Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in U.S. Adoption Practice

Two. "Kids Need Families to Turn Out Right": Public Agency Adopters

“kids need families to tuRn out Right” Public Agency Adopters Without the support groups, one or both of us would be dead. You’ve heard the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”? Well, it’s taken the whole damned East Coast to rear my daughter! —single mother, puBlic agency adopter, 1999 There has long been a socioeconomic divide between those who adopt children from foster care and those who adopt privately or through private agencies. For decades, most foster parents have come from the working and lower-middle classes (see Mandell, 1973: 43). Public agencies did not actively solicit adoption applications from these caregivers until reforms of the 1970s permitted foster parents to adopt. Public agency adoptions began to permit kin adoptions in the 1970s, followed by greater acceptance of single-mother adoptions in the 1980s. Kin adoptions reflected the class and racial/ethnic backgrounds of children in foster care. Single-mother adoptions included more middle-income professionals and whites than the children’s backgrounds would predict. The ten couples I interviewed who had adopted or were seeking to adopt through public agencies—whether through the state’s Department of Social Services or its designated private agency partners for adoptions labeled “special needs” or “hard to place”—shared certain characteristics. The ones who remained throughout the screening and training process were less well off than the people I interviewed who were seeking private or international adoptions . Based on the wives’ and husbands’ self-reported occupations, in most cases, the public agency adoptive couples’ household incomes were comparable to those of the single professional women seeking to adopt through public channels. Public agencies also provide home-study services to people not planning to obtain children from public sources. These participants in the preadoptive training/home study sessions are more likely to have higher two 1 “kids need families to turn out right” incomes. One prosperous white couple remained in the training sessions to complete their home study. They opted for international adoption after expressing a fear, based on the pre-adoptive parental training sessions they attended, that they would never get a healthy infant going through public channels. The prospective adopters in the training sessions I observed were not all white, in contrast to those in the private agencies not contracted to the state for special needs and older-child adoption. But compared with the children awaiting adoption, there were a disproportionate number of whites nonetheless.The public adopters’ class composition mirrored what stable employment , freedom from addiction, or relative nonviolence would have made of the vast majority of foster children’s birth families. In short, public agency adopters shared class characteristics with the parents of foster children, but proportionately more were white. The public agency adopters as a group, however, showed the greatest ethnic and racial diversity of any prospective adopters (private agency or independent). not the “honeymooneRs”: woRking-Class CouPles as adoPteRs The discussion of family in these working-class adoptive couples’ narratives all stressed the desirability of a stable nuclear unit within a wider net of supportive kin, but otherwise their situations and reasons for adopting varied. The white couples in the sample tended to be younger and most had infertility issues; the one middle-class African American couple was adopting for infertility reasons. The two working-class African American couples were seeking to add to their families, as were three working-class white couples. Two of the latter were adopting because they were starting a second family as a result of remarriage; in both cases the husband had non-resident children from a former marriage and did not wish to sire any more children. The remaining middle-class white couple revealed their baby-boomer status when they identified their motivation to adopt as arising from an interest in “Zero Population Growth.” The two working-class African American couples were in their mid-forties, older than all but one of the other couples by a decade. They were starting second families: their first set of children had grown and moved out of the house. As one of the mothers, Simone, put it, “We have room in our home and hearts now that the kids are grown for another family.” Her husband, Aaron, added, “Children need families and we did a fine job with our other Blue-riBBon BaBies and laBors of love 0 ones.” When asked what their older daughter thought of...