Conflicts Inherent to Adoption, Essay Example

Abstract

Always a deeply personal and individual circumstance, the issues involved with both decisions to adopt and the processes to undergo contain myriad conflicts. The biblical legend of King Solomon, ruling over a custody dispute and deciding that a literal division of the child in question was the solution, remains the paradigm for the extreme emotional and practical dilemmas any custodial quarrel entails, and applies to the far-ranging difficulties encountered in many adoption scenarios. Adoption is a terrain wherein judicial strategy must always be tempered by the volatile human factors involved. Only through an increased and humane focus on all of the factors pertaining to each unique adoption situation can a mutually productive outcome be set in motion, if not guaranteed.

Foundational Considerations

Addressing the issue of adoption is an intrinsically complex and often self-defeating affair. By its very nature the subject is profoundly personal, stemming as it does from the highly emotional and deeply-ingrained longings of parents to obtain children they are typically unable to have through natural means. This in itself is responsible for a component of stigma, fortunately waning in modern society. Nonetheless, many prospective adoptive parents wrestle with psychological issues of ‘having failed’, long before they even enter the adoption arena.

Then, those choosing to adopt are placed in a world dramatically more stringent than that of biological parents. Levels of scrutiny, both internal and external, come into play in a process that is alien to the biological mother or father. The often lengthy and arduous road in adopting compels prospective parents to examine their motivations. The actual, tangible reasons for desiring a child or children are considered and weighed by the parents, and these considerations are very much less pressing to those capable of having children themselves. Biological mothers and fathers may wonder about the timing or the rightness of having a child, yet that very ability to have one acts as a tacit and potent permission of sorts; if it is not a thing they must do, it is nonetheless something they are enabled to do. It carries with it, then, a far stronger sense of choice and of personal empowerment. Denied this, the prospective adopters must intently question the rationales behind their pursuing a course not so easily taken, and just why, in fact, they would wish to assume so massive a responsibility.

Added to this is the societal and judicial determining of their fitness as parents, a process unavoidable to some extent within any adoption scenario. “Biological parents do not need to ask anyone’s consent if they want to have offspring.  Adoptive parents….always have to undergo a family investigation first. They are dependent on the judgment of others” (Hoksbergen, 1997, p.2). This alone can be an unsettling, if not traumatic, process, irregardless of that ‘fitness’ a court seeks to verify. Our culture is demonstrably and adamantly focused upon the well-being of its children, and this is a preoccupation in sway since the 1970’s. In plain terms, very few people could be deemed ‘fit’ to raise children by the exacting standards of our time, allowances for human factors notwithstanding, yet this is in some measure the precise evaluation criterion the prospective adoptive parent must face.

It is then easily seen that, between the harsh external elements of societal and judicial scrutiny and the more personal issues inevitably to be addressed, the decision to adopt and the course pursuant to it is not a choice lightly made.

Opportunities, Procedures, Outcomes

The social tide mentioned that is intent on securing the well-being of children stems at least partially from less than pleasant reasons. That is, the documented increase in child abuse, whether the abuse is more prevalent or the documentation responsible for increased awareness of it, has swung a wide arc in the pendulum of perceived notions of proper child care, certainly within the last few decades. The biological parent who threatens a light smack on the posterior of his misbehaving child may well find himself visited by a children’s service representative, alerted by a well-meaning witness. In such an environment, laws and regulations regarding prospective adoptive parents are fluctuating wildly, and from state to state.

Consider that, as recently as 1994, congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act, “…which prohibits agencies receiving federal funds from denying transracial placements solely on the basis of race. It permits the use of race as one of the factors to be considered in adoptive placement….” (Moe, 2007, p.139). This is an extraordinarily apt example of how open to interpretation adoption standards are, and how a committed focus upon each individual case is the only viable avenue to any proper determination.

Historically, older children are less quickly adopted, and this circumstance remains very much in place today. It is in fact classified as a ‘special needs’ adoption, despite the definition of ‘older’ varying from over one year of age to over five, and perhaps with reason: the failure rate of successful adoptions for older children is twice that of the norm. “…Ten percent of those aged six to eight years, and as high as forty percent of children adopted between the ages of twelve and sixteen are disrupted and dissolved” (Lamanna, Riedmann, 2008, p.260). As may be supposed, children who have been on the adoption market for lengthier periods suffer from social disorders of one kind or another, and are typically far more difficult to integrate within a new home.

That difficulty notwithstanding, the increased global nature of our times has fostered greater options for potential adopters. Recent legislation both in the US and abroad enables gay and/or unmarried couples to adopt, and single people are also considered viable potential parents.  Evident everywhere within the adoption sphere is that, the more relaxed the party is in regard to age, race, or special needs, the greater his or her chances of securing and expediting an adoption.

To revert to our Solomon parallel from the beginning, there are fewer disputes prompting the radical solution of splitting a child in two when so many children, albeit not of the traditionally perfect infant mode, are in need of homes.

It comes down to, of course, the procedures involved, and these vary widely, both in state or national mandates as well as in the most localized of situations. Prospective adoptive parents may wait years upon first making an application. If they are exceedingly specific as to age and what race or type of child they want, they may never achieve the adoption, and a great many parents find themselves adjusting original expectations and/or requests to what, precisely, they can best hope for obtaining within a reasonable time. In a very real sense, the adoption marketplace is in a constant state of flux, both legislatively and within the individual cases themselves.

The Real Conflicts

A conundrum lies at the heart of adoption. More exactly, several do, and all are predicated upon the same dilemma: that of judiciously deciding, employing a wide spectrum of both factual and intangible data, an outcome that cannot be predetermined.

As an example, there is the age-old issue of financial fitness of prospective parents, and those with low incomes have been historically precluded from adopting, or have faced nearly insurmountable odds in the process. In point of fact, the poverty of birth parents has often been responsible for the placing of children for adoption. It occurs today: “TANF (New York’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program) puts an enormous strain upon poor parents and effectively encourages them to either place their children within the homes of friends or relatives, or give them up altogether for adoption….” (Smith, 2007, p.164). This is not at all dissimilar from nearly ancient feudal courses taken within unfortunate families.

It is logical that an agency with the power to place a child would prefer, if not insist upon, a parent or parents with a reliably stable financial background. Naturally, the child’s physical welfare is a primary consideration and the parent who cannot properly feed and shelter the child is unfit by any practical standard. The problem arises, as such problems do, in degree. Provided essential needs are attended to, is there anything beyond this which a placement agency has a right to regard, in the matter of finances?

There has been more than sufficient evidence to indicate that increased levels of comfort and financial resources do not necessarily promote a happier child, or even a potentially better citizen. It is blatantly unwise and dangerous for anyone empowered to determine a child’s adoptive fate to believe in an intrinsic greater virtue within the impoverished family. Yet so too is it indisputable that greater means in no way results in a better life or a finer rearing for a child. In any case, what must be most closely examined is the character and nature of the prospective parent(s).

In essence this brings the Solomon/adoption conundrum full circle. The issue of adoption is one strewn with legislation, and there is no dearth of governmental activity regarding its implementations and procedures. This of itself is not damaging, of course; our society is built upon the concept that, in governing ourselves, we take responsibility for enacting laws and policies to regulate even such intensely personal choices as adoption. Children in particular must be able to rely on the law, when there is no initial home environment to offer them protection. We thus find ourselves in a perpetually conflicted cycle, wherein needs, desires and unpredictable outcomes are fed into a machinery which cannot properly address so many variables.

Conclusion

The error we make is in thinking that a more complex web of legislation will remove the obstacles in making these determinations. Legislation can never produce ethical consideration; it can only attempt to safeguard its absence, and “…adoption, more than any other human service, is rife with conflict of interest” (Babb, 1999, p. xxv). As long as individuals, each acting upon their own frame of references, evaluate and render cases of adoption, the human element will predominate over the most stringent laws. Judges yield enormous discretionary powers, as do adoption agency workers who may misplace or delay an application, and not always by chance.

The sanest course to the most effective and potentially harmonious means of handling adoption is through an acknowledged acceptance of the vagaries of this human factor. As the prospective parent most vocally insisting upon a child to adopt may be the least fit, so may the more meek and unassertive man or woman create the best home. As the struggling young mother may be ill-suited to adopt, despite a voracious desire to do so, so too may the older, wealthy couple present the more natural and earnest case. Increased understanding, and not increased legislation, is the key. Training in behavioral modes and character assessment is, here, far more valuable than statistical income reports. The greater the field of psychological awareness and knowledge within those decreeing adoptions, the greater likelihood of protected, nurtured, productive and contented children.

References

Babb, L.A.  Ethics in American Adoption (1999). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Hoksbergen, R.A.C.  Child Adoption: A Guidebook for Adoptive Parents and Their Advisers (1997). London, England: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Lamanna, M.A., Riedmann, A.  Marriages and Families: Making Choices in a Diverse Society (2008). Belmont, CA: Thomson Higher Education, Inc.

Moe, B.  Adoption: A Reference Handbook  (2007). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc.

Smith, A.M.  Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation  (2007). New York, NY: Cambridge University press.