Things to Think About. “Adoption and Culture” Pre-Publication Articles on Adoption, Abortion, Reproductive Justice, Dobbs

Cross -posted from The Daily Bastardette, November 23, 2022

Well, it’s Thanksgiving Eve! Where are you? Dreading tomorrow and whom you must spend it with? Stuck somewhere on the road trying to get to that place you don’t want to be? (I once spent 3 hours on Thanksgiving Eve between the old Columbus-Delaware exits on I71, which normally took about 7 minutes.) Grousing at home because you are alone or don’t want to be alone.? I hear ya on all counts.

Today has not been a real cracking day in AdoptionLand. But…I did run across, thanks to Dr. Michele Merritt–a link to the advanced access/pre-publication  articles from the latest issue of Adoption and Culture. The entire issue is devoted to Adoption, Reproductive Justice, Abortion, and Dobbs, and looks super good, like all of the journal’s past offerings.  I was an early member of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture and have presented at four ASAC conferences (Pitt, U of Tampa, MIT, and Florida State) and I can’t speak highly enough of the scholarship and people (academics and non-academics) I have met there over the years. They are a welcoming group, and I will always be grateful, as an academically trained historian, but working outside of academia, that they had no problem with me.

Here is the ink for each title, You will get the whole thing not just an abstract or summary. I know some of the contributors personally and others through social media, and I am sure that each essay and article will be compelling. I plan to read them over this holiday weekend if this damned NAM/NAAM blogging will leave me alone.

I believe that the nexus of  “adoption and abortion” is, and will become moreso, the major issue in adoption and fostering “reform/deform” (I don’t like to use those terms, but I’m not sure anything else will do as a broad definition of what is going down right now on any side.  Re-positioning? Fetishizing? Abolition might be a talking ground, but I don’t see it happening. If you have a better term, let me know.

Dobbs certainly impacts the restoration of adoptee rights to records, history, family, and identity. It establishes a state-backed pattern of purposeful creation and growth of an adopted class without normal identity rights and maintains the spurious ethics of adoption secrecy. It promotes the commercialization of child adoptee bodies and attempts to invent adult adoptee gratitude and adherence to adoption and its institutions.  Should we expect a big boom in therapy in 20 years?

These are things we need to think about:

• What happens as adoption becomes more mired in rightwing, theocratic, and Christian Nationalist discourse?
• How do we deal with the deliberate creation of bastards with compromised rights to fit a reprehensible sociopolitical agenda?
• What about bio parents rights; legalized anonymous birth and abandonment?
• What happens if ICWA is overturned?
• Re-homing?
• A return of “updated” and “modernized” maternity home spaces; adoption industry growth?
• How do we resist and reject the co-optation of fake government and private agendized non-profit programs to “assist” bio families, when the underlying plan is family policing, family disruption, and child re-distribution to the “more deserving?”

My Stop Safe haven Baby Boxes, Now! website has a substantial page on adoption, abortion, reproductive politics,  Dobbs, and Safe Haven/Safe Haven Baby Boxes. I never thought it would grow as big as it has. When it first went up Dobbs hadn’t come down. SCOTUS and Amy Coney Barrett made all the difference. I have added the Adoption and Culture link on that page.