A Gay Man in Solidarity to the Adoptees Rights Movement
Almost everything written by gays around adoption is promoting gay parenting. In this article, as gay man of colour I want to discuss about deeper unspoken matters: adoptees’ rights.
Adoption of an unrelated individual as we know it today in the West is a social practice that is rarely discussed critically. It’s benignly accepted that adopting equates to a humanitarian and selfless gesture, and that it should be universally encouraged. More importantly, it’s never read as impeding on the human rights of children and their parents. Being gay and family-oriented, I had assumed that I’d adopt a child because there are so many individuals in need of a loving home and it would be selfish to create a child of my own. I had the chance, through a documentary project, to interview adoptees’ rights activists and understand, to my surprise, that this way of thinking must cease.
The passive discourse around adoption is partly caused by the portrayal of adopted people on films and television in strictly emotional terms through stories of reunion, search and identity. We’ve been accustomed to this limited framing where the adopted person becomes a sentimental display for the adopter’s benevolence. That narrow narrative undermines the potential of any political discussion around the power dynamics that generate family separation in the first place.
When we talk about adoption amongst higher social classes, it’s always in terms of reproductive rights, when it’s actually an issue of reproductive justice. On one hand, upper and middle class westerners are seeking solutions for either their infertility or for fulling their ideals of a family and are claiming rights to access parenthood. On the other hand, activists in reproductive justice are fighting for family preservation within disempowered communities through holistic approaches: creating parental resilience, promoting social connections, teaching parenting skills and child development theories, giving concrete family support in times of need, collaborating among the several community and/or neighbourhood systems that are directly involved in the family, and the list goes on.
To fully understand the debate, adoption has to be examined throughout its history. Before the 1970s, unmarried mothers, also called “les filles-mères” in Québec where I live, were shamed by an intrinsically sexist society. The unwed mothers who often were confused by the transformation of their bodies through pregnancy and at the same time afraid of the consequences of the stigma they bore, had to either surrender their baby to their death, go through dangerous backyard abortions or pretend their newborn was a younger sibling. Most fathers simply remained invisible out of guilt, leaving the mothers on their own. Thus, with the increasing amount of children in the streets, the Grey Nuns in Montréal created orphanages . This social phenomenon was carried out through the clergy who was enforcing values which stigmatized unwed pregnancy, and at the same time, was parading around the province to sell the illegitimate children in rural homes.
In the mid-19th century, the Sisters of Mercy were created out of the need to shelter unwed mothers from the public’s eyes. They created in Montreal unwed mothers’ home located on René-Lévesque, which interestingly enough, I can see from my bedroom window. Today, this building is vacant and in a poor condition. Now owned by the University of Quebec in Montreal, it is roamed by only a handful of security officers, unwilling to answer to any of my questions about its dark history.
I found one of the last Sisters of Mercy alive who worked in those homes. From her point of view, mothers were well treated to the point that some of them remained life-long friends. She dismisses the claims made by mothers saying they were coerced into surrendering their children to adoption. In 2012, the National Post published a story “where most of the mothers interviewed […] said the coercion was systematic: From the church-run maternity homes where accommodation was sometimes predicated on adoption and where mothers had to write a letter to their unborn child explaining the separation; to the social workers who concealed information about social assistance and who told single mothers they could be charged with child endangerment; to the medical staff who called the women “sluts” and denied them painkillers, and who reportedly tied teenagers to their beds or obstructed their view of labour with a sheet.”[i] The reason why we don’t hear much about it is that many of these mothers have internalized the shame and side with the sisters who enforced family separation.
When interviewing the Sisters of Mercy’s spokesperson, there was still today no understanding that something better could have been done. It was described that a good social worker’s role was to remind the mother of society’s oppression. They’d discourage the mothers from keeping their children by repeating throughout their pregnancy that they’d be selfish mothers if they kept their babies. They’d remind the mother that she’d be discriminated at her workplace and that no man would want to marry her thereafter. The spokesperson explained, “It was for the child’s best interest.”
The popular understanding is that mothers made a willing choice of relinquishing their child. In my view, in light of history, all surrendered children have been made through subtle systems of coercion. Would a woman with the tools, means, and dignity make the same choices?
During an interview for my upcoming documentary on adoption issues a mother described to me:
“Those homes for unwed mothers were just like a machine; eating you and throwing you back in society with no support. No one ever explained to me anything of what I was about to live through.”
But things shifted around the world for women starting in the late 60s. In Quebec, under Trudeau and Bourassa’s governments, the Council for Women’s Status was created. Women had access to paid maternity leave, tax deduction for child care expenses, legal abortion, the pill and increased child allowances. The Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms was adopted which enshrines gender equality and prohibits discrimination in hiring and promotion on grounds related to sex, marital status or pregnancy. In other words, women had access to financial means and consequently were able to raise their children.
Eerily, this history sounds exactly similar to what has been recognized in Australia as the Forced Adoption Era. Unlike French Canadian mothers, the Australians have developed a widespread political language to understand the horrors that happened to them. In 2013, the first female prime minister of the country made a moving national apology to mothers, fathers and adopted people who were victims of this discriminatory system. Canada has a long way to go. Mothers here still internalize their shame and only a few have come out of the fog.
With the rise of women’s rights, the number of local adoptable children dropped drastically. And in response to the market shift, international adoption boomed. At the end of the American War in Vietnam in 1975, three thousand “war orphans” were put on planes and shipped to the West. This event captured popular imagination under the name of the “Babylift Operation”. Soon, couples were putting greater pressures on the government to systemize international adoption. Baby trafficking exploded and it took a decade later to become regulated.
In parallel, in vitro fertilization (IVF) was being developed by researchers around the world. Pioneer in IVF, Alan Trounson describes:
What had happened in the late ’60s, is that abortion was made available to women, and so suddenly there were no babies for adoption. We had to develop something different because the physicians who were then treating women for infertility were being pressured much more to get a solution, and so IVF was born out of that particular need.[ii]
Whilst in the West, we now feel uncomfortable to adopt out our single mothers’ children, hypocritically, we have lower standards for other countries: we’d gladly adopt children from South Korea’s single mothers who suffer from the same social stigma that we had before the 70s. Have you noticed that adoption agencies portray potential adoptees as orphans? How uncomfortable would it be if those children were marketed with their mothers in the background as victims of systemic inequality?
Let’s not forget, adoption is an industry after all, and like any other, it obeys to the same dynamics of supply and demand. With international adoption regulated and local adoption limited, the demand for babies was so strong that offshore surrogacy was created in the turn of the new millennia. As professors Cuthbert and Fronek explain in a report for the Australian Institute for Family Studies:
Inequalities in wealth and power have always underwritten the exchange of children for adoption, and continue to underwrite the production of children in surrogacy arrangements. The children of the affluent are not and never have been exchanged to be raised by the poor. The shift from intercountry adoption to commercial offshore surrogacy does not change these political and economic dynamics, for all that it might (…) offer apparently progressive and transformative possibilities for parenthood outside heterosexual norms of family formation in Australia. [iii]
The demand is driven from this very fact: in most cultures, womanhood and manhood are indissociable from parenthood. You can’t fully be a woman or a man if you haven’t raised a child. For death, we have funerals to help overcome the feelings of loss. With infertility, there are no tools. Therefore, many privileged infertile couples and individuals don’t know how to overcome childlessness and will have desperate recourse to three expensive family formation services: IVF, adoption or offshore surrogacy.
For a large portion of the LGBTQ+ community, the mimicking of heteronormativity through the ownership of children can allow some sense of belonging and acceptance within their own social realm. The impossibility of creating children through biological means is not dealt with emotionally, but instead with power and with money.
Whether you know an adopted person or not, there are slight chances that you’ll hear an adoptee talking about this issue. Adoptees are an invisible minority of society. Often assimilated to their adoptive families, they are isolated from other adult adoptees and do not develop a political language around their unspoken reality. Many feel a split sense of belonging between their family and their adoptive family and prefer to keep their feelings quiet. It is usually later in their lives when their adoptive parents pass away or when they have their own children that they are triggered to speak critically about the injustices of adoption. A Minnesota’s University’s study in 2008 showed that adoptees are 4 times more likely to commit suicide and to self-harm than non-adopted persons, in addition to the fact there is an overrepresentation of adoptees in substance abuse.[iv]
It’s a reality that can be compared to what LGBTQ+ people were experiencing in the 60s, where most had double identities and hid their true selves, afraid of challenging their sense of belonging or causing damage to the family unit.
To sum it up, the system of adoption is a service where the adopters are the main beneficiary. It’s not selfless. The UN Convention on the Rights of Children does remind us that adoption is not considered as humanitarian aid. In the words of Ontario Provincial Court judge Nevin, adoption is defined this way:
The concept of adoption is a unique creature of statute that has been referred to as the most significant procedure which can arise within the legal system. It involves the total extinguishment of the birth parents rights and the establishment, legally, retroactively and permanently, of the parent-child relationship between a child and a person who is not the biological parent of the child. Once an adoption order is made the child becomes the child of the adoptive parent and the adopted child ceases to be the child of the person who was his or her parent before the adoption order was made.[v]
In simple terms, adoption is the transfer of a child’s ownership. It fabricates a permanent identity unto the adopted person and guarantees the acquisition. In its core, adoption does not guarantee the child’s safety nor its well-being, unlike what popular culture like to sell to us. Some adoptees do even consider the system as legalized human trafficking.[vi]
As a filmmaker, I am concerned by the lack of diversity in the narratives on adoption. Adopters often flood the media coverage saying how hard, long and expensive it is to adopt. What we are missing is the voice of adult adoptees speaking critically against the system of adoption.
This is what led me to make “My Invisible Mother”, an animated documentary that portrays an adult adoptee, William Hammersley who recalls the social realities that forced his mother to put him up for adoption. It’s really short — three minutes long — but it achieves two important things: (1) adoption is not told from the adopter’s perspective and (2) adoption is not advertised as a happy-forever fairytale. The film has won “Best Documentary” at the Canberra Short Film Festival, which has symbolic value since it was also where the National Apologies for Forced Adoption was made in 2013.
Have you ever heard anyone talk against adoption? Like in any debate such as abortion, immigration or gay rights, we hear both arguments for and against. However, adoption is left under the radar. It’s still too taboo to question its validity. As adoptees from around the world are now connecting through the Internet, they are starting to voice their personal experiences as a political reality. Hopefully, in the near future, they will be able to claim justice — including adoption abolition — without being dismissed for being ungrateful. For that, we need to recognize that adult adoptees are an invisible minority who have something to say as a political group.
Read for yourself. Here are my some favorites:
- Not Your Orphan by Blake Gibbons
- This Adoptee Life by Amanda Medina
- Liz Latty’s blog
ENDNOTES
[i] Carlson, Katheryn Blaze. (March 9th 2012). Curtain lifts on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers in Canada. The National Post. Retrieved from <http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/curtain-lifts-on-decades-of-forced-adoptions-for-unwed-mothers-in-canada>
[ii] Donovan, B. (Writer & Producer). (2011). The baby maker. Australian Story [Television series]. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved from <www.abc.net.au/austory/transcripts/s289014.htm>.
[iii] Cuthbert, D. and Fronek, P. (2014) Perfecting adoption? Reflections on the rise of commercial offshore surrogacy and family formation in Australia, p.56.
[iv] Margaret A. Keyes, Stephen M. Malone, Anu Sharma, William G. Iacono, Matt McGue. (2013). Risk of Suicide Attempt in Adopted and Nonadopted Offspring. Retrieved from: <http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/ early/2013/09/04/peds.2012–3251>.
[v] Duhaime, Lloyd. (2011). Adoption Law in Canada. Retrieved from: <http://www.duhaime.org/LegalResources/ FamilyLaw/LawArticle-190/Adoption-Law-in-Canada.aspx>
[vi] Dohle, A. (2008), Against Child Trafficking. Retrieved from: http://www.againstchildtrafficking.org/
