Who's Afraid of Open Adoption?
Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.
ince I’ve given up my posting on infertility boards, I had to find other places to do my chatting. Unsurprisingly I moved to adoption boards, such as the one at Adoption.com. There I found an underused section of the forum: the African American Adoptive Parents section. I thought it would be fun to chat with other black adoptive parents. So I set out to get some chatter going in that section.
There was a question nagging at me for a little while. I know that many potential adoptive parents have concerns about openness in adoption. Yet in my narrow experience, I’ve seen that black potential adoptive parents seem to be even more leery of open adoption than majority parents. I wondered why that was. Could there be something cultural that made us want/need to have closed adoption?
I know that when I started the process toward adoption, I was a little worried about “sharing” the child with his/her firstmother. Yet when I learned how beneficial this relationship would be for the child, I relented. Still there were concerns about whether I would be seen as the baby’s real mother.
Luckily as we developed a relationship with Josie before Zara’s birth, all my fears evaporated. I became able to fully understand the beauty of open adoption.
Yet among some of the members of the African American support group I belong to, I find that there is still a lot of anxiety and discomfort about the concept of open adoption among the black couples. I asked two of the women whether they could express what they feared would happen in an open relationship with their children’s firstmothers, but they were not able to describe what made them feel this discomfort.
So I posed the question, are black adoptive parents less comfortable with open adoption? An interesting discussion ensued. One very eloquent woman quoted the 4 myths of adoption from Silber and Speedlin’s book, Dear Birthmother:
1) firstmother doesn’t care or she wouldn’t have given up her child.
2) first parents will forget about their unwanted child.
3) secrecy in adoption is best to protect the child.
4) adoptive kids who really love their parents won’t search for their first parents.
The poster posits that all potential adoptive parents can buy into these 4 myths, not just black parents. There’s been a lot written to explore and dispel these myths. She does go on to describe some reasons why black couples/families specifically may be less likely to choose open adoption.
I believe that African Americans are less likely to open their home to adoption because we have begun to believe the stereotypes and don’t want to welcome ‘unwanted elements’ into our lives. Firstparents struggling with addictions, including the hustling lifestyle, are a part of the ‘unwanted element’ we feel we’d be exposing ourselves and our families too.
I’m not naive. I’ve been working with the ‘unwanted’ for almost two decades now. I know how challenging they can be…I also know that children should not have to suffer the sins of their parents-bio or adoptive. We all err when we assume that every child born into challenging circumstances inheritance are addictive, anti-social, borderline personality bio parents who’ll intrude and invade your home and lifestyle. That’s the stereotype. It’s wrong and unfair.
Now I found her last statement to be particularly compelling. We’ve seen more and more separation in the black community between the haves and the have nots. Back in the day, blacks used to live in merged communities where you would see the black doctor living side by side with the black janitor. Now the black middle and upper classes have moved away from living in black communities (for reasons of perceptions of safety, better schooling and neighborhood opportunities, among other reasons). This leads to a ghettoization of the lower middle and poor black families creating a schism in the community.
I know this schism too well. My family had an “us” versus “them” ideology regarding blacks living in poverty. It was the “I clawed my way out, so I’m not going back” mentality. What fascinates me about this is that a reluctance to open adoption in our community might be partly due to a desire to not interact/connect with “those people” meaning the druggin’, hustlin’ fucking around members of our community. Combine this fear with a tendency to buy into the 4 myths of adoption listed above, and you have a problematic combination that causes a rejection of open adoption.
This is blowing my mind.
Granted, we’re speculating here. I’ve not done a study to look at why blacks are reluctant to choose open adoption, or to see if my brief observations of this reluctance actually bear out when examined scientifically. But I’m interested in the ideas presented.
Any thoughts on this? Let’s discuss.