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Social Class
Adoption is and has always been deeply imbued in classism, as it is adoption's intent and most often outcome to move a child from lower to higher-class status. This is truer today than ever, as adoption has become a business of finding children for clients, and less of a charitable act of finding homes for needy children. The clients being served by adoption are adopters who pay the adoption fees. In the adoption industry, as it is now called, the "merchandise" is the children. As with most merchandise, fees (prices) vary depending on desirability and demand, which in this case is based on age, health, and skin color. These distinctions thus create discrimination of handicapped, older and non-white children, while adopting couples are discriminated against based on their socio-economic abilities with couples having the "means" getting the more sought after commodity: healthy, white, newborns. All of these factors add to the classist and discriminatory nature of adoption. Class and discrimination remain a part of adoption when it comes to the issue of opening sealed adoption records. This essay makes the case that: 1) adoption is classist; it is easier for richer, more powerful, and better-educated (higher class) people to take children from poorer, weaker, and less-educated (lower class) people; 2) adoptees are a discriminated against minority denied the same rights as non-adoptees; 3) sealed adoption records serve this classist, discriminatory system by preventing any and all contamination from the adoptees' original birth status to his newly acquired status obliterated to "protect" cross contamination from one social class to the other.
A Discriminated Minority
Numerically, adoptees represent a small percentage of the total population of this country. At last count, 2% which has perhaps as much as doubled with the increase in international adoptions over the past decade. However, numbers alone do not identify a group as a minority. Women, for instance, though they are nearly half the world's population, are recognized worldwide as a minority in that they are treated unequally by the dominant group. Likewise, there is approximately the same percentage of left-handed people as there are homosexuals, yet one is discriminated against and the other not. Rather than being based on a numerical or percentage figure, a minority is defined as a group of people who are singled out for unequal treatment, and who regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination (an act of unfair treatment directed against a group or individual based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, religion, or politics) which excludes them from full participation in the life of their society (Wirth 1945). Membership in a minority is referred to as being an ascribed status; it is not voluntary, but comes through birth.
The shameful heritage of America includes the almost total annihilation of Native Americans with the remainder being placed in isolation on reservations and denied rights, slavery of African Americans, exploitation of Chinese Americans, internment of Japanese Americans, just to name a few. Immigrants to this country were spared harsh treatment only by assimilating into the "melting pot" -- forgoing their heritages in order to be accepted and find employment and housing. We are currently becoming more respectful of each individual's unique heritage, and desire to re-establish ethnic pride. Multicultural-ism and pluralism, where minorities maintain their separate identities and cultural practices, have thus become politically correct goals. The melting pot metaphor is rapidly being replaced by that of a "tossed salad."
Yet adoptive parents, particularly in the past, were encouraged to treat their adopted children "the same as if" they were born to them. Indeed one would expect parents to provide their adopted offspring with love and care equal to that of any child born to them. However, expectations of being "the same as" create a climate in which it is easy to ignore the adoptees' origins and genetic heritage. While minority status crept up on adoptees quite insidiously, developing so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent, it is nonetheless a very harsh and severe form of assimilation that is forced upon them. Unlike racial minorities who have assimilated through marriage -- a consensual, voluntary act of two adults -- adoptees are assimilated as infants and young children with no choice in the matter. Some adoptees are removed from their country of origins, their native tongues and cultures, in addition to being taken from their original families. They are expected to accept and adopt the culture of their new family "as if" it were their own.
Strangely, however, though treating adopted children "the same as" non-adopted children has long been a recognized policy, they are not treated the same as their non-adopted counterparts when it comes to access to their own birth records. The inequality of treatment in regard to denying adoptees equal access to their own birth records, clearly makes them a discriminated against minority based on birth status. The fight to regain for adoptees the same rights as non-adoptees in regard to access of their birth records is therefore a civil rights issue and compromises of these rights such as mandatory registries or intermediary systems are unacceptable. How has this discrimination been allowed to go on? By being wrapped in a cozy blanket of protection.
Who's Protecting Whom?
Protecting individuals almost always involves denying them certain rights and privileges. In some instances laws are made to protect all people equally, such as automobile seat belt laws. Other protective restrictions apply only to certain "classes" or groups of individuals, such as protecting children by not allowing them to drink or drive, work, or go to war. Adults deemed mentally incompetent, likewise are awarded certain "protections" and denied certain freedoms. Society also protects itself from criminals by restricting their freedom and rights through incarceration.
There is a need to be cautious, however, not to "protect" capable people who do not need or want protecting. Such was the case when it was alleged that women needed to be protected from the strains of higher education, believed to be too much of a "burden on [their] frail capacities" (Henslin 1999). Women were considered the "weaker" sex and therefore were kept subordinate and infantilized by not allowing them to own property in their own name, sign contracts, serve of juries or vote. Today it is seemingly unacceptable to treat one group of American citizens differently based on their biological differences, and yet this is precisely what we do to adoptees. We infantilize them and treat them either as needing protection, or as people others need to be protected from.
Protecting adoptees from "the stigma of illegitimacy" has long been the stated and popularly acceptable reason to keep adoption records the sealed. Researchers who have studied the history of the sealed record in this country, however, have determined that the protection of the adoptee never quite held up as the real reason. More often, sealed records were intended, and remain, to protect adoptive parents from the intrusion of birthparents. Be that as it may, the stigma of illegitimacy is no longer viable for continuing to withhold this information from those who are in large number pressuring to have it.
Interestingly, organized efforts in opposition of sealed records therefore
changed the purported benefactor of their efforts from the "protection"
of adoptees to that of the "protection" of birth parents: the non-client,
non-best interest party to the adoption, whose rights they are clear to point
have been relinquished. Adoptees have thus become a discriminated minority,
trapped by antiquated so-called "protective" measures, even if they
are no longer (or ever were) the ones being protected. Whatever the original
reason for sealing the records, it is no longer clear if they remain sealed
to protect adoptees from birth mothers, or vice versa, or to protect adoptive
parents from birth parents.
( Except from The Dark Side of adoption by Mirah Riben.)
Mirah Riben, birthmother and adoption rights activist, author of "shedding light on…The Dark Side of Adoption" (1988). http://www.freeyellow.com/members2/adoptbook/
Sources:
Henslin, James S. 1999. Sociology: A Down to Earth Approach. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 293-295.
Gitlin, Todd. "The Heart of Being Human" Solinger, Ricki. 1992. Wake up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
Wirth, Louise. 1945. "The Problem of Minority Groups" In The Science of Man in the World Crisis, Ralph Linton, ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
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