Adoption is a complex billion-dollar business that often increases inequality.

wocinsolidarity:

Here’s an even harder truth: The adoption industry is a business. It generates billions of dollars each year and requires other people’s children in order to stay profitable.

Here’s the toughest truth yet: Those children are almost always the children of poor and working class people, people of color, native and indigenous people, and young people. The people who adopt them, who directly benefit from the economic and racial oppression of these groups, are most often middle and upper-middle-class people and are primarily white.

The mainstream feminist movement has been, by and large, pro-adoption and has resisted an explicitly intersectional position on the inequities and injustices that typically bring adoptive families together. There are many reasons for this, but here are the two I think about the most:

1) Mainstream feminism has historically assumed that the decision to relinquish a child for adoption is a choice that people make freely, and that the people who choose it do so because they don’t believe in abortion.

2) Mainstream white feminists are part of the primary demographic that stands to benefit the most from adoption.

There will likely always be children who need to be adopted into loving families and held tightly by those families, their communities, and high quality support services across a lifetime. But if, as feminists, we believe that all people should have the ability to make informed and supported choices about becoming parents or not, then we should work to make these instances rare. That means, of course, there will be fewer adoptable children, but we must understand that families are not interchangeable and that the desire to become a parent through adoption does not make anyone entitled to someone else’s child. As it stands in this country, market forces in adoption, coupled with racist and classist state interventions and a reductive societal narrative that sees adoption as a fairy-tale ending where everybody wins, mean that people who have class and race privilege will continue to build their own families through the constrained choices, coercion, and loss of those who do not. This is a feminist issue.

The Reproductive Justice movement, pioneered and led by Black feminists and women of color, teaches us that all people should have “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” If we think about adoption through this lens, and in particular, the right to parent the children we have, we see that we must ask something very different of mainstream feminism. Committing ourselves to reproductive justice, to human rights, demands that we fight for the economic and racial justice to ensure all pregnant people are able to make informed, authentic decisions for themselves, and that families who want to stay together have the autonomy and support necessary to do so.