The Political Geographies of Pregnancy

5. Adoption and Surrogacy: Children as Commodities, Wombs for Rent

115 5 Adoption and Surrogacy: Children as Commodities, Wombs for Rent When money is as central to a human service as it is in adoption practice, money not only drives the process, but it shapes the results. —Anne Babb, Ethics in American Adoption There is an amazing, glaring silence in the politics of motherhood : the voices of birthmothers are absent from policy-making, news coverage, and legal disputes. Whenever I mention the race, class, and nationalistic privileges and injustices on which modern adoption practices are based, I am sure to offend some people. Feminists rarely discuss adoption (Cornell, 1998: 96–99 and 1999; Solinger, 1992: 240, 246). We have published a lot about surrogacy, abortion, single mothers, and family law, but we seem to leave out adoption. I think this is because it hits too close to home. Many academic feminists have adopted children themselves or have relatives who have. Academic feminists, despite our somewhat precarious position in the academy, are middle-class, articulate, and able to utilize social services, lawyers, and networks to get what we want. Our children are rarely, I would venture, “given up” for adoption. Drucilla Cornell writes “that it is a form of class elitism to think that yearnings of the heart are available only to the middle class and the wealthy” (1998: xii). I appropriate her point for my examination of adoption and surrogacy. 116 The Political Geographies of Pregnancy Adoption Markets The few times we hear from birthmothers involved in our closed, hierarchical, patriarchal, and male-normed adoption system, we learn that their grief and sorrow is often lifelong (Robbins, 2001; Cannold, 2000: 108–10; Crary, 2000; Babb, 1999: 178; McKay, 1998; Saltzman, 1998; Sullivan , 2001a and 2001b; Solinger, 1992). Allowing women to contract out their wombs, as well as holding them to these contracts, also indicates, in Carole Pateman’s words, “a transformation of modern patriarchy.” “Father-right,” she observes, “is reappearing in a new, contractual form” (1988: 209). As Anne Babb points out, many professionals involved in the adoption business fail “to serve birth parents ethically or even competently ” (1999: 90; see also Freundlich, 2000). Only in a legal system so embedded in patriarchy could a birthmother be erased, her human rights denied, in the name of the sanctity of contracts and the need to protect patriarchal family forms (Cornell, 1998: 102–10). Adopted children also feel cut off from their heritages and histories and have to battle heartless rules and laws erected to erase the birthmothers and bar the children from locating them (Lifton, 1994 and 1998). Sometimes adoption is glibly thrown out as the alternative to abortion . What both abortion and adoption must be, many feminist observers maintain, is a personal choice. Natalie Angier, a New York Times science writer puts it this way: For all the reasons that I remain a staunch supporter of abortion rights, for all the reasons that a woman is entitled to her full sexuality regardless of the unreliability of birth control and of the human heart, here is another one. It is vicious to force a woman to bear a baby she doesn’t want, to prod her vengefully through the compound priming of pregnancy and force her to be imprinted through every physiological contrivance at evolution ’s disposal with an infant she can’t keep, an infant that will remain forever stuck in her blood, an antigen to the attachment response, try as she will to shed her sad past. The “adoption option” is fine if a young woman chooses it and is at peace with it. But option it must remain, for the body is a creature of habit, and the longer it has been exposed to the chemistry of bondage, the more prone it becomes to emotional flashbacks, to recurrent neuroendocrine nightmares. . . . (1999: 349–50) American adoption practices are rife with potential and real conflicts of interest, the taint of money and baby-selling, and the illusions that adoption is easy and painless. As one scholar points out, adoption does not only “build families” but also tears them apart by severing the birth Adoption and Surrogacy 117 families from their children (Babb, 1999). Professionals involved in the adoption business often have conflicts of interest vis-à-vis the birthmothers because their adoption agencies depend on babies being placed for adoption. Adoptive parents are sometimes harmed by these conflicts of interest if they are not told the full story of...