IV: Is Adoption Right for You?, Page 5
To Get a Servant or Extra Hand on the Farm
It was common once to adopt children to provide more working hands on a farm or in the house if a family had too few children or the balance between boys and girls was wrong. There were actually formal schemes in the Commonwealth and the USA to provide children for this purpose. In some cases the children were well-treated and grew up healthy and happy as well as being a practical addition to their new families. But these schemes were also widely abused, and so were many of the children, who were virtual slaves in their new “families”.
The Child Migrants scheme, which under various guises for over 300 years sent unaccompanied children from Britain to the colonies, especially Australia, has been comprehensively discredited for the untold misery it inflicted on thousands and thousands of innocent children. Likewise, the Orphan Trains of America from 1854 to 1930, while not as pernicious as the Child Migrants scheme, also subjected many of its child “beneficiaries” to a life of serfdom. In Switzerland indigent and orphaned children were auctioned off to farmers and factory owners for over a century, a practice which did not end until the 1950s. Nor is there any place for individual adoptions of that kind any more, if there ever was. But individual adoptions, especially of children from the Third World, still take place where the main, if unacknowledged, purpose is to secure cheap servants. These are thankfully very rare in Britain.
Because All Your Friends Have Babies
Do all your friends have babies and you feel left out? They probably envy your child-free state just as much. After all, you have more disposable income; you can come and go when you please. You don’t have to take your holidays according to the school vacation timetable. You and your partner can make love wherever and whenever you please and make as much noise at it as you want, without fear of being interrupted by the baby or discovered by the toddler! Make the most of your freedom. (You don’t want that kind of freedom? Good sign. Read on.) But having a baby just because everyone else has one is not sensible. You may not be cut out for parenthood. You need a lot more and better motivation than to be one of the crowd. If you feel left out of the conversation when it turns to the contents of little May’s and Rasheed’s nappies, just change the subject. No one, except the childless, is the least bit interested in anyone else’s babies, and everyone except May’s and Rasheed’s mothers will welcome your intervention. Pretty soon your friends’ babies will have turned into spotty, morose adolescent goths, and you can say a silent prayer of thanks.
As a Fashion Accessory or Political Statement
Some Hollywood actors, members of the jet set, and the chattering classes seem to have got the idea that an adopted baby is a fashion accessory or political statement. In the smart circles of New York Long Island society, said Vanity Fair in the summer of 1998, a Chinese baby was a type of status symbol. Trans-racial adoptions by the liberal middle class also have a history as political statements: I am cool/politically aware; therefore, I have adopted this cute little Black/Asian/handicapped baby. These adoptions also have a sad history of failure, from Joan Crawford’s two adopted children on. The cute baby grows up, doesn’t fit in with the image any more and turns out to have a mind of his own. Chinese babies are “out” next season and Amazonian rain forests or penguins are “in”. What happens to the Chinese baby then? That is not to say the rich and famous shouldn’t adopt — there have also been plenty of happy, successful adoptions by members of the A List — but they need to be very sure they are doing it for the right reasons.
The prime reason for placing children in adoptive families, from the social workers’ point of view, is to give them a normal childhood, not the best money can buy. Too often the best money can buy means nannies, a private swimming pool, boarding schools and bodyguards, whereas what children really need are love, parents, dirt, carrots, a football and stability. One of the major faults of systems that allow private placement is that they permit, even encourage, the virtual sale of babies to the highest bidders with too little attention paid to their suitability as parents. One of the main virtues of British adoption law is that by outlawing private adoptions and any kind of payment to intermediaries or the birth family, it has put a stop to the market in babies, and the rich and famous adopt on the same terms and after undergoing the same rigorous assessment as their gardeners.
© Roger Ridley Fenton
