"When Adoption is Foreign"
by Tricia Shore

(Originally published in The News & Observer, September 17th, 1999)

     "She's going to Russia in October," my friend tells me regarding our mutual acquaintance. "She's adopting a child." My friend expected a smile from me, a congratulatory word perhaps. One year ago, I may have given her these things, but I do not today.
     In the past year, I have fulfilled my life-long dream of finding my mother. My reunion and subsequent research have led me to realize that adoption does not always have a fairy-tale ending. Adoptees grow up with people who are legally deemed our parents, but according to nature they are not. The legal lies that adoption created for me failed to work.
     For many years I did a fabulous job of pretending that the people who adopted me were my real parents. I wanted them to be. Because of my coloring, I could pass for their natural daughter. We pretended, but even when the pretending almost worked, we knew that no matter how much we wanted to be a natural family, we were not: I was not genetically related to them.
     While not all adoptees feel the need to search for their roots, I did. I felt a strong connection to my natural mother and father, even though I had no idea where or who they were.
     Despite a law that aims to separate natural families from each other, I was able to find my family after a lengthy search. The first time I saw my mother's picture in her high school annual I knew that she had given birth to me - even though a mistake in the yearbook had put the wrong name beside her picture.
     For the first time I was able to see someone to whom I was genetically connected. I could no longer pretend that the wonderful people who raised me were my natural parents. I had seen the woman who held me for nine months, who gave me my bones and skin, whose genes I will give to my children.
     Although not all reunions are happy ones, our reunion is going very well. Even though my mother and I have spent 34 years apart I am amazed by how comfortable I am with her, how much we are alike. There is almost a psychic connection that I can only explain as being in the magic of genes, in the mystery of our DNA.
     Removal from my natural environment and seperation from my parents has always caused me to cringe when I see bumper stickers that tout adoption as "a loving word." I never quite believed that seperating a mother and child was a loving word, no matter how happy it made the people who adopted.
     From reading the work of Rickie Solinger, I have found that after World War II white unmarried mothers were encouraged by social workers and the psychiatric community to give away their children to infertile couples. Unfortunately, my mother succumbed to this pressure, a decision we both regret. Black mothers often kept their infants, partly because the demand was not as high as for white infants.
     Instead of accepting infertility, whites adopted to fulfill the idealistic goal of a nuclear family. Adoption agencies told people who adopted that the children would not be curious about their genetic backgrounds.
     After 1973, women in the United States began to have more control over their own fertility. The demand for healthy white infants remained high; the supply decreased. Infertile couples and others who desired children but were unable or unwilling to become pregnant turned to other countries. And now instead of simply taking a child from its family, adopters take a child from its culture.
     While many people think they are rescuing the child from poor conditions in Russia or the inhumanity of China, they do not realize the harm they are doing to the child by taking it away from its family and culture.
     I have often wondered why the $20,000-$30,000 paid for a child from another country could not be given to the mother, or to other family members if the mother is deceased, so that the family may raise the child in its own culture.
     But such supportive measures for children would not allow possession of the child by eager adopters. I see the ads for foreign adoption close to those for sperm and egg donation and I realize how cheaply some people are willing to buy and sell genetic connections. I cannot allow those genetic connections to be severed so easily.
     I do not smile when I hear of adoptions from foreign countries. I know only an inkling of the genetic confusion that these children will go through in their lives. Instead of paying to possess these children, let's pay to keep natural families and children together.