IV: Is Adoption Right for You?, Page 6
To Carry on the Family Name
The Murgatroyd-fforeshaws of Lower Piddle may have come over with William the Conqueror, but you can’t adopt just to continue the family line. If you adopt a son, you may name him Solomon Malcolm Haythorne Murgatroyd-fforeshaw VI, but that still doesn’t guarantee that there will be a Solomon Malcolm Haythorne Murgatroyd-fforeshaw VII. He may become a Catholic priest, or change his name to Joseph Dreamcoat, join a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in northern India and leave the manor house to a cats’ home, or get happily married and have eight daughters. You have to have a better reason than that.
You should also be aware that one of the very few differences in law between born-to and adopted children is that adoptees cannot inherit titles of nobility from their adoptive parents. If you have a title of nobility you cannot pass it on to your adopted child, and when you die it and any property entailed on it will pass to the next eligible person just as if you were childless.
To Have a Successor in the Family Business
The continuation of your business or farm in your family is not a valid motive to adopt. If you are the fifth generation of your family to run your umbrella shop and you have no one to pass it on to, that’s unfortunate, but you cannot adopt a child and have any more expectation that he will take over than if you had your own born-to son or daughter. Likewise, your farm may have been in your family since the 15th century, but your adopted son may decide he wants to be a shoe salesman. If you look around your extended families you may well find someone who would be a worthy successor. By all means adopt, and be glad you may have someone to follow in your footsteps, but be happy for your child to be his or her own person, not a clone.
To Do a Needy Child a Favour
You thought that was a good reason? It isn’t, not on its own, although it often does figure in people’s motivations. The reason why I consider it a bad reason is that very often well-to-do or very religious people have adopted children out of social conscience or guilt at being rich, or to fulfil what they saw as a religious duty (all the major religions say we must take care of orphans). And too often these pious people expect some kind of acknowledgment of their virtue, some gratitude from their adopted children. Charity given in this way does not count very high in the list of virtues, and in the great Rabbi Maimonides’ Eight Degrees of Charity, it only ranks fourth from the bottom. If you’re burdened with guilt because you’ve got too much money, my address is at the front of this document; I’ll be only too glad to help you out.
Children won’t let themselves be used in this way. The surest way to make a child ungrateful is to let him know you expect gratitude. Besides, there is no reason why a child should be grateful to you for adopting him. After all, he didn’t ask to need to be adopted, any more than he asked to be born, and he quite possibly didn’t have any more say in the matter. We adopters are the ones who should be grateful for being given the marvellous gift of children, regardless of how they come to us. We aren’t in debt to our children for letting us adopt them, but we should be eternally grateful for this alternative way to become parents; not everyone who asks for a child is given one.
Now, have I put some of you off? I hope that if you have read the foregoing section carefully and honestly, either alone or with your partner, and found your motives for adopting fitting primarily into one or more of the categories, that you will go away and think very carefully about taking the idea of adoption any further. Right now you are probably not a person who should adopt. There are other alternatives which might answer the need for children in your life or which might prepare you to have another think about adoption later. I discuss these after the next section.
If you have read this section and not found yourself staring back from the page too blatantly, you are ready to go on to the next section, where I address some other ideas about adoption and adopters.
Next: Chapter V: Are You Right for Adoption?
© Roger Ridley Fenton
