On "Humanitarian" Adoption (Madonna in Malawi)

In a luxury hotel in Acapulco, a group of women from the United States eat, swim, take in the tourist attractions, and wait for the processing of their international adoptions so that they can return home with their new babies. These women are the protagonists of John Sayles's film Casa de los Babys (2003). As it follows one day in their lives, Sayles's film gives voice to the stories of these women, who—despite their varied backgrounds and personalities—all believe that adoption will fulfill their frustrated aspirations for motherhood and thus allow them to "complete" themselves. It creates sympathy for these characters by exposing gender norms that conflate female identity with motherhood, and it makes visible what Ann Anagnost calls a regime of "maternal citizenship" linking parenthood, consumption, social value, and political agency. ¹ But the film also conveys the colonialist belief of many of the women that the babies will be "better off " in the United States simply because they will possess more economic stability. In other words, Sayles reveals the problematic vision of the adoptive mothers that satisfying their desire for motherhood will unquestionably improve the lives of the children they adopt.

Such a belief resonates with what David L. Eng identifies as the original "humanitarian" justifications given to the public for transnational adoption, when it began to be practiced in the United States on a large scale after World War II. ² As Laura Briggs documents, at this time photographic images of starving and abandoned children from overseas war zones began to saturate the news media. After the war, such images were used to build support for organizations like UNICEF and to underpin the burgeoning practice of transnational adoption. ³ The Korean War in particular proved to be a watershed, since it inspired crusaders like the evangelical Harry Holt to publicize the adoption of Korean orphans as a mode of relief work. While Korea was the first and for some time the largest site for transnational adoptions, adoptions from other conflict zones in Asia such as Vietnam and Cambodia followed. ⁴ More recently, transnational adoption has focused on China, where the adoption of baby girls has been scripted as a way to "rescue" these children from a supposedly sexist culture. ⁵ New members of the "diaper diaspora" are also increasingly drawn from what are seen as the poverty- and violence-stricken former Eastern Bloc countries, Latin America, and Africa. ⁶

What Anagnost calls the "theme of salvage" so central to the worldview of Sayles's adoptive mothers, however, is not the whole story revealed in the film. ⁷ Sayles carefully splices together the perspectives of the American women with those of local people whose lives interconnect with the Yanquis. One discourse that the Mexicans introduce to the debate is that of commodity extraction. A would-be revolutionary whose mother owns the women's hotel describes transnational adoption in the language of dependency theory, defining it as one in a long line of historical injustices in which the United States steals "raw materials" from Latin America in order to "refine" them up north. When asked by his friends why the Yanquis can't breed their own children, he replies: "They are too busy making money to procreate." Another character, a former construction worker who has lost his job and comes to the hotel looking for work, straightforwardly and even proudly describes infants as his country's "greatest exportations." ⁸

Contrary to the protest of one of the adoptive mothers—who tells her frustrated husband by phone, "No, I don't think you should call the Korean people . . . This isn't the commodities market"—the discomforting equivalence of babies with other commodities produced in the global south and delivered up to the global north haunts the film. So too do the stories of two different biological mothers, which themselves point to what Eng describes as the "international gendered division of labor" perpetuated by global capitalism. The first is a teenager forced into giving her baby up for adoption by her domineering mother. In this case, the biological father (also a teenager) never even learns...