wanting vs. saving
This blog/debate through the New York Times, “Celebrity Adoptions and the Real World,” is a smart collection of opinions on the gray area in the ethics of international adoption. The comments section has some valuable insights, too.
I don’t want to belabor the theme of adoption in my life, but it is an issue that isn’t resolved. When faced with infertility, it took a long time to accept inside myself that I wasn’t comfortable yet with adoption. I am comfortable with caring for children who aren’t mine, clearly, and I am comfortable with the idea of being the only present mother to a child who isn’t mine by blood — in many ways my life would be easier if I were the only mother for Rosie. But I’m not comfortable with taking a single child out of its environment when maybe the solution is even more selfless than getting someone to love: maybe the solution involves giving money or time to build better schools, acquire vaccinations and cleaner water for a community of people so in need that they surrender their children to survive.
Because I’m not sure why we want children. I have made too many decisions in my life based on saving someone, and I don’t feel comfortable picking a child that I want to save, satisfying some craving for martyrdom in myself that I know I can overuse. I don’t want a child because I want someone to love me, because a love of a child to a parent is complicated, probably more complicated than the love of a parent to a child. When we’d gone through all the shots and surgeries, Rosie said, Your baby better be really thankful you did all this, to which I said, It won’t. Children, aside from Rosie, aren’t known for understanding the sacrifices we make to be parents.
Maybe the reason I want children is because of a wanting to learn, to go through the sacrament of motherhood, to feel what it feels like to use my body and my emotions the way that I am biologically intended to. And also because I think I wouldn’t mess a child up too badly, that maybe, with the mixture of Steve’s forgiveness and strength and my good qualities, we will create someone who can take care of this planet better than we have.
Or maybe we won’t. Too many organically-raised children grow up to drink diet coke. Maybe I want children in order to experience that sort of surrender, that a child of my blood could be less like me than a child I adopt. To learn from them — because I think it is true that we are given by however means the children (and pets) that are meant to teach us.
Faced with infertility, I took the path that was unpoetic but that felt like it could satisfy the most inside of us right now. I am still not completely comfortable with my choice. I don’t know later on in life what path we will feel we should then take. Maybe then it will be the right time inside of us to adopt. We said when we chose IVF that it didn’t exclude adoption later on down the road, but at the very least we would donate money equal to the cost of the procedure to help children born into poverty. Why? To assuage my guilt that I made this choice? To ensure through some voodoo that the children born out of me will be healthy and kind? Because, faced with a dilemma, I chose a path that only the privileged could take? One that I can’t talk about with my Catholic no-stem-cell-research neighbors? One that doesn’t make people coo or tsk or look at me more kindly?
These decisions are complicated. I would love to see a blog/debate like the one I linked to where it asked the question not “Is adoption the way Madonna does it ethically sound?” but “Is it ethically sound to choose IVF instead of adoption?” I can’t help but think that hearts would then sway toward Madonna.
But I realize that these moral debates are at play for all of us each day. Our tax money goes towards the war and no one is marching anymore. Children are dying in Darfur and some of us spend our money on plastic toys for our own children without ever seeing the discrepancy. Farmers are underpaid and yet a lot of us choose to buy the bunch of bananas filled with the pesticides and sweat and tears of migrant workers instead of spending a few extra cents on organic fruit. Why does Madonna want a child from Malawi? Why didn’t I buy the organic banana? What is it that I purely want and what is it that I want to save?
May 21st, 2009 at 7:05 am
Oh, Courtney! What an amazing post. I got your e-mail and will reply to it separately, but I just wanted to say right here how much everything you say here resonates with me, even though I have never come close to seriously considering adoption. I have thought about it in the abstract, and I so very much agree with both your questions and your conclusions. There is a big generational/cultural gap, in my family, between my parents’ generation — who *did* have children because they wanted someone to love them, to recognise their sacrifices, to take care of them in return, to support them financially and morally in their old age — and my generation, who is having children because, yes, we simply want to experience this, to learn from it intellectually, emotionally, biologically, all of that (and yes, the gap makes for a very sad conflict of expectations between these two generations, but that’s another story.
Before I got pregnant I tended to downplay the biological part of the learning, but now, after these nine months, it really does seem to me that that in itself would have been a valid reason to do this. I have never had this kind of chance to get to know my body, and perhaps more astonishingly, to know it in so many completely *new* ways after more than thirty years — why should this count less than intellectual growth? Am I just trying to justify the selfishness of reproduction to myself? Maybe. But I have done other things just to experience them, because I thought the experience would be meaningful and would deepen my knowledge of myself, so why not this, when, like you, I think we will be decent parents?
To me, there’s nothing unpoetic about the choice you made, and who cares if outsiders who haven’t thought about all this very much coo or tsk or do something else? Certainly the way you have thought and written about it is immensely poetic. And yes, the decisions are complicated. Have you read “The Peter Singer Solution to World Poverty”? It’s an essay you can find in dozens of anthologies — your last paragraph brought it to mind. I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it, since you are already formulating all these questions.
much love
P
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:22 pm
jeebus. how do we any of us make a decision in this world with so much to painstakingly consider?
and wait — I thought it was you who knew the right thing to do.
pains taken or no, all you can ever do is creep up on this one, and hope to scare out of it what you think is right, b/c it will never ever offer it up easy.
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
thanks a lot. Now I’m going to need at least 8 years of analrapy or psychoparalysis to figure out what I want.