Thanks for your good writing.

ce: “If it is a moral imperative for the infertile to adopt, is it not a moral imperative for the fertile?”

Yes.

Granted, the adoption system seems to be very interested in disqualifying people from adopting. More interested in disqualifying people than in getting parentless children adopted, in fact! It’s weird. But, y’know, I really don’t think the bureaucratic difficulties are the main reason most people don’t consider adoption first. I think it’s their unexamined and often ugly attitudes about children.

BTW, that article Lalaroo linked to is very much worth reading.

Also, I am really disgusted by the way so many people (consciously or subconsciously) view children as a means of achieving immortality. Your child is not you!

I have to add that not all infertility treatment is expensive or to the extreme in the NYT article- though I fully support a women’s right to control her own body, whether it be to remain childfree, choose the number of children she has, have a homebirth, use contraceptives, have an abortion, or use IVF to conceive her children because endometriosis has irreparably scarred her fallopian tubes.

There are conditions, like PCOS or abnormal clotting factors, that can cause infertility and also cause health risks throughout the lifespan. Often it is the desire to have a child that will lead a woman to discovering these risks, and thereby give her the knowledge to try and prevent further problems.

It’s interesting that feminists can, on the one hand, vilify a woman like me for wanting to experience pregnancy and birth, and wanting to mother my children instead of focusing on a career, and in the next breath denounce the patriarchal devaluation of mothering. There is such a push as well for us to have powerful transcendent births and breastfeed for years- but if I need a little Clomid to remind my ovaries to work, I don’t get get to join that exclusive club. You don’t often hear fertile women who just fall pregnant being scolded for having a child. Or shamed because they didn’t consider adoption first.

Infertility really isn’t a problem for rich white women. Run through my blogroll. Most of us carefully weigh our choices against our ability to afford them. That includes adoption. Often there are no real choices, because financially none can be afforded. For my family, even one round of IVF is a financial gamble we can’t afford. We feel incredibly blessed to have had successful lower tech treatments.

I am totally supportive of a woman being childfree by choice. This job isn’t for everyone. There are other contributions that can be made to make this world a better place. This one is my first choice. I just wish those women who have never felt the urge to be pregnant or rear a child give me the same benefit of the doubt.

I’m not excusing the general obnoxiousness of this particular type of mother, just saying that all these issues are complicated.

I also wish that she would have been more examinate of her desire for a child that was genetically hers. I don’t necessarily cite her for following through with this desire, but she seems to run with it without being more aware of where this desire comes from. She elaborates on the feeling, but not why she feels that way, what might be behind these beliefs, and if these bases are a sound reason to follow through on her desire.

I may be judging her as a female-identified person more harshly than I would others, but the article seemed like it wanted to be introspective, but utterly fell short. I usually enjoy “life pieces” because of their introspection and examinations of thoughts, but this author didn’t seem to include that in her writing. Perhaps it was too private, but it really robbed the article of something that would have made it more compelling and easier to relate to.

Also strange and underserved are the portions about the husband. When talking about the desire for a genetically-hers child, she writes only of the husband’s features, not her own. I don’t mean to cite the husband for already having six kids (“how dare he?!?!”) but the second-to-last paragraphs of the article really struck me. It makes me wonder if some of the husband’s ideas about reproduction influenced the author more strongly than she let on. Perhaps not, perhaps it makes more sense, given more context, perhaps the article was heavily edited and parts like that got left out.

And of course I would have loved to see the author reflect on why she thinks that creating and raising a separate human being with its own identity is an “expression of love for one another” and is a path of immortality, but that is such a common narrative that many hold it as assumed, and many more accept it, unexamined.

[That said, the welfare system REALLY varies from county to county, however. The first county we lived in was good--understaffed (as always) but genuinely caring and well run; the second I firmly believe was set up to punish and humiliate people who were seeking help.]

The system is underfunded and cruel because it’s part of the welfare system in the United States. Americans as a whole have basically no interest in actually making the system functional and humane. Headlines scream every few months when a poor child is killed in foster care from abusive carers who “fell through the cracks” and then we turn around and cut taxes, cut budgets, talk about making the system leaner and meaner.

Do not feel “happy” that these systems are just “incompetent” governmental agencies (Lalaroo, #37): it’s bad government because most of us don’t really care enough, in the end, about how poor people are treated by our government agents to demand change. That is our shame. All of ours. And there are better systems out there–not perfect ones, but better. I worked with a social worker here in the US, in the “good” county, who had 70 kids on her caseload. 70. The British social worker I worked with at the same time had 20 children, and she was part of a team.

If all of us… would be adopters, child-free people, fertile people, etc…. loved “less than perfect” children as much as we like to see ourselves as loving them, we’d be out there visibly demanding better systems for their care. (I’m doing some work in this area, but I definitely indict myself here as much as anyone.)

I was always aware how much better it is to be in that system once we were on the path to being adoptive parents (particularly being white, and middle class, by that time), than either as a foster parent or a poor biological parent. If your options are limited, you don’t have choices; wealthier people can always say: “I don’t like this scrutiny,” so I’ll try a different path. “This isn’t welcoming enough.” I don’t blame people for having or making this choice, but it’s a luxury, a privilege, to be able to walk away from, to be basically ignorant of these systems.

I also wanted to point out this complex story on international adoption from Foreign Policy, which makes the point that very few children available for adoption in the world are orphans. And international adoption is, today, at base, about finding children for parents, rather than vice versa–and the article dances around this a bit, but, truly, that’s been the history of Western adoption, which has never been a full-scale child-welfare institution, but a child-finding institution, and we’ve exported that model world wide. No regulations will change that basic reality. (Everyone interested in transnational/transracial adoption issues should read the collection OUTSIDERS WITHIN (ed. Jane Jeong Trenka et al.))