I’m pleased that the LRC is helping to further the debate about the politics of adoption. My book is my response to simplistic public conversation, which casts adoptive parents as either humanitarian heroes or colonizing baby-snatchers, ignores birth parents and elevates children as little more than posters for western goodness: cute and mute. We are currently steeped in either feel-good stories of rescue or horrific tales of kidnap, which flatten the disparate and contradictory stories of real life. I also want to draw attention to how adoption can deflect attention from the sordid mess that is global political economy, and how the inequalities that result in the creation of modern adoption systems are created.
So I’m happy to see that Suanne Kelman appreciates that my goal was to challenge the fantasy of the global cabbage patch. Despite the pictures we see on the news or in adoption agency advertising, babies do not sit alone, removed from parents, neighbours, communities, waiting for westerners to rescue them. The adoption system we’ve inherited over the past century (domestic and international) is practised as a zero-sum game: I win, you lose. Loss is always part of the story, not just in the case of scandalous, illegal, baby-snatching adoption.
I’m puzzled, then, that Kelman often invokes the trope—whoops, sorry, cliché—of the needy Third World child who is better off in Canada (including my own). The adopted Asian girl she sees on the subway, Mia Farrow’s children, the untold numbers of children growing up in far-off orphanages, all of these are examples, to Kelman, of children with a “better shot at a good life” in Canada than they would have had otherwise. Maybe so. My point, though, is that the dazzling pleasures of children can be blinding; we ought to keep both the individual and the political context in view. As long as “rescue” frames our understanding of adoption, or the needs of poor children, we’ll never see the big picture. I think we can do better than make sure adoption is practised ethically and legally, as Kelman recommends. I agree, of course. But we can also take all that warmth, support and compassion we seem to want to bestow on poor children and figure out how to spread it around a little more evenly.
