and now, a poll

[kindkit]

Following on from my previous post, because now I'm beginning to wonder if what I think is my culture's view of adoption and birth mothers is not actually the case. The poll is as anonymous as I can make it, and anonymous comments are allowed.

Poll #18972

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 27

When a woman places her child up for adoption rather than raising the child herself, how is that predominantly viewed in your culture (not necessarily by you)?

Good! This is an excellent thing to do if she felt unable to raise the child herself.
11 (40.7%)

Neutral, neither good nor bad.
6 (22.2%)

Bad. She should have raised the child.
3 (11.1%)

Adoption is extremely rare or nonexistent in my culture.
2 (7.4%)

Other, which I may choose to elaborate on in the comments.
5 (18.5%)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

It's not so much bad as tragic - of course she would want to raise her own wanted child, how sad that she couldn't. Adoption outside of foster care or kinship adoptions is really rare.

ETA: I did go to school with several adopted kids, and they were all Aboriginal kids being raised by white families except for one Indonesian kid adopted by Christian missionaries.

[kindkit]

I think adoption may be a lot more common in the US than elsewhere--I just found a statistic that says that 1 in 25 households with children has at least one adopted child.

I suspect it has a lot to do with the US's conservatism on a lot of issues, for example the stigma surrounding abortion and the insufficient financial and other assistance for single parents.

[st_aurafina]

It's really difficult to adopt a child in Australia - there's lots of fostering situations and discussions about open adoptions, and there's a sense that it's very sad that a mother couldn't raise her own child. And we have the Stolen Generation behind us, where Indigenous children were taken away from their families to be raised by white families. We have income support for single mothers here, and while it gets the same kind of right-wing slander that the UK gets, it's still income support.

I don't know any adopted kids, I know five or six in permanent foster positions, and there's a couple of foster parents in town who do short term fostering. I don't know anyone who has given up a child for adoption, either.

[kindkit]

*nods* I'm beginning to think that the quite pro-adoption attitude in the US has a lot to do with the strength of the anti-abortion movement and the very negative attitude towards any kind of income support.

[mecurtin]

I was born in the mid-1950s. Adoption has become more favorably viewed in the US over the course of my lifetime, though it's always been fairly acceptable, and very acceptable since WWII. I'm not at all sure how much is due to the anti-abortion movement: certainly the demand for healthy white infants to adopt has exceeded the supply for my entire life, and the large number of international adoptions are because the demand for adoptable children is so high.

It turns out US adoptions peaked in 1970, before the start of the anti-abortion movement.

[kindkit]

the demand for healthy white infants to adopt has exceeded the supply for my entire life

And now I'm wondering if the cultural encouragement to young white mothers to have their babies adopted rather than abort OR keep the baby is related to this. Not in a conspiracy-theory kind of way, but there is a general awareness of the "shortage" of adoptable healthy white babies, I think. A sense of "why would you choose abortion when someone else would love to have that baby?" and "why keep the baby when someone else who could raise it with more advantages wants it?"

[mecurtin]

I think this has got to be included in women's calculations, going back well before Roe v Wade. I don't know how common adoption ever was in other Anglophone countries, but in the US about 2% of children are adopted.

Notably in the US, some VERY prominent people were adopted as children: Steve Jobs, for example, also Larry Ellison (of Oracle; adopted by relatives). Both Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton were adopted by their stepfathers.

So, pretty much every US adult (and most children) will know someone who was adopted.

[sovay]

I don't actually know how adoption is predominantly viewed in my culture! Since I am not answering this anonymously, I think the answer in the U.S. is neutral-to-good and relatively normal, but I don't know how much of my thinking is influenced by knowing, growing up, two adopted kids and one friend of the family who had had a sibling adopted; it was presented to me as a thing that happened, but also something that was obviously complex.

[kindkit]

I think the answer in the U.S. is neutral-to-good and relatively normal

That's my sense as well, and I didn't grow up knowing adopted kids, apart from one family I met--and didn't know very well--when I was fifteen.

[sovay]

That's my sense as well, and I didn't grow up knowing adopted kids, apart from one family I met--and didn't know very well--when I was fifteen.

Actually I grew up knowing three adopted kids and one person who had had a sibling given up for adoption! I forgot about one of the kids. Which is just another data point on it being relatively common in the U.S.

I bounced your question off spatch and he had actually encountered, in the U.S., the idea that a young unwed mother should be socially stigmatized rather than praised for giving up her child for adoption—she's dodging the consequences of her irresponsible sexual behavior! It should ruin her life! She should suffer! How dare she pass the responsibility off on somebody else? And of course the people who espouse this opinion would not be happier if the young woman in question had an abortion, or if we actually had enough of a social safety net that she could comfortably raise the child herself, because the whole point is not really the welfare of the child, it's punishing women no matter what they do (and the weird-ass Randian bootstrap fantasy that if a person is not perfectly, magically self-sufficient, they deserve nothing at all). Whee.

[vilakins]

Adoption of children born here used to be more common in my culture decades ago* (I think more due to the shame rather than any other reason), but now it's mainly children from overseas (Asia or eastern Europe) due to the welfare state providing for single mothers. I do know a couple who adopted children from abusive homes.

* Greg's grandmother was adopted, and in a branch of our family a child was brought up by his grandparents whom he assumed were his parents; it turned out later than his older sister was his mother.

OTOH in Maori culture, often families will adopt a child from relatives because they have no children of their own, or because the parents are finding things hard; this works well as families are extended anyway.

[kindkit]

*nods* When I made the poll I was thinking of the old-school Western model of formal, closed adoption, where there's no further contact between birth mother and child. Informal adoptions and the adoption customs of non-western cultures definitely create a more complex picture.

[vilakins]

The old-school Western model of formal, closed adoption certainly did exist here but is long gone. In Greg's family, a sister is trying to trace who their grandmother's real parents were, and also suspect their mother had a child before she married who was adopted out, but it's very hard to find these things out.

Formal adoption still exists, and the vetting of adoptive parents for suitability (of whatever gender mix) is quite thorough, but the children's birth parents are on open record, and some even have visiting rights if they're not the abusive parent. I suppose adoptions for non-abuse reasons still happen, but they only ones I know of are children from overseas orphanages.

ETA as not addressed: as I've not heard of anyone putting their child up for adoption nowadays, I have no idea if the mother would be blamed or stigmatised. IMO it's very good if she doesn't feel able to bring up the child for whatever reason, and it's her decision.

[oursin]

Adoption used to be a lot more common in the UK - various instances of well-known women who had had illegitimate babies in the 50s-60s and had to give them up (it was the Done Thing and approved social work practice) being found by the children in question - with the legalisation of abortion, the greater availability of contraception, and the growing destigmatisation of pregnancy out of wedlock, this became much less frequent. Also, much more problematisation of adoption, and its being seen as not so much about the parents as is it right for the child - people who want to adopt within the UK are usually taking on children who come from very damaged backgrounds and have already been in the foster system, rather than, as in the 60s, the newly-born babies of young women anxious to preserve their university careers.

Given what are viewed in the UK as the even more liberal views around unwed motherhood in the Nordic countries,not to mention social welfare support, I would have thought giving a child up for adoption was very rare - I'd want to know the parents' motivation for pressuring their 16-year-old daughter into doing it.

[kindkit]

Hmm, that's interesting. I wonder if what seems to me to be a greater stigmatization of birth mothers in the UK, Australia and NZ, Scandinavia, etc. has more to do with class and race than I'd considered. Now that I think about it, the valorized model of adoption in the US is a teenage, middle-class white girl who wants to stay in school and also give her baby a "better life." It's not a young woman of color, nor one living in any kind of stigmatized poverty, and issues like drugs, abuse, etc. are excluded.

On the show, Dicte exactly fits what in the US is the valorized model--young, white, not an immigrant, relatively middle-class, not a drug user--but gets blamed anyway, and that's what I found so shocking, I guess. Her parents' reason for pressuring her is that they're Jehovah's Witnesses and are ashamed of her sin, but I'd have expected the blame to then fall on the parents, not on her.

[lilliburlero]

I think in Britain the general cultural viewpoint is confused: often in a 'woman's place is in the wrong' sort of way. I don't get the sense that there is a lot of negative judgment of parents who choose to have children adopted, but it is regarded as intrinsically tragic in a way that I imagine could be irritating for all concerned.

In Ireland there is much more distrust of the idea of adoption, owing to the long history of institutional abuse of unmarried mothers and their children. It's not, I think, that someone would be openly negatively judged for having their child adopted, necessarily, but the idea is tainted with the aura of the 'bad old days', and there might be a lot of surprise that anyone could want to do that.

[kindkit]

I'm finding it interesting how important historical factors are: Australian commenters have mentioned the "stolen generation" of indigenous Australian children forcibly removed from their parents to be raised by white families.

[sage]

I just realized that I've never known anyone who gave up their kid for adoption, even the teenage mothers I knew back in the 80s. OTOH, I have known LOTS of people who were adopted and several people who adopted kids. In one case, they were fosters who adopted (a tween white girl who'd been kept in a fosters dorm and never actually parented and an infant latino boy who was born addicted). Another was a single black woman who fostered-then-adopted a black baby girl who'd been removed from her birth mother's custody. And the wealthy couple spent a lot of money adopting healthy babies (two white infant boys and one infant girl from Colombia).

Multiracial families are really common in Texas, incidentally.

As far as stigma, back in the early 80s, one of my dad's coworkers confided in him that his teenage kids had been adopted...and swore him to secrecy. I don't know why the culture of shame existed in the first place, but I'm glad it's dissipated.

[kindkit]

I wonder if the birth parents of adopted kids just don't tell people? Not necessarily for reasons of stigma--"I gave birth to a child who was then adopted" seems to me like at least a couple of levels more intimate than "I have two kids that I adopted from China" as a friendly topic of conversation--but not necessarily unconnected with stigma either.

I'm glad that the practice of not telling kids that they're adopted, or not telling them until they're teenagers/young adults seems to be disappearing, anyway.

[magnetic_pole]

I know quite a few people who either adopted children or were adopted themselves, and while it's not seen an an unequivocally good thing (especially the international and transracial adoptions), it's definitely part of life among folks I know (US, urban/suburban, middle and upper middle class). Part of the reason may be that I'm in academia, and many (of the wealthier) academics adopt in their 40s or even later, after tenure, and I'm gay, and so many other (better off) queer families I know adopted because they weren't able to reproduce the old fashioned way. (Children are especially expensive and highly prized in these circles.) And for various reasons I've also come to know a significant number of adoptees from China and Korea. Where people seem to place blame, adoptees included, they tend to blame systems and cultures rather than people. More recently, birth mothers are often known to the child and are sometimes a part of the child's life.

Interesting to read these responses! M.

[kindkit]

When I was in graduate school, one of my professors and his (male) partner adopted a child from Russia. They were of course overjoyed to have a child, but also very conscious of the problematic side.

Where people seem to place blame, adoptees included, they tend to blame systems and cultures rather than people

Which seems correct to me, but then, I was an academic too and trained to think that way. A lot of people, by no means all of them "uneducated" in the conventional sense, seem to dislike thinking systematically and prefer to blame individuals.

[genarti]

I don't think I've known anyone closely who gave a baby up for adoption, or if I do it's not something we've discussed, though I know numerous people who were adopted (including three of my siblings and several cousins.) That said, I would say somewhere between good and neutral -- that it's a good thing to do if the birth mother couldn't raise the child herself, to let childless parents have a kid and let the kid grow up in a loving home, but also that it's sad (or, some would doubtless say, her fault) that she was in such a situation and had to make that call.

(US, for the record: white, having grown up in the Midwest and New England and lived in New England thereafter until very recently.)

[kindkit]

The overall sense I'm getting is that in the US, there's less tendency to blame the birth mother if she chooses adoption. But on the other hand, most other western countries have less stigmatizing attitudes towards abortion, easier access to abortion, and better financial and social support for parents who are young and/or single and/or poor. So there's a sort of trade-off, with some inequity and ugliness on both sides. (I think the non-US situation is better overall, but I also don't think anyone should be blamed for being unready, unable, or unwilling to raise a child.)

[mllesatine]

I believe adoption is quite difficult in Germany. I know with the new gay marriage law gay couples can now adopt (for instance, it wasn't possible for a woman to adopt her female partner's child) but it's probably still difficult to adopt a child where neither of the parents is a biological parents.
A few years ago there was a huge national debate about "baby boxes" where mothers could place their new born child if they had their baby in secret and where it would be picked up (those boxes were monitored and I think close to hospitals). And the state runs a national campaign for women who are pregnant and have to keep that pregnancy secret. Even then the child has the option of finding out about the name of the birth mother when it turns 16. So there is always debate about the child's right to know their parents.

I believe abortion would be the first option for most women.