The war on adoption - opposing adoption as a way to fight the pro-life movement - Cover Story

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Marvin Olasky

Soldiers in the sex-liberation wars are asking: If a baby can't grow up in the care of its natural mother, is it better off dead?

The police said there was nothing they could do about the child Ken and Pat had adopted. "Nothing you can do?" Ken yelled. "But he broiled a harmless puppy in the oven, raped a fifth-grade girl, sent us 32 death threats, and tracked us down even though we quit our jobs, packed up and moved, and left no forwarding address."

Welcome to today's progressive depiction of adoption.

In the america of the 1990s a war has begun. Adoption, like Sarajevo, has its stout defenders, and the attempt to reduce adoption to rubble in the name of self-fulfillment and combatting "cultural genocide" may be turned back. But the attack is being pressed mightily, and there is even a fifth column within the traditionally pro-adoption camp.

Time and the New York Times led the latest offensive in April with articles headlined "The Ties That Traumatize" and "Adoption Is Getting Some Harder Looks." The highly publicized tug-of-war over two-year-old Jessica DeBoer of Ann Arbor (her birthmother changed her mind and is now trying to get the child back) was the news hook, but Time's subhead was the subtext: "adoptive parents everywhere [are] on edge." The New York Times piece ended with a proposal for new, improved "adoption" procedures, including multiple parents and perpetual monitoring by courts.

Many publications have been putting adoptive parents on edge for years. Only a small percentage of adoptions go wrong, but the failures receive the press coverage. Adoption is hellish for children, People magazine suggested last December when a mother was accused of beating her adopted son with a broom and telling him she would "trade him in." Adoptive parents fare no better, an Austin American-Statesman headline in March revealed: As bliss turns to heartache, parents seek to end adoption." (Adopted children, it seems, "set fires, snuck out of the house at night, tried to hang the family dog . . .")

The onslaught is at its fiercest in such magazines as Playboy and Mirabella, bedfellows that would be strange were they not both committed to trysting without consequences. Ken and Pat are the infertile adoptive parents in "King Bee," a Playboy short story that pictures them sitting in "the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-a-child," where a man with "the voice of a seducer" and the audacity to dress "in a suit woven of some exotic material" gives them the good news that they can adopt Anthony, "a sunny, smiling towheaded boy."

Anthony, of course, turns out to be so vicious that hapless Ken buys a puppy to gain some comfort; this, evidently, is what author T. C. Boyle thinks parents who want to adopt should do in the first place. Anthony has his revenge: "It was Ken who noticed the broomstick wedged against the oven door, and it was Ken who buried Skippy's poor singed carcass and arranged to have the oven replaced -- pat wouldn't, couldn't cook in it, ever again." Anthony gets to be a threatening six feet tall and eats so enormously that Pat "could barely make out his eyes, sunk in their pockets of flesh." Then he tries to kill Pat by trapping her amidst thousands of swarming bees, but the bees turn on Anthony and he is stung to death.

The Mirabella focus was not on adoptive parents but on birthmothers paid off in a "shadowy and competitive adoption bazaar" to provide "trophy babies." Birthmothers in Meryl Gordon's article "Handmaid's Tale" (a reference to the Margaret Atwood proabortion novel) have few rights: "Buy a vacuum'cleaner from a door-to-door salesman and consumer laws give you three days to cancel the purchase; sign away a baby in Texas and that child is gone forever." Overall, today's adoption process is a "distasteful ... bartering of lives."

Adoption receives similar treatment in traditional women's magazines-a Good Housekeeping headline from March 1992 read, "My adopted daughter thought she was second-best" - and on popular television shows such as L.A. Law, which portrayed a birthmother and adoptive parents almost yanking apart the tiny prize they both coveted. An analysis by George Gerbner of 39 television programs involving adoption as a significant plot element showed that half the programs emphasized the legal difficulties of adoption; the "shady deal" was the next most frequent plot element, present in almost one-third of the programs. Adoption agencies on such shows were always tricking birthmothers into "giving up" babies, ripping off adoptive parents, and so on.

Winners All Around

There are problems with adoption, to be sure-exacerbated by governmental bureaucracy, trendy ideas, and tinges of racism and reverse racism-but studies show that adoption works well for the vast majority of adoptive children, whose welfare should be our first priority. It also works well for most adoptive parents and for birthmothers, who generally grieve for the departed child but are glad that they have given life and are able to get on with their own lives; as one put it, "I knew that something can hurt a lot and still be the right thing to do." That's not what anti-adoption propagandists would have us believe, though. We are told that adopted children are always searching for their birthmothers-in real life, less than 5 per cent do-unless, of course, the children have already been killed by adoptive mothers. For example, Barry Siegel's A Death in White Bear Lake has a birthmother looking for the child she had placed for adoption two decades before, only to find that the adoptive mother (probably separated at birth from the witch in Hansel and Gretel) had beaten him to death. Marsha Riben's The Dark Side of Adoption even equates adoptive parents with the devil.