifts, and clients” in transactions across national borders.
Many families with African-American children have embraced the notion of open adoptions because they are convinced of the “dysfunctionality” of closed adoptions or truncated relationships with birth parents. These sentiments are mixed with a sense of mission and a desire to more closely approximate the “as if” experience of giving birth by pursuing domestic rather than international adoption because the probability of adopting an infant is greater:
“In domestic, you can get a newborn. In most international countries, by the time you are able to get placed and get the baby, it’s on average 9 months old and we really didn’t want to miss anything. We tried, and tried, and tried for so long that we didn’t want any shortcuts. We want to be able to have the sleep deprivation, change as many diapers as is humanly possible, and that was really the main reason.”
The “gift” of an adoptive child is embedded in a web of market forces, legal forces, and ethical dilemmas. Prospective parents undergo a rigorous adoption approval process, symbolized by the home study in the U.S. and the country referral, which is the last step before prospective parents are connected with their adoptive child. In considering why people adopt, and further, why they adopt internationally, it appears that most parents who adopt internationally have put to one side desires to perpetuate and see their genes reflected in their child’s attributes. Nevertheless, they have not abandoned their desire to create a family in order to feel whole, and they may have very specific ideas about what it is that will make a family.
In the discourse of Russian adoptive families and transracial adoptive African-American families, the term “blended families” frequently appears. In the former instance, it refers to the vanishing of adoption altogether and the creation of an “as if ” normative family. Some Russian adoptive families argue that blending is critical to protecting a child’s right to privacy in the face of probing curiosity strangers exhibit toward adoptive families. The discourse of transracial adoptive African-American families deliberately challenges normative family configurations in the U.S., but does not necessarily acknowledge institutionalized racism. Rather, it is perceived as a celebration of multiculturalism and of the will of a superior power, most often God, at work that propels parents to engage in missions that will save and rescue vulnerable beings.
If parents are infertile and choose to adopt internationally or across racial lines, these experiences and choices are often framed as destiny. The matching of a child and parent in the context of a hidden and uncertain process is viewed as intelligent design. “God had a plan in store” is a statement, a reassuring comment in the face of disappointment or, alternatively of success, that is repeated again and again by adoptive parents. Intelligent design subsumes biology, including race and racism, within the purview of a supernatural power and fate. More sustained political struggles against racism do not follow necessarily from these views.
GLOBALIZATION AND INTIMATE GAZES
The internet, as product and catalyst of globalization, has created a strange domain of gazes. Adoption has always occupied a netherland of public and private concern, intimate business and state regulation. Potential parents of international adoptees “pick and choose” among countries, regions, and children from sites on the internet that make explicit a market model. The faces of many kinds of children make their appearance, click after click, endearingly objectified, bereft of family, available for consumption. And many companies craft advertisements promoting their wares with photos of families comprised of Caucasian parents and children from China, Guatemala, India, and
Vietnam. The convergence of pragmatism, genuine shifts in assumptions about family formation, racism, and niche marketing strategies is evident in these images. It is unclear which carries more weight. The social practices in countries with pervasive poverty, corrupt governments, dictatorships, and their own forms of family engineering create conditions that are then sorted by potential parents in the U.S. seeking to adopt.
Adoption sites on the internet also post excruciatingly intimate details about the lives of various families, their predicaments, anxieties, and difficulties, as well as photos of their children. In blurring public and private domains, the postings are an acknowledgment of, and an effort to create, constructive community and, possibly, a distinctive culture. Yet, a false sense of privacy accompanies these efforts, such that little reflection seems to be taking place regarding what these postings mean for the very children whose future lives are of such concern. What will they think about what is being written about them or about their photos gazing back at them as they grow into adulthood?
While children are not commodities, and though love and a desire to constitute family rather than consumption are the motivations given for transnational adoption, money changes hands, a transaction occurs, a child is placed at a site that is neither monetarized nor entirely free from exchange value, and loss informs all sides of the equation. A culture of personhood must thus be built from the bottom up. This is selectively accomplished through legal documents, photographs, and cultural artifacts as well as through the exclusion of particular kinds of information and the omission of bits of history in creating the artifice of a child’s biography. Transnational adoption is less monetarized, less biologically anchored, and less open to free choice relative to other reproductive technologies such as surrogate motherhood, IVF, or frozen embryos. Nevertheless, the discourse of missionary zeal and individual love masks inequalities between children’s sending and receiving countries. It also makes it difficult to distinguish between a commitment to pluralism or an acceptance of racism as the status quo.
TRANSFORMATIONS?
Market models are intertwined with our own fervent belief that family formation and family ties should lie outside the market economy. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer argues that consumerism inevitably colors the differential scales and practices attributed to any kind of relationship in our advanced capitalist society, including children. This is not surprising but brings many people up short, especially those motivated by rescue and religion. A group of Russian-adoptive families became incensed when one parent asked whether anyone had rejected a child after they had arrived in Russia In response, another parent struggled with the reality that in some ways the process resembled picking a puppy from a litter. Her comment provoked first outrage, but then a more probing and thoughtful discussion in which some of the parents confronted the ambivalence of picking and choosing children.
The evidence that adoption across racial and national lines is challenging people’s assumptions about normative configurations of families in the U.S. is decidedly mixed. Increasingly, people involved in transracial adoption realize that racism cannot be combated by ideologies of pluralism and color-blindness, but they remain a minority. Below, the mother of African-American children recognizes how much she needed to change her own behavior:
“Our children will face many struggles in life and as parents we need to help prepare them for the racism and prejudice that is out there…Our children need to see how we respond to racism so they can learn how to respond. And you WILL experience racism when you are with them…Our children need to see us interacting with people of their race on a regular basis… People in our predominantly white community are totally accepting of our cute 3 year old right now. But what will happen when he knocks on their door to take their little girl on a date? Or, if they find out that their son is dating our African American daughter?…It is also not always really easy because there is a large group in the African American community that is against white parents adopting African American children. Now, of course this isn’t everyone but it is out there and you and your child need to be aware of it.”
Do these kinds of reflections and changes in everyday behavior have any impact on challenging ideologies of kinship and race in the U.S.? If the pace of transnational adoption continues, the growing familiarity with transnational and transracial adoptions in a public sphere through the subtle expansion of networks and communication among them may lead future generations to accept a broader range of family configurations as normative. Research is nevertheless needed to determine the weighty bearing that institutionalized settings —places of worship, schools, shopping sites, and the media — have on the socialization of children and the cues they absorb to build their assumptions about family formation in the U.S. Meanwhile, as transnational adoptive families, in ways not so different from the long traditions of immigrants, dig to America, constructing bridges and tunnels, and crossing deserts, they still find themselves challenged by walls built from foundations of assumptions about race, biology, and the privileges of power, and class that disrupt the flow of intercultural networks.
Linda Seligmann (lseligm2@gmu.edu) is professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (http://anthropology. gmu.edu) and an affiliate of the Center for Global Studies. This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
