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The Imprint of Another Life
Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility
By Margaret Homans The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11888-5
CHAPTER 1
MONEY AND LOVE
FALLING-IN-LOVE AND THE UNSEEN ECONOMY IN RECENT ADOPTION NARRATIVES
"Love" is a costly luxury. It demands time, space, and resources. The authors of the 1834 Poor Law in Britain recognized this when they legislated that husbands, wives, and their children would be housed separately as the price of public support; the poor were not entitled to love. Love was reinvented in Britain with the advent of industrialization, the rise of the middle class, and the invention of separate spheres that divided the middle-class home from the workplace and gave women a special occupation: the disciplined expression of love through child rearing, material consumption, and moral guidance of the family. As Ruskin puts it, "within her gates" the woman is to be "the centre of order, the balm of distress, and the mirror of beauty."
In George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver, starved for beauty as well as affection after her father's financial ruin and death, falls in love only after she has left work and entered her cousin Lucy's upper-middle-class world of leisure and luxury. The characters' frequent drawing-room musical performances both indicate the extent of their leisure and amplify their emotions, which they have the leisure to indulge. When Maggie trembles and thrills to the music, she looks beautiful and desirable to Lucy's suitor Stephen Guest, who offers her "love, wealth, ease, refinement." Stephen addresses Maggie in the language of "love": "What could we care about in the whole world beside, if we belonged to each other?" (Mill, 569). Stephen's kind of love claims to be a universal emotion, free from all contingencies of time and place, but the narrator emphasizes that, rather that transcending "the world," it flourishes only under certain economic conditions. Earlier in the novel when Maggie is poor, lonely, and "panting for happiness," the narrator comments that "good society" — whose members might look down on poor Maggie — "is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating in furnaces." This "good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony," enables for its members certain manners and emotions that may not be available to those living in "want," which "spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion amidst family discord unsoftened by long corridors" (Mill, 385). Economic conditions, in other words, determine emotional life, and when Stephen offers Maggie "love," he forgets (but she does not) her obligations to characters altogether differently situated. Stephen, because of his economic position, can imagine a "love" that sweeps aside "the world"; Maggie, by contrast, cannot afford it.
Something akin to this love that is said to be "beside" and not "in" the world can be idealized in the relation between parents and children and within economic constraints that are, as in the case of Maggie and Stephen, more visible to some than to others. In Toni Morrison's Sula, Hannah Peace asks her mother Eva a "strange" question: "Mamma, did you ever love us?" Eva, who has struggled up from the deepest poverty, deliberately sacrificing one of her legs (for the insurance money) to support her three children, answers: "No. I don't reckon I did. Not the way you thinkin'." Hannah is prepared to move on, but Eva continues: "You settin' here with your healthy-ass self and ax me did I love you? Them big old eyes in your head would a been two holes full of maggots if I hadn't." When Hannah asks if she ever played with them, Eva recalls how she fought off starvation in the cold winter of 1895. "Don't that count? Ain't that love?" When she sees Hannah burning to death later that day, she throws herself out her upper-story window trying to save her. Hannah's definition of love, that it involves leisure or "play," comes from the relative comfort of her present life, in which there is an abundance of food, time, and sexual love. The narrative links her "strange" questioning of her mother to her fiery death, as if it were retribution for demanding from her mother a "love" that meets the standards of other classes, other economies.
Love is not separable from the economic. Raising children, adopted or not, requires resources, and raising them with that emotional overflow called "love" requires additional resources: think of what it would cost to provide even the conditions of possibility for "love" — that is, at the very least, the focused attention of an adult, a lot of the time — for every child in every orphanage in the world. Moreover, middle-class parenthood enmeshes families in daily acts of consumption, from diapers to prom dresses. Responding to a 2004 collection of ethnographic essays about parenting, a collection that opens with her own 1989 expression of hope that motherhood can be disarticulated from the marketplace, Barbara Katz Rothman remarks, "There seems no way to think beyond consumerism. One can consume differently, but almost whatever one does as a mother becomes just one more cog in the consumer wheel." She notes, too, that we still speak of birth as "having" a baby, as if in unintended recognition of the child's status as property. Most of the time, however, middle-class families with children born to them have no reason to see these costs (much less to connect their affectionate acts of consumption with a marketplace in children) and can believe that having and loving their children is merely "natural." All legal adoptions, by contrast, involve fees, and adoption raises the possibility that a child might be exchanged for money or might be valued or devalued in monetary terms. "Americans," writes Igor Kopytoff, "hold on to a sentimental model of kinship affectivities, consecrate it by dubbing it 'traditional,' and worry that the new reproductive technologies risk commoditizing children into designer products." The naturalizing of bio-family love, its rendering invisible of the economic cost of "love," makes the expenses of adoption seem very conspicuous and sets up an apparent binary opposition between adoptive and biological families. Although, as I am arguing, all family life involves expenditure, adoptive parents bear the uncomfortable burden of making visible the connection between love and money, and many adoptive parents seek strategies for evading this burden. Like Stephen Guest and Hannah Peace, adoptive parents would like to think that their "love" transcends "the world" of hunger or "uncarpeted" rooms. This first section of chapter 1 explores writings that define adoptive family-making in this tendentious way.
But first, how does adoption become burdened with its unsavory task of revealing the cost of "love"? Domestically, the economy of adoption is most visible when it involves differentiating among categories of children. In the United States, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997) provides tax credits for adoptions, with the greater subsidy going to those who adopt special needs children. By making special needs children cheaper to adopt, this subsidy in effect makes all US adoptions into purchases, even though such adoption costs are — as in one stock response to a question commonly addressed to adoptive parents, "How much did she cost?" — comparable to the price of a C-section birth, a price unlikely to be equated with the purchase of a child. Pamela Anne Quiroz's study of hundreds of US adoption agencies reveals that, despite the federal Multi-Ethnic Placement and Inter-Ethnic Placement Acts (1994 and 1996), which prohibit categorization by race, a large proportion of agencies segregate available children by race, placing African American children in the "special needs" category along with children with disabilities and charging different fees depending on the child's skin color. There are agencies advertising "traditional" and "minority" programs, where "traditional" is clearly a euphemism for "white"; another agency charges more than twice for a Caucasian child what it charges for a "full African American," biracial children falling somewhere in between. Quiroz summarizes: "by law race cannot be factored into placement; yet in private adoption children are categorized, labeled, described, and priced along racial lines." "Priced": to Quiroz it is clear that children are being purchased. The transactions involved in transnational adoption are just as visible and can appear outlandish and frightening to US citizens, with shady lawyers demanding unreasonable fees, envelopes of cash handed over in foreign hotel rooms, incomprehensible bureaucratic procedures, and the lines between legally mandated fees and bribery sometimes hard to discern. Margaret Radin aptly ascribes revulsion toward the exchange of money for children to its proximity to human slavery. Families adopting transnationally often express "unease that the movement of the child across national borders transforms it into a commodity bought and sold as a form of embodied value."
In contemporary adoption practice, a "gray market" makes it possible for adopting parents to spend money on administrative costs, donations to orphanages, and the like: anything but payment for the child. As Rothman puts it, "money is changing hands, but no one is technically selling a baby." As in the internet conversations Anagnost observed, parents' "unease" and "anxiety ... often [take] the form of a refusal and resignification of the meaning of monetary exchanges." For example, Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the United States' most visible and influential defenders of transnational and transracial adoption, who traveled to Peru to adopt a child with four thousand dollars hidden in her shoes and two thousand dollars in her clothes, acknowledges that there are "some documented instances ... of improper payments to birth parents" (i.e., "baby-buying") and that transnational adoption can be seen more broadly as "exploitation ... the taking by the rich and powerful of the children born to the poor and powerless." Yet she downplays these unsavory economies of adoption, explaining "stories of 'child trafficking'" or bribery as misperceptions of routine and proper payments to officials, agencies, or lawyers.
Moreover, she recounts horrific stories about orphanages (e.g., in Romania in the 1980s) to argue that the sale and stealing of children "are by no means the worst things that are happening to children or their birth parents today" (Family Bonds, 154–55). She sees adoption largely in terms of individual children, individual parents, and their mutual need for love, arguing, for example, that reluctant "sending countries ... should stop thinking of ... their homeless children as 'precious resources'" and instead adhere to the international human rights treaties "that recognize children's rights to a loving, nurturing environment" (160). Notice here that she inverts the accusation that adoptive parents are purchasers of children: in this formulation, it is the sending countries that see children as commodified "resources" and adoptive families that remove children from circuits of commerce. This shift of focus onto "rights" is echoed in her book's introduction, when Bartholet, countering the criticism of "adoption's potential for exploitation of the poor and ... of racial and ethnic minority groups and the Third World," asserts that adoption "can be understood as liberating" and capable of "expand[ing] options for the oppressed" and "as an important part of reproductive autonomy" (xxi). Focusing on women making "choices" is like focusing on children's "rights": both concepts derive from the Enlightenment liberal humanism that both presumes and produces the individual (rather than, say, the state or the global economy) as the central agent of human life. Although Bartholet intends to differentiate a (bad) property-based idea of adoption from (a good) one based on rights, Rothman points out that rights as a concept is so tied to property (to have rights in one's body depends upon ownership of one's body) as to make rights in and to adoption merely a more palatable name for adoption understood as an exchange of property.
In another instance of her turn from the political or economic to the individual, Bartholet acknowledges that the screening system that pairs parents and children and that promises children competent, nurturing parents "operates primarily on the basis of what looks roughly like a market system, one in which ranking produces buying power" (Family Bonds, 71). Children and parents are rated according to their degree of desirability, with the most "desirable" or "marketable" children (healthy infants) going to those who most closely resemble normative middle- or upper-class biological parents (young, heterosexual, married couples); money, moreover, can enable parents to circumvent this system through costly private adoptions (71; see also xvi). But what bothers her most seems to be not this "market system's" commodification of children but rather the damage it inflicts on individuals when "'marginally fit' parents are matched with the hardest-to-place children, which means the children with the most extreme parenting needs" (71–72). In Peru she observes that "gifts" of cash are needed to make the wheels turn smoothly and tells poignant stories of other adopting parents devastated by losing their newly placed children, apparently because their cash outlays are insufficient. Shifting the reader's attention from commodification and trafficking to individual suffering, she consistently changes the subject from the politics and economics of exploitation to "children in need."
Contemporary critics of transnational adoption argue, against Bartholet and the pro-adoption federal policies her advocacy helped to institutionalize in the 1990s, that the practice is a part of the globalization of capital that is often enmeshed in exploitation and illegalities and that adopted children moving from the underdeveloped to the developed world constitute unpaid and unconsenting labor. David Eng, for example, repeatedly asks, "On which side — capital or labor — does the transnational adoptee fall?" and answers that children adopted from Asia perform the unpaid but "crucial ideological labor" of family-making not only for heterosexual but also for gay and lesbian couples. (Again, children born into their families do this kind of work too, but the exchange is invisible.) Citing the costs of transnational adoptions, he compares "the commodification of infant girls as a gendered form of embodied value bought and sold" to mail-order brides and to "military prostitution and the commodification of Third World female bodies for First World male consumption and pleasure." According to Quiroz, "under the pretext of family rights and parental freedom of choice juxtaposed with the benefits to orphans, the market freedoms enjoyed by participants in private adoption negate issues of ethics and social responsibility." Laura Briggs sees transnational adoption as a practice of economically exploitative imperialism, in which "ideologies of 'rescue'" provide cover for US foreign policy aims. On the basis of an extended historical analysis of adoption from Latin America, Briggs argues that transnational adoption is inextricable from the disappearances and kidnappings occurring during the US-backed anti-communist wars of the 1970s and 1980s. She summarizes the consequences sardonically:
The basic structure through which children came into transnational adoption made it difficult to distinguish between legitimate adoptions — or at least those where the parents had fully and willingly consented, however much that consent may have been conditioned by war's aftermath, community dissolution, refugee status, poverty, violence, or other kinds of desperation — and those that happened as a result of kidnapping, threats, or bribes.
For Tobias Hubinette, commenting on the commodification of children, "contemporary international adoption ... has parallels to the Atlantic slave trade [and to today's] massive trafficking of women and children for international marriage and sexual exploitation." Reports of global child trafficking continue to this day, with newly disturbing reports coming from China in 2012. These critiques shift the emphasis from individuals back to economic and political systems and from the viewpoint of the adoptive parents and nation to that of the birth parents and their communities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Imprint of Another Life by Margaret Homans. Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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