soloveitchik:
soloveitchik:
The way people talk about birthing parents as inherently awful and abusive is deeply entrenched in misogyny, racism, classism, and ableism (particularly the hatred of addicts).
I’m still thinking about this video I saw yesterday where a gay man said that “it’s a good thing” when children are adopted because their birth parents are too poor to take care of them. It’s just so disgustingly evil to follow that line of logic. Which is essentially “poor people don’t deserve to have children.” Concluding that wealthier people are entitled to poor people’s children.
The lack of self-awareness and entitlement is so disturbing. Not to mention the level of tone-deafness as if so many children of color aren’t legally kidnapped by the state and justify doing so by any means necessary. It’s just sick to automatically think so lowly of people to justify the logic that you deserve their children. You can’t wrap your head around the concept of it being coercion or stealing if it doesn’t suit your moral compass.
Also kinship care exists and isn’t even uncommon among many communities. Birth parents struggling with poverty, mental illness, or addiction usually have families. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents, even close family friends/community care exists if there’s no other options.
Am I saying birthing parents struggling can’t be abusive/negligent? No. But the assumption that adopted parents and foster parents are all angels incapable of the same abuse (and frequently assault) is absolutely dangerous. And the presumption that they are good “vetted” people usually rests on them being white and financially stable. Not to mention separation from birthing parents is going to be traumatic regardless.
But what I am highlighting here is that there is this pernicious assumption that every child put up for adoption must have birth parents who are awful or faulty in some way. And this way of thinking is deeply rooted in a multitude of prejudices that are dehumanizing and fundamentally lack compassion. Why aren’t other options more widely accepted as alternatives? Because of pro-adoption propaganda by privatized adoption agencies that prey and profit off of the vulnerable, poor, and marginalized.
I disagree with your example about how that person saying what he said must mean that he or others think that poor people don’t deserve children.
The key phrase is “TOO poor TO takare care of them.”
It’s not that poor people as a whole don’t deserve children, it’s that in reality there are people who simply cannot care for their children. Take a look for example at children who get sold so that the family can feed the rest of them. That’s one tiny example.
Birthing parents aren’t evil or faulty by default. Many times, they are the ones who decide to give their kids up for adoption, and that could be as simple as them not believing in abortion but not wanting a child, or a lot more difficult when they do want it, but the circumstances aren’t optimal.
I will personally NEVER demonize addicts SIMPLY for being addicts. I’ve seen the things addiction can do, and different sides of where that stems from, to know that addicts don’t want to be that way. It’s hell on earth. But just because I can understand where they’re coming from, it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for many of them to have children unless they’ve been sober for a very long time.
I fully believe that even today, with all that we know about drug addiction, there is a demonetization of addicts as a whole, but this isn’t part of it.
There are other options, like the one you mentioned which is family members stepping in, but family doesn’t always want to do that. Or they may be denied for one reason or the other.
Here in the USA, our system is deeply flawed, but it goes BOTH ways.
For every story you hear about a child getting taken away unjustly, you hear the same about a child who actually needed to get taken away and wasn’t, or who was but later reunited with his birth parents only to suffer more or end up dead.
About the misogyny, I don’t see it.
The state usually wants to reunite the children with their birth parents, not take them away.
Now, if you’re speaking about this on a global scale, that I can’t speak on, but I know that saying that someone is too poor to take care of their children isn’t offensive or “evil.” There IS such thing as being too poor to take care of your children, and if really poor parents want to keep their children, I 100% support it, because they are people with emotions, but life will be a little harder. That’s just a fact.
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