Hey there,
Sorry to be AWOL on my Substack. Part of what I struggle with in terms of this format is that I’m a slow thinker and an ever slower writer, so writing long form responses to flash-in-the-pan social media trash fires about adoption politics is not in my wheelhouse. I’m a historian by training and most of my takes aren’t just not hot, they aren’t even lukewarm by the time I’ve finished thinking through an idea. You will not find me writing about adoption politics at Quartz or Slate or The Atlantic. My takes are far too cold for those mediums.
But I wanted to write to you today about a particular thing that people like to throw out when arguing with anti-choicers about what’s going to happen to the surplus of babies that will appear once they force pregnant people to bear children they don’t want.
A few weeks ago, a video came across my Twitter feed posted by a guy named Walter Masterson (dated December 9, 2022). In the video, Masterson can be seen confronting anti-choice protesters outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic and trying to get the protesters to sign “adoption papers.” Surprise! No one wants to.
I’m just an adult adopted person writing to you and begging you to stop asking anti-choice protesters some variation of “How many babies are you personally going to adopt, hmmmmmm?”
I don’t think Masterson is a bad guy; but he’s just as misinformed as the people he’s trying to enlighten. Trying to give “adoption papers” to anti-choice protesters equally as absurd as those “pro-life” (as long as you are still a fetus) people who stand outside clinics with signs reading, “WE WILL ADOPT YOUR BABY.” (Which, of course, turned into the social media meme that would not stop giving.)
As it turns out, neither pro-choicers nor anti-choicers have a monopoly on completely misunderstanding how adoption actually works as a industry, system, and practice. Or conflating abortion (the choice end a pregnancy) with adoption (the often last resort of choiceless women to relinquish children and not parent). And to throw a little more gasoline on this already considerable dumpster fire, let me tell you that adoption is THE oppressive system that both anti-choice conservatives and pro-choice progressive absolutely love and it unites them like nothing else (with the possible exception of Dolly Parton who is beloved by everyone everywhere always). In this age of political partisanship and polarization, adoption bridges the entire political spectrum and makes bedfellows out of everyone.
Conservatives love adoption because they think it’s the answer to their crusade to control women by limiting their reproductive choices. They assume, wrongly, that the act of relinquishing children will remove the burden of parenthood, while ignoring the massive physical and emotional costs, not to mention considerable health risks (including death), of pregnancy. This was exactly Amy Coney Barrett’s flawed logic when she asked about safe haven laws, reasoning that abortion access laws weren’t really necessary if a woman could simply make use of existing safe haven laws and abandon her baby at the indicated drop point and go on with her life as if nothing had happened. (If you need a refresher on exactly what she said, here’s a recap in The Boston Globe. It was chilling.)
Conservatives also love adoption because it gives them a chance to prove their goodness and commitment to caring for the biblical “widows and orphans” as suggested in the Book of Proverbs, despite their growing love affair and commitment to fascist politics and violence. As Kathryn Joyce argued in The Child Catchers, adoption has become a mainstay of conservative politics; evangelical ministries control much of the adoption industry as we know it, including “crisis pregnancy centers,” adoption agencies, and orphanages in the global south. Conservatives have seized on their vertical integration of the adoption industry to rebrand the experience of relinquishment, a traditional punishment and source of shame for women who break social and sexual norms, as a new form of women’s empowerment based on a mother’s love, bravery, and heroism. If you don’t believe me, hold your nose and head over to Brave Love to get your relinquishment merch. (I can only assume that the coffee cup is to hold the tears of relinquishing mothers.)
But conservatives also appear to believe that adopting children, particularly children of color, also shields them against accusations of racism. Conservative media gushed about Coney Barrett’s adopted Black children from Haiti, as if they had the power to inoculated her against racist beliefs.
As I often point out to people, adopting Black children doesn’t make anyone less racist. (And as one adopted person I know says, your Black adopted child shouldn’t be your first Black friend.) You can also read about the experiences of white conservative evangelical political commentator David French and how shocked he seems that America “soured” opinions on his multiracial family and attacked him and his family from both the left and the right over his adoption of his Black Ethiopian daughter. Progressives on the left accused him of performative multiculturalism and imperialism, while conservatives on the right and far right said exactly the monstrous anti-Black racist things that we might expect from them. But French is wrong about one thing: no one has soured on adoption. People love that shit.
America Soured on My Multiracial Family (David French, The Atlantic, 2018)
But we know that conservatives love adoption for these unsurprising reasons. People in my circles get a little more defensive when I point out that progressives, who would like to think about themselves as enlightened people fighting alongside others to right the wrongs of racism, patriarchy, poverty, and social marginalization, also really love adoption. And if adoption is an oppressive system (and you know that I think it is), people with progressive politics should really stop and think about why they love adoption so much and divest from those systems. (You would think that I am asking people to kick puppies. I am not, for the record.)
Progressives often think they are exempt from all of the the oppressive politics of their conservative counterparts, but make no mistake, progressives deeply love adoption systems for different but related reasons. First, the families created through adoption often look like the type of multiracial, cross-class, feminist progressive alliances that they would like to embody and model for others. Additionally, people who identify as feminists often strongly support adoption policies, seeing them as a means to expand the definition of families and secure the legal rights of single women and same-sex couples, not to mention as an alternative means of family building and subverting the big P (patriarchy). Progressives also love adoption because they see adoption as another ‘choice’ on the menu of reproductive rights. In this telling, women who do not wish to parent make informed choices to relinquish their children and are equally empowered by their choice as the Brave Love birth mothers. (Progressives, step up your merch game if you want to keep up! Yes, that was sarcasm.)
The problem is that their tool of choice, adoption, makes them complicit in an oppressive system that hurts children both literally (who can forget the story of the Hart family, the progressive middle-class white lesbians who adopted six Black children and then drove themselves and the children off a cliff?) and through propping up systems of structural violence. As this article in The Establishment argues, what’s so often missing from progressive conversations about adoption is the acknowledgment that adoption is a product of inequality, proof of the failures of social policies to help people who need help. It is not proof the success of a pro-choice agenda. Additionally, using pro-choice language to talk about relinquishment (which, remember, involves actually giving your own children away to strangers) hides the choicelessness of the women who relinquish children because of their poverty. (For fun, ask some white middle class people if they’d ever relinquish children and watch them recoil in complete horror. They want those people to relinquish children, but they’d never do it themselves. Not even for a coffee mug.) Progressives love adoption as a system because they personally benefit from it.
The only true bipartisanship right now is unwavering support for adoption.
Everything you said needed to be said and needs to be repeated again and again, especially to the left.
Also, I’m sorry you felt the need to apologize for the frequency of your output or the heat or coolness of your takes. There’s nothing wrong with taking the time to be thoughtful (in fact the world of commentary could use more of it), and most of all, your writing is worth the wait.