The Politics of Adoption

Adoption has always been fraught with stigmas surrounding sexuality, single motherhood, race and immigration. Cristen and Caroline decode the underlying messages of how we perceive orphaned children, adoption stereotypes and the meaning of family.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you from how stupports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, And today we're talking about adoption, UM.
And we are talking about adoption in one episode, one

(00:25):
podcast episode, not ten podcasts episodes, UM, which we could
because adoption is a massive, massive topic. Oh yeah, and
there's no way that we can possibly cover it comprehensively,
all aspects of it UM in a single episode. UM.

(00:46):
And Plus the motivations and experiences and impacts of adoption
on both adoptive families and adopted children are so complex
and far more complex than pop cultural stereotyping and outright
stigmas suggest. And because of the scope and sensitivity of

(01:08):
all these issues, we are narrowing in our focus. We're
not really gonna take a lot of time to look
at all of the stigma surrounding adoption. In fact, yeah,
we're going to focus more today on what domestic and
international adoption history and practices teach us about our cultural

(01:28):
definitions of nationality, family, and relationships. And of course there
will be dashes of racism and sexism and imperialism and
war thrown in for good measure. Well, what a bummer
that that has to be. And of course, but yeah,
I mean the geopolitics of adoption is something that I

(01:51):
was largely unaware of. UM. There are so many aspects
of adoption UM that I was unaware of before diving
into research for this podcast, And to be completely honest,
the landscape is so broad. I wasn't even sure quite
where to start for this episode because I knew that
I didn't want to try to speak on behalf of

(02:15):
the adoptive community UM, because I have no direct link
to that UM. But I also knew that there are
issues tied up in this that everyone can relate to
that touch our lives in one way or another. And
this particular episode angle looking more at these geopolitics was

(02:38):
inspired directly by a Q and a over at the
toast between Nicole Chung and Arissa Oh, who's the author
of the book To Save the Children of Korea The
Cold War origins of international adoption. Yeah, and and right
off the bat, here is an issue I was not
aware of as it comes to adoption UM. I was

(03:00):
not aware of the links between, UH, what was going
on at the time of the Cold War and what
was happening overseas with the rise in American adoption of
foreign infants, and Nicole asks Arissa why it's so important
for us to understand the history of inter country or
foreign adoption at all in the first place, Like, you know,

(03:21):
this is a thing we do. Why what's the point
understanding the history? And Arissa points out that, you know,
we think of adoption, uh inter country adoption as being
a personal and private thing. Here are the parents, here
is the child, and you know, here's the agency or
organization that's facilitating the adoption. But she talks about how well, actually,

(03:42):
in reality, inter country adoption is an extremely public act
and their influence, she says, by large forces like national laws,
ideas about race, gender, family, geopolitics. And she says, in turn,
because of all the things adoption is and has been

(04:03):
used in the public sphere to signify certain things like
America's goodness or anti racism. And this is definitely a
point that we will revisit later in the podcast, but
it kind of goes to this issue of at the
time that you see adoptions rising from places like South Korea,
you also see Jim crow lynchings these terrible racist environments

(04:27):
happening here in the United States, and adopting infants from overseas,
particularly infants who are not white, has often will a
it's been very bit visible because Okay, that child does
not look like you white parents who adopted it. Um.
But it's also and traditionally has been a way of saying, like, see,

(04:48):
we are not racist. We are good hearted people who
want to save children. And the we in that case
is not We're not talking speaking to the individual parents
involved in all of this. A lot of these individual
parents just really want to parent these children. This is
more speaking in the political and even symbolic sense and

(05:09):
how it relates to geopolitics and um. Nicole Chung we
should mention of the toast was especially interested in talking
to Oh because she herself was adopted by American parents
from Korea. And Oh goes on to say that looking
at inner country adoption helps us understand how the micro

(05:32):
and macro, private and public shape each other, because we
have to ask these questions about what you were speaking to, Caroline,
of why mainly white Americans adopt non white children from
from other countries, Uh, the role the US plays in
perpetuating the kinds of global conditions that have fostered a

(05:55):
lot of the orphans and the situations they're living in abroad,
and and also of why Americans adopt from some countries
but not others. Um. So we figured that this was
uh an angle of adoption that all of us have
something to learn from, both about our personal definitions of

(06:17):
what a family means and what a family can be
and look like, but also how that is related to
our overall sense of patriotism and nationalism. Um. And this
obviously will sort of flow into more of a focus
on international adoption, but our international adoption policies in the

(06:39):
United States are very importantly predicated on particular trends in
our domestic adoption patterns. So before we dive into more
of the history, let's toss out some facts and stats,
starting just with the definition of orphan, because as I think,

(07:01):
when we think of adoption, typically we might imagine more
of an annie the musical situation where you have an
orphan who has no parents or relatives to speak of,
living in deplorable conditions. Um. Perhaps with an alcoholic Carol Burnett.
We don't know, Uh, God, I would love to live
with Carol Burnett, alcoholic or no, um, but that is

(07:26):
rarely the case. Yeah, I mean so that that is
definitely one definition, right, you don't have any parents anymore,
maybe they've died, disappeared, deserted, um. But there's also a definition,
according to US immigration law, that the child has a
soul or surviving parent who is unable to care for
the child uh, consistent with the local standards of the

(07:48):
foreign sending country, who has in writing irrevocably released the
child for immigration and adoption. All of the sounds pretty straightforward,
as we will revisit later in this show, it is
anything but straightforward. UM. So if you look at numbers,
UNISF estimates that the orphan population in Sub Saharan Africa, Asia,

(08:12):
Latin America and the Caribbean in two thousand five was
more than one hundred and thirty two million, and only
thirteen million of those had lost both parents, meaning that
in the legal language, they were a double orphan. The
other millions and millions of these children were so called

(08:32):
single orphans, so they had still um, they still had
a parent or an extended family around them. Um. And
according to the US Children's Bureau in ten, there were
one hundred and one thousand or more American children in
the public foster care system waiting for adoption. But again,
that doesn't necessarily mean that they that that their parents

(08:55):
are deceased or disappeared, or that they have no other
relative of around UM. It has more to do with
the availability of a caregiver for that child. UM And
if we look a little bit more into domestic adoption,
I was surprised to learn from the US Children's Bureau
that we don't know precisely how many adoptions take place

(09:17):
within the US each year because there is no federal
clearinghouse that collects all of that data. Yeah, I can't believe.
I couldn't believe that. Well, it's because there were so
many different sources of adoption. UM In there were around
one eleven thousand domestic adoptions in the US, and by

(09:38):
the way, girls are a bit likelier to be adopted
compared to boys, and half though, of all the adoptions
in the US are facilitated through a public agency like
the foster care system, So those numbers we've got, we
can totally track all of that. But once we get
into the other half outside the child welfare system, it's

(10:01):
harder to keep tabs on private adoption agencies, independent adoptions
that might be conducted without any agency whatsoever. UM adoptions
by stepparents, grandparents, etcetera. There's just a lot of different
adoptive arrangements that can happen. But and listeners please write us,

(10:22):
but there's there's so there's no overarching like I'm going
to report this to this agency that this is happening
for for all of these different avenues of adoption. That
seems crazy to me. Well, I'm sure that there is
that there are specific steps that you have to go
through legally in order to legally adopt someone. But according

(10:44):
to the U S Children's Bureau, they cannot tell you
for certain. They can estimate, they can give you a
pretty close estimate, um, but they cannot tell you down
to the child, how many are happening. Um. When we
move into international or in her country adoptions as they're
also called, the US government considers us a private undertaking.

(11:06):
But that doesn't mean that you're doing it all on
their own. It's sort of an interesting like we're gonna
like check in with you, but if something happens, you're
kind of on your own. It seems like, um, people
listening who have gone through inter country adoptions. Would love
to hear from you about this because, um, the government's

(11:31):
classification of it as a private thing makes it sound
so much simpler than it sounds, because you're in reality
going to be dealing with the State Department and the
Department of Homeman Security because you have to certify a
child's immigration status. You also have to obtain a visa
for the child to enter the US, and beyond that,
they will provide education and resources on ethical adoption procedures. Um,

(11:56):
because it can get very dicey, very quickly. Um. But
another thing I was really surprised to learn when it
comes to inter country adoption is that they have declined
dramatically since the nineties. Oh yeah, So in our country,
adoption actually peaked in two thousand four at about twenty

(12:18):
three thousand children. By ten that had plummeted to about
fifty six hundred, or less than seven percent of all
US adoptions. And in the top five countries where we
adopted children from here in the US were China, Ethiopia, Russia,

(12:40):
South Korea, and Ukraine. But of course, by Russia was
no longer on that list because they flex their geopolitical
muscles and said no more US citizens adopting Russian children.
And also keep these most recent rankings in mind, because
it will tie a lot into where this conversation is

(13:01):
going to go in terms of how those rankings are
influenced by again geopolitics. Give me a dollar for every
time I say that word Caroline, Please this episode so
I can buy some Christmas presents. Um. And the reason
why though there's been such a stark drop off is

(13:24):
due to things like yeah, Vladimir Putin being like, you
know what, I'm going to cut off, um, Russian adoptions
to the US because we're strong, we don't need y'all. Uh,
And it's sort of it was in that case, it
was retaliation for sanctions. Yes, Um, So you have these

(13:45):
tightening regulations um around just adoptions in general, and also
moratoriums on foreign adoptions like the kind that we've seen
happen in Russia. And also you know this perception more
broadly of international adoption being more of and I hate
to put I hate to use this terminology, and this

(14:07):
is not mine, okay, more of a necessary evil than
humanitarian good. Yeah, viewing it as a last resort of
allowing our children from whatever country to be adopted out
to the United States rather than being able to keep
the children here. And I mean, you know, contributing to
this too is that you have in geos, for instance,

(14:28):
working to keep kids in their extended families and communities,
rather than having children who are in orphanages, even temporarily,
who are illegally adopted out. UM. And you also, UM,
like you know Krista mentioned, regulations have been tightened. You
have a lot of unethical practices in certain countries being
clamped down on. But even with all of those changes

(14:52):
that have been made, a lot of which to the
benefit of these children. Um. Most children who are adopted
international only do find homes in the US. But of
course adoption is a lot more complicated than just those
raw numbers and data from the U. S. State Department
and elsewhere. UM. In fact, the more we learned the more.

(15:17):
In fact, the more we learned, the clearer it became
how unclear America's adoption history is. I mean, this stuff
is straight up complicated, and it's complicated by a lot
of discrimination, UM and a lot of social stigmatizing. And
I cannot recommend enough the University of Oregon's Adoption History

(15:42):
Project they have a terrific comprehensive website detailing the history
of American adoption. And I mean, just just stepping out
for a second now, um, to take stock of where
we're about to dive into. You can imagine adoption in

(16:03):
the US, the issue of adoption, okay, as being at
the center of a giant ven diagram of social taboos
because race and ethnicity aside, which will certainly come up,
consider just how many core issues related to adoption remain
taboo even today, things like premarital sex, which was not

(16:27):
so long ago just considered female sexual delinquency, team pregnancy,
children born out of wedlock, single motherhood, infertility. There's also
a very clear gender theme along these lines in terms
of who the target of discrimination usually is. Yeah, not
to mention the issue and the question of what even
constitutes a family, which remains a really polarizing political question,

(16:51):
especially when issues of race and even religion come into it. Well,
an lgbt Q status, Oh yeah, absolutely. And so we're
going to dive in to a bit of a timeline
and history of adoption this country when we come right
back from a quick break. So, really, what we're doing

(17:18):
when we dive into the history of adoption in the
United States is just sort of sifting through a pile
of garbage, it feels like, in order to get to
what we would like to think is really the main
motivation of all of it. It's just you know, providing
children with homes they need, you know, providing people who
really want to be parents with the opportunity to do so.

(17:41):
But again, it's complicated, although it didn't really start so complicated. Uh.
In eight Massachusetts past America's first adoption legislation, called the
Adoption of Children Act, which two thumbs up, was focused
on the welfare of the child child rather than the
welfare of the adult. Children needs stable homes, loving parents,

(18:05):
a safe environment. That's great, But we didn't really have
it all figured out, especially as America the melting pot
really began to take shape. Um, it would take us
a century to really start figuring stuff out, Like, you know,
maybe shipping immigrant children off on so called orphan trains

(18:29):
from the East Coast out to the West isn't the
best path to assimilation and um. Quick side note. I
was in a ballet in late middle school, the Orphan Train,
which was based around this chapter of American history from
eighteen fifty four to when around two thousand kids Catholic

(18:53):
and Jewish, particularly immigrants, yes, were shipped out away from
their parents I mean orphan. They were rarely orphans in
the sense of not having parents around. Many of them
had both parents. They were just poor. Um, they were
sent on these orphan trains out to the Midwest and

(19:13):
beyond to serve as sort of farm labor, free labor
for for a lot of folks out there. Yeah, and
I mean they were sent to so called werethy Protestant
families to help again assimilate these children into an American
way of life, supposedly, and um, the reading that we
were doing on this from the University of Oregon pointed

(19:35):
out that a lot of these kids actually made their
way back home one way or another. Maybe their parents
came and got them or or or whatever. But um, yeah,
this this is horrifying thousands of children. They're like, uh,
it's better for you to be separated from your family
and grow up with someone else than to grow up
a Jewish or Catholic immigrant in a big city. Well,

(19:58):
and the big city aspect was a may motivator of this.
You know, this is around the time when we first
start seeing the development of like boy Scouts girl Scouts
in summer camps because there was a lot of concern
about the negative developmental impacts of the urban environment on kids.
So that's another reason why they were sent to the
great outdoors out west, like give them some fresh air

(20:20):
and sunshine and some good old fashioned American apple pie. Um.
But while this is happening, you also have baby farming,
which was America's old school baby black market UM where
commercial maternity homes would bring women in, usually low income

(20:43):
women who are pregnant and could not care for a
child UM for for whatever reason, they would be paid
barely anything UM to have their baby delivered, and immediately
that baby would be sold for a real good bargain,
again often to like agricultural families who there was a

(21:05):
quote from one farmer who had bought a baby UM
who said, you know what, I bought this like farm
new farmhand essentially for a hundred dollars. It's like that's
quite a deal. Um. So final, finally, around nineteen twenty,
we had our first children's welfare organizations and bureau starting

(21:26):
to step in and crack down on that UM. But
it doesn't even end there I learned a whole new term,
a whole new era, Caroline. The baby's scoop era is
that like baskin Robbins. Oh oh oh, if only it
were that delightful. Um. So adoption reformers have termed the

(21:47):
period from to nineteen seventy two in the United States
the baby scoop era. And it's notable that it starts
right after World War Two, during this so called baby
boom um and ends with roe v wade uh. And
the baby scoop era is a term to denote this

(22:10):
period when at least one a half million unwed mothers
in the US were forcibly and secretly sent to maternity
homes to have their babies and never speak of it again.
And when they would be shipped off to these places
a lot of times um, if they were poorer, they
might be installed as like a temporary servant in a

(22:34):
wealthier person's home until they could deliver their babies, sort
of like earning their keep. Um. But regardless, at a
lot of these maternity homes, you could not take any
of your clothes. You would only be known by your initials.
Like it they really wanted to. It sounds like a
black mirror episode. Honestly, Um, you were supposed to pretend

(22:58):
as if this is your someone else and that's just
never happened to you. And regardless of whether you maybe
wanted to raise that baby or not, Um, you would
be forced to sign it away. Now, I mean, race
enters this conversation too, because the thing is, it's not

(23:18):
like black unwed mothers were facing the same sort of pressure, um,
because of racist assumptions about how natural their promiscuity was,
and also that their babies were considered less desirable to
adopt in this country, which again, unfortunately is a theme
that will recur throughout the rest of this podcast. Um.

(23:41):
And that snippet is coming from Catherine Joyce's book The Childcatchers,
Rescue Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption. But really
the most controversial adoption concept of all in the United
States even to this day, is the idea that parents
and children don't have to match skin color in order

(24:03):
to build a happy, healthy family, which leads us to
the desegregation essentially of American adoption, although in fits and starts. Yeah,
and I mean this is what's called transracial adoption, and
the first recorded adoption of a black child by a

(24:23):
white family in the United States happened in nineteen in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
It took that long, well yeah, for the first recorded
adoption to happen, because there was just this overarching idea
that well a white families wouldn't want a black or

(24:44):
brown child, but be um that it was better for
everyone if a adoption wasn't spoken of and be that
you matched your family. There was there was this big
issue of matching that had always been the preference. Yeah,
and matching really being short for race matching, which is
really euphemism for segregation. UM. But this is not an

(25:07):
antiquated notion by any means. There are uh still people
within the social work field today who, um do believe
that matching children with their respective ethnicities and cultures is
best for that child's development, which relates back to our
conversation just a second ago about um NGOs who really

(25:29):
advocate for UM investing in developing countries in order to
keep children there rather than adopting them out to the
United States. UM. But there is undeniable racism that's going
on in you know, sort of breaking and breaking that

(25:50):
that color line in American adoption because African Americans were
considered classified as special needs and quote hard to place adoptees,
and we're outright denied services even in some states. So
by nineteen the US Children's Bureau realized that they had

(26:13):
fifty thousand black children who were in need of adoption.
And even today there are more black children awaiting adoption
in the US than white children. So when agencies are
seeing this discrepancy, by the nineteen fifties, some agencies and
some individual private couples started exploring transracial adoption arrangements, and

(26:37):
we start seeing campaigns to increase African American adoptions and
they were marginally effective. They reached an all time high
of two thousand, five hundred seventy four in one year,
and that amounted to about twelve thousand adoptees total. And
even though white people at the time would be considered
extremely progressive for even considering adopting a black child at

(27:00):
the time, if you look at the campaigns, these campaigns
that were going on trying to promote this idea, it's
clear that no, we're we're not all that progressive. Um.
Take for example, one from the Boys and Girls Aid
Society of Oregon, which was called Operation Brown Baby. That's

(27:21):
honestly not surprising to me at all, because Oregon was
founded or whatever you say, estate is was started just
for white people. It was illegal for black people to
go to Oregon or be or live in Oregon. So,
but the number of African American children being adopted by
white couples plummeted starting around nineteen two because this is

(27:46):
when the National Association of Black Social Workers took a
direct and very vocal stand against black children being placed
with white parents. They basically said, black children in white
homes are cut off from the healthy development of themselves
as black people. And you really just see the numbers plummet,
they fall, they fell through the floor to zero. Yeah,

(28:07):
I mean, and it's not like, you know, their peak
of almost dred was like huge, hugely high. I mean
that that also just goes to show the resistance, this
total fear of a white family adopting a black child.
And why aren't we talking about the flip side of that,

(28:28):
of say, black family adopting a white child whole Caroline's
because it just was unheard of, like seriously, like that
would not happen, because if it were to, that family
would likely be the target of protests and potentially violence. Um,
there was a situation in nineteen four I believe in

(28:49):
New Mexico where a Mexican American family adopted one, maybe
two white children and want to bring them into into
their family, and the white people in the surrounding community
were so outraged by it that a violent mob showed
up at their house and they forcibly removed the white

(29:12):
children from that home. But we should note that there
were a few times, a few really distinct times, when
white Americans suddenly weren't so skittish about desegregated parenting. And
we're going to get into that when we come right
back from a quick break. So starting with World War two,

(29:44):
you can reliably track the rate of America's inter country
or international adoptions with uh, the amount of military warfare
happened ng and also later on with natural disasters. And

(30:05):
we really start seeing this post World War two. Yeah,
I mean post World War two. You've got soldiers and
journalists coming home talking about how widespread the issue of parentless,
poor parentless children is. Yeah. War orphans, hello, war is
the worst for women and children. This goes back to

(30:26):
our episode on Japan's quote unquote comfort women from World
War Two. And if you haven't listened to that episode, um,
that was the name given to Korean women in particular,
who were uh forced by Japanese by the Japanese military
into sex work to service both their servicemen and also

(30:48):
American servicemen even after World War Two. Yeah. Um. And
along those same lines, really, wherever you find servicemen stationed
uh mid or post prolonged military conflict, you're gonna find
their out of wedlock babies. Um. This is also a
callback to our episode on Asian exoticism. Um. And soon enough,

(31:12):
in the wake of World War Two, international adoption becomes
humanitarian and benevolent, not a desperate move for say, a
woman who simply can't conceive and is therefore less of
a woman in American culture's eyes at the time. Yeah,
I mean, America's first wave of international adoptions are initiated

(31:35):
in this period after World War Two. American military families
who were stationed abroad who wanted to care for children
orphan in the war were on the front line, so
to speak, of these international or transracial adoptions. Um. And
then slowly it became known among the American public really
gaining steam when those soldiers and journalists returned home with

(31:59):
stories about out all of these European and Asian orphans,
and and like Kristen said, it became part of not
only we as individual parents want to care for these children,
we want to be parents and give these children a
safe living home, but also on a larger, more nationalism
related scale of look at what good humanitarians we are

(32:20):
here in the United States now. If we're talking about
baby ranking, Um, West German babies were adopted first among
these service members and their families because why they're white.
They're white. Uh, more than sixties six thousand babies of
Allied soldiers born to West German women. In the decade

(32:42):
after World War Two, there were more than sixty six
thousand babies of Allied soldiers born to West German women. UM.
But the thing is there weren't just white men fathering
children with white German women. There were black soldiers as well,
and the children that these German women had by black soldiers.

(33:03):
Black American soldiers were considered pariah's. Nobody wanted them, and
hundreds ended up being sent to the United States to
be adopted by black families. So even families in the
United States who were adopting children from other countries. Still,
we're not willing to accept, by and large, children who
were half black and half white. And while we see

(33:26):
the supply of adoptive babies rise in the wake of
World War Two, we also see on the home front
in the United States the demand go up as well,
because we have sort of the return to a traditional femininity.
You have the more the rise of the Betty Draper
era where women are expected to leave their jobs if

(33:47):
they had taken one during the war. And hell yeah,
and I'm talking about white women here of course. Um
white women, Uh go home, have your babies, and you know,
cook dinner for your your vet when he comes home.
And Uh, that put a lot of pressure on women
to fulfill that identity. And if they could not, because

(34:10):
infertility is a very common thing, you start to see
the American side demand for adoption starting to meet more
of that supply side. And when it comes sout to
desegregating parenting, the first time we really witness white American
families and growing numbers choose to adopt a child of

(34:35):
a different ethnicity. Uh, it is not going to happen
with an African American baby. No no, no, no, no,
it's gonna happen with children of color from overseas. And
this concept becomes popularized, uh really with the best selling
memoir that came out in N four called The Family

(34:55):
that Nobody Wanted, and it was all about the Doss family,
who were nicknamed the United Nations Family, and starting in
in that first wave post World War two, they eventually
adopt eleven children from outside the US, including Filipino, Hawaiian, Balinis,
Um Malayan, Indian, Mexican, and Native American children, but not

(35:20):
a single African American child, mind you. Yeah, because they
tried to adopt Gretchen, who was half African American and
half German, but they faced so much pushback from not
only their family but also their community that they ended
up placing tiny Gretchen with an African American family. And

(35:41):
I believe Mrs Daws's quote was something along the lines
of her toast brown skin matched her new families perfectly. Yeah. Yeah,
And and Mrs DAWs was one of those women who
wanted to have a big family, do her patriotic postwar
duty and and have that family. But after her first childbirth,

(36:03):
I believe she had difficulty getting pregnant a second time,
and since the supply of white babies was so low,
they were really hard to come by. And they're like, well,
I guess, I guess we'll look into maybe this inter
country adoption UM, with the exception, of course, of a

(36:23):
Native American adoption, which we are going to touch on
in just a second. UM. But it isn't until after
the Korean War that we really start to see more
of the modern era of inter country adoption. Because the
Korean War takes place from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty

(36:43):
three and leaves in its wake one hundred thousand war orphans,
including an estimated fifteen hundred so called g I babies UM,
although estimates at the time were far higher, and the
South Korean government had no interest in keeping especially those

(37:04):
g I babies around, they did not fit in. It
was you know, a sign of essentially um imperialism, you know,
Americans coming in UM. And as a result, South Korea
becomes the first nation in the world to streamline inter
country adoption. Yeah, And I mean that was incredibly appealing

(37:27):
to white American adoptive parents because first of all, uh,
many of these babies that were left behind were a
mix of Korean and white. Um. If they were Korean
children with black fathers, they were usually placed with black parents. UM.
But even if they adopted a Korean child, these white

(37:51):
parents in America, still there's issues of race there because oh, well,
you know, this is a full blooded Korean baby, but
at least it's not black. There were also fears about
you know, birth parents or relatives or extended family popping
back up that were eased simply by virtue of the
fact that you are so far away from South Korea

(38:13):
when you're in average town America. UM. And contributing to
this from the other side was that mixed race children
really were not wanted in Korea, where pure bloodlines were
sort of part of the emerging South Korean nationalism after
both the Japanese occupation and then a civil war. And
even today there's a stigma around adoption in South Korea,

(38:36):
even if the baby isn't mixed race. But at the
same time, there's still stigma around a single mom keeping
and raising her baby and few if any governmental supports.
So there's that sounds pretty familiar as an American sitting here. Yeah,
but so whereas today there's this effort to have more

(38:56):
in country adoptions, having South Korean parents adopt South Korean infants,
there are still all of these complicating factors, including social stigma,
that make it difficult. Yeah, I mean right now, South
Korea exclusively prioritizes um intra country adoptions, wanting to keep

(39:17):
South Korean babies in South Korea, and in fact uh
I wasn't able to find confirmation of whether this went through.
But in an older article we were reading, South Korea
had declared that it would put a moratorium on inter
country adoptions, especially to the US. By and so between

(39:38):
nineteen fifty three and nineteen sixty two, Americans were adopting.
Americans had adopted fifteen thousand foeign children. And there are
a couple of names that pop out during this era.
So in nineteen fifty five you have evangelical Oregon couple
Harry and Bertha Holt, who actually obtained a congressional order
in order to adopt eight in orphans, and the couple

(40:02):
would go on to form the whole International Children's Services,
which specialized in international adoption. And it's worth noting here
that the Christian religious community in the United States is
huge when it comes to international adoptions. Oh, right after
World War Two, as early as nineteen Lutherans, Catholic services,

(40:28):
you know, even evangelical groups, they were the first ones
who were getting involved with facilitating inner country adoptions. But
the angle they were coming from did have a humanitarian
edge to it, but certainly, um, a religious edge to
it as well. Yeah, there was a bit of a

(40:49):
missionary bent to a lot of those adoptions. Yeah, wanting
to essentially like save their souls and raise them in
Christian homes explicitly. Um. Josephine Baker, Yes, that Josephine Baker
was not uh inspired by religious motivations when she adopted
twelve children from all around the world. Um. She called

(41:13):
her children the Rainbow Tribe. And of course this wasn't
related directly to the Korean War either. She adopted twelve
kids from Finland, Venezuela, Japan, France, Belgium, all told, ten
boys and two girls. Okay, starting out, that sounds great.
She's giving these kids a home and she wants to
show how we can have a racial utopia. Oh my gosh, Yeah,

(41:37):
look at all these kids from different backgrounds. That's fantastic. However,
the kink and all of this is that, Um, she
a lot of times with a lot of these children,
would make them act as though they were born in
a certain country or with a certain religion and make
them adhere to it. So, for instance, she adopted a

(41:58):
French boy and gave him the name of Moses and
told him and everyone who encountered him that he was
Jewish and raised him to be Jewish. Um. Obviously there's
nothing wrong with being Jewish. I'm just saying that some
of her practices were a little questionable, especially when you
take into account that she sold tickets for fans and
visitors to watch her and her Rainbow Tribe hang out

(42:23):
at her palatial estate in France. I mean you could say, well,
you know, she was like she built her career on
entertainment and singing and that famous banana skirt dance. Um.
And yeah, I mean there there's like, there's this core
of her that has really good intentions, but the execution

(42:44):
not so great. Um. But her humanitarian desire and her
celebrity did make me wonder, Caroline, whether her Rainbow Tribe
sort of imprinted the humanitarian glow, whether a valid or
not onto today's trend of celebrity international adoptions. But I

(43:06):
don't want to get ahead of ourselves because we still
got a lot to get through. Um, like the Vietnam War. Yeah,
have you ever heard of Operation Baby Lift? I had not? Yeah,
so um it wasn't there a Disney movie called like
Operation Dumbo where they airlift Dumbo drop I think? So okay,

(43:27):
something about an elephant being airlifted. Yes, all right, maybe
questionable from an animal rights perspective, but that that's one
elephant and a Disney movie. What was not a Disney
movie was in nineteen in uh Saigon, when the Vietnam
War is shutting down, the American government is like, oh,

(43:49):
you know what we need to do because we've really
caused a mess. Uh. One thing we could do is,
I don't know, like airlift at least two thousand Vietnamese
children in to the US before troops withdraw. Um another
fifteen hundred in addition to that two thousand would be

(44:10):
airlifted and sent out to Canada, Europe and Australia. And
you can say that's questionable, That is so questionable. That
was just a touch of a disaster. Because it turns
out that a lot of those um presumed Vietnamese orphans
were not orphans at all, um, which again is nothing

(44:32):
new or old in the realm of adoption. Well yeah,
and that's also why at the top of the podcast
we wanted to spell out the definition of an orphan
according to US immigration law. UM. This is part of
why those standards were um established because uh, when they

(44:54):
started realizing from the children and also from very angry
relatives of the children who were like, oh cool, America,
you come over here, you make a mess, and then
you steal our kids on the way out. Yeah not cool,
great great um. And it was such a diplomatic disaster.
And so this is why US adoption policies thankfully began

(45:15):
checking more rigorously as to whether kids are actually orphaned um.
Whether that is um, single parent or dual parent orphaned um.
Although that will come up again with Madonna. Yeah shocker um.
But around this time too, on the home front in

(45:38):
in the United States, we have to pass the Indian
Child Welfare Act because there had been sustained protests and
activism against the practice of removing Native American children from
their families and placing them with white families. About seven
hundred of these kids were taken as part of the
Indian Adoption Project man by the Child Welfare League of America,

(46:03):
and not surprisingly, protesters argued that this was a form
of cultural genocide. But as this was going on from
nine fifty eight to nineteen sixty seven, the leaders of
the Child Welfare League thought that they were doing this
extremely progressive and enlightened work of Hey, you know what

(46:26):
we're you know, our nation is so uncomfortable with children
of color, you know, being raised in white families. But
look at us. We're now able to bring at least
Native American children into white homes, people, white people. What
is wrong with you? Um? Oh god, So that's that's
a that's a hard question to answer because it's just

(46:48):
so much UM. So it's understandable that, um that that's
certainly backfired as well. UM. And this whole time, if
we if we look at the sixties going all the
way up to South Korea will remain the primary country

(47:09):
of origin for children adopted by American families, all because
in the wake of the Korean War, the government, i
mean made it what some people referred to as the
Cadillac A kid, you not the Cadillac of adoption. Um,
they've made it so systematized. I don't want to say easy,
because I doubt adoption is ever easy, but they made

(47:31):
it streamlined and accessible. UM. And now we have to
dig though into some geopolitics because during the Cold War,
the US government is totally cool with the roughly one
fifty thousand babies who are adopted from South Korea because
we are at Cold war with the U s s R.

(47:54):
And we want to look as benevolent and peacemaking. Oh
and also not quite as racist as all of the
news happening due to the Civil rights movement UM would
make America appear. So it was like, hey, you know what,
let's we're still not cool with white families adopting black babies,

(48:15):
but hey, you know, if if you're an international child,
you are welcome here. UM. So we do see at
this time international adoptions increasing at a rate much higher
than those so called transracial adoptions in the US. UM.

(48:35):
And getting back though to geopolitics, in the nineteen eighties,
you see an uptick in a number of American adoptions
in Central and South American countries, particularly El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Mexico because in nineteen eighties, you also have an
uptick in civil wars and issues of poverty happening there. Yeah.

(49:01):
And in the nineties, of course, the Cold War starts
to thaw, and we then see an uptick in Romanian
and Russian adoptions. But the New York Times in nineteen
nine one documented the underregulated Romanian so called baby bazaar,
which Romania actually shuttered their international adoption program in two

(49:21):
thousand one. I mean, just like scary, scary, scary stuff
when it comes to the way that children were sent
to the United States to be adopted. UM. And in
the Hague Adoption Commission, international agreement is drawn up that
basically establishes an adoption authority in every participating country. And

(49:42):
in the meantime up to I think it was two
thousand six when it was fully ratified. Um. This whole time,
there have been super shady adoption operations identified in like
you said, Romania, South Korea, Cambodia, Guatemala, Vietnam, and Nepaul,
to name just a few. UM. And on the flip

(50:05):
side of that, Reuter's investigative journalists discovered a spate of
adoptive parents here in the US putting out ads like
Craigslist ads essentially to re home. In quotes, they're adopted children,
particularly troubled kids, and often, as should come as no surprise,

(50:25):
this led to issues of sexual and physical abuse for
the children who were rehomed, but especially through World War
Two through the end of the Cold War. UM, adoption
really becomes a form of diplomacy, American diplomacy. UM. Not
that all of these adoptive parents were thinking that way,

(50:48):
but in terms of the kinds of regulations and relationships
and support that the US government would provide for that
it was certainly motivated um by wanting to make the
US look good. So if we come out around full
circle to what we were talking about at the top
of the podcast about the adoption cliff, as it's been

(51:09):
called that plummet of international adoptions. UM, why is that?
I mean you mentioned putin revoking adoption access in response
to sanctions imposed by the US. UM. But there's more
going on than just Russia. Yeah, China did it too. Um. Yeah,

(51:32):
China wants to to flex its muscle the show that
it's like a superpower and not this developing country where
it's children need to be sent off to the United States. Right,
because China has had that one child policy for a
long time, and now that that's been revoked, China is
basically like, hey, no, we're we're going to keep our kids.
United States, get out of here. Um. So you know,

(51:54):
in two thousand four, Russian children were twenty five of
all inter country adoptions to the United States that year.
And you know, so once they say no more, we
don't like your sanctions, you can't have our children. We're
going to keep them, um, a lot of American parents
are going, Okay, well, I still want to adopt. I

(52:15):
still want to be a parent, Like who to whom
can I provide a safe home? Well, a lot of
parents then turned to Africa because you have far fewer
countries in Africa that are committed to that Hague Adoption
Commission International Agreement, countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, and Malawi. Um.

(52:38):
In Ethiopia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, you've
got issues of poverty and limited social services and few
adoption institutions, which basically amounts to having a very high
number of adoptable children that are not under some of
the same regulations that children in perhaps your other European

(52:58):
countries or Asian countries are you also have parents going
to or not going to, but communicating with countries that
have undergone natural disasters, places like Haiti. But again, often
these orphans, whether it's in these African countries that we
just mentioned, are in places like Haiti. Again, a lot
of these orphans are not the so called double orphans.

(53:21):
They either have a parent still around or they have
an extended family. And so a lot of times what
you see, and this is horrifying to read about, but
you know, perhaps a family has fallen on hard times
or cannot pay the bills. They might place their child
or children in an orphanage temporarily so their children have
care while they can get money together. Well, then some

(53:45):
of those less reputable organizations or orphanages will end up
placing out the children right from under their their parents
or their grandparents or their families noses. So the family
comes back to say, okay, you know, thank you for
gearing for our child. We'd like to go home now.
Well the child isn't there well. And and also to

(54:06):
a lot of children in uh orphanages and similar institutions
in developing countries are children with developmental disabilities UM and
we should note that in terms of the shift towards
Africa and UM recent sites of national natural disaster, that

(54:27):
it's not like we have parents, you know, turning to
them in mass because remember UM, as of I believe
you know, when we have barely fifties six hundred international
adoptions taking place in the US, that represents only seven
per cent of all of the adoptions happening by US parents.

(54:50):
So I'm saying this because international and inter country adoption,
especially if you want to adopt a baby, UM and
a baby who has no physical or developmental disabilities, that
is now becoming an issue of class and status because

(55:10):
it's way more challenging because of supply and demand. It's
way more challenging UM to adopt a baby baby first
of all, UM, but a baby internationally UM due to
all of the regulations that exists now that again are
enforced for the welfare of these children and UM. When

(55:33):
I first started reading up for this podcast, Caroline, I
got stuck in a celebrity baby adoption UM sort of
circle because I realized, you know that you have the
scandal in two thousand nine when Madonna attempted to adopt
her second baby from Malawi and she was stopped. There

(56:00):
was a complaint by the child's grandmother, UM, saying that
there was a financial coercion going on. There's a similar
situation with the first baby that she adopted from Malawi,
and that was really, I mean the biggest news making
its way into American you know, headlines far and wide

(56:22):
regarding international adoption probably since uh, the last war that
we had. UM. Now, it seems like so much of
our focus on inter country adoptions is very celebrified and
celebrified specifically of you can see, so there's so many
Google results for this of the basic question of like

(56:44):
why are all these white celebrities adopting black babies from
Africa specifically? Yeah, I mean Sandra Bullock also adopted to
African American children. UM. But yeah, there's a lot of
concern not that like people should be able to adopt
children of other races and ethnicities, but like, are you,

(57:06):
as a parent, introducing your child to his or her
culture of origin? You know, there was the concern back
in the seventies of black children being adopted by white parents,
and I think that that concern is obviously still valid
and still stands of like, Okay, if you adopt a
black child or or what have you, You know, is

(57:27):
this child going to be aware of its history of
the people who came before, or are you just going
to claim what so many white people do claim and
say that you're totally color blind and raise the child
with no sense of identity, which can lead to a
lot of problems when that child gets a little older
and starts asking questions about his or her identity. Well,

(57:50):
and the exact same thing can be said too for
those tens of thousands of UM children who were also
adopted from South Korea. I mean, any time you have UM,
to use old school terminology, an unmatched UM family, they
are rightfully so concerns over child development and cultural identity

(58:11):
and national identity, and ultimately it roots back to that
question that still perplexes so many people. Unfortunately in my
opinion UM of well, what should a family look like?
And I mean this this episode has certainly made clear
some of the reasons why that question has has plagued

(58:33):
our culture for so long UM. And there isn't a
consensus really within the adoption community, uh, the adoption advocacy
community at large, as to what the absolute best thing
to do is especially when we're talking about say uh
brand Alena r I p brand Alina's sort of rainbow

(58:56):
family Allah Josephine Baker Um that they have formed with
adopted children from Cambodia and Vietnam and elsewhere. Um where
you have some people saying, at the end of the day,
it's going to be terrific for any child to grow
up in Angelina Jolie's house versus pretty much any other

(59:17):
else you could think of. But then you also have
NGOs on the ground Una Sef and Save the Children
or two um main ones who do see that as
more of a last resort where it's like we have
a crisis, yes of onty two million orphans around the
world who don't necessarily need adopting, okay by white families,

(59:41):
but who are indicative of all of these community resources
that celebrities say could use their millions of dollars to
build up. And and Madonna for her part, like with
the whole Malawi scandal, you know she did invest I know,
lot of a lot of money into that local community. Um.

(01:00:05):
But yeah, I mean there's there's really no easy answer
to that. That's one thing that I that I picked
up from a lot of what we read, and especially
first person accounts of what we read, UM, which is
that there's there's no there doesn't seem to be a
blanket answer, there is no panacea for all of these
issues happening. But in the middle of all of this
is we're trying to figure it all out. You have

(01:00:27):
children who are relatively helpless in a lot of ways,
and not just children born in countries outside the United States. Um.
Once we got to almost the end of researching for
this episode, I thought, wait a minute, hold on, hold on,

(01:00:47):
hold on, what about what about American babies that are
then adopted out so to speak? Oh, yeah, they do exist,
but they primarily uh are from a very particular demographic. Yeah,
there's a lot of black babies that get adopted, specifically

(01:01:08):
to Canada, the Netherlands, and Ireland. Those are the top
three countries that adopt American children. Yeah. According to Joan
hi Feazer Hollinger with the Berkeley Law School, around five
hundred infants are adopted out of the US annually, quote,
most of whom are black. And one major motivation that

(01:01:29):
comes up a lot in stories about this is the
opportunity to allow that child to grow up outside of
American racism. Not to say that racism only exists in America, UM,
but you do have a birth mothers who say, you know,
I want to give my child a better chance, not

(01:01:50):
just financially, not just with domestic stability, but also when
it comes to race. So that says a lot. And UM, Canada,
you are the number one adoptive country for American babies.
So I say thanks, because you know we love Canada.
Yeah we do, UM, Okay, yeah we do. So, listeners,

(01:02:13):
We've covered a lot of territory and there have probably
been a lot of generalizations caught up in that in
US wanting to offer UM this snapshot for you, and
I do want to reiterate that a lot of what
we're talking about is more of the high level geopolitical
UM and and diplomatic aspects of adoption UM. And we,

(01:02:36):
by no means are are trying to impugne adoptive families UM,
but rather to highlight all of all the reasons why UH,
it remains such a complicated issue. And I would like
to hear from our adopted listeners if you do struggle
with some of these identity issues that we brought up
and parents. We also want to hear from you what

(01:02:58):
have your experience has been going through the process and
also going through people's reactions to it. We have We've
got a lot of baggage and and stigma and stereotyping
when it comes to the even just some mere concept
of adoption, and to me, it is time for those
taboos too. And um so share with us mom Stuff

(01:03:21):
at how stuff works dot Com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
messages on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages
to share with you when we come right back from
a quick break. All right, I have a letter here
from Star Sminty listeners Stephanie, in response to our barri

(01:03:41):
your Gaze Trope episode. She says, I'm friends with many
queer women who write about TV and or are heavily
invested in the fandoms, and I cannot emphasize how much
has gutted us, especially earlier this year, as it seemed
every show we loved kept killing us off the hundred, which,
thank you, she corrected our pronunciation from the one hundred

(01:04:03):
to the hundred. Uh. The Walking Dead person of interest,
Jane the Virgin Orange is the New Black, etcetera, etcetera.
My expectations for queer women characters have gotten to the
point where if someone is revealed to be attracted to women,
I start a mental countdown for them and start to
emotionally pull away because it's only a matter of time.
For example, when I started House of Cards over the summer,

(01:04:24):
I started liking Rachel, but when her storyline had her
becoming closer to a new female friend, I actually started saying,
Oh God, don't kiss her, Rachel, No, you're gonna die now.
It's weird when you get used to desperately wanting representation
on TV, but now you dread it because you know
they're probably going to die and die in a really random,
nonsensical way. But I did want to share some TV

(01:04:46):
shows that are bright shining light on the dead lesbian
or bisexual landscape of if you're interested in TV shows
that feature badass, multidimensional women characters and queer women characters
that are not just love interests that die, were disappeared
and never seen again. Two shows I recommend our Winona
Earp and Supergirl. Winona Earp was actually revolutionary for me,

(01:05:08):
as it had a very purposeful meat cute for its
two characters. This was not a vague, oh, she's just
being friendly meeting, but established romantic interest from the start.
Supergirl's recent coming out storyline of supergirls older sister Alex
dan Verse is also fantastic and beautifully portrays the story
of an older twenty or thirty something year old woman
realizing that she's gay, which is not something we often see.

(01:05:31):
I hope this email wasn't too long, but as Caroline said,
I have a lot of nerd rage from thanks again
for the wonderful podcast and all you guys do, and
thank you Stephanie. And I've got a letter here from
Priscilla about our Barrier Gays episode, and Priscilla writes, there's
something about the history of the Dead Lesbian Trip that
I thought you guys might be interested in knowing that

(01:05:53):
trope goes much older than TV and seems to have
originated with lesbian pulp novels. In order for those novels
to be published, the authors had to give all lesbian
characters a bad ending like death, losing their minds, or
ending up with a guy. Most of those novels were
written by queer women, which is really troubling. It's a
part of the history that for whatever reason, tends to

(01:06:13):
be left behind on the barrier Gays conversation. On another note,
I'll start by saying that this is my personal opinion.
I consider any queer character, regardless of the motivation or
story justification, to be in the trope. With a low
amount of queer characters and the media and the negative
portrayals and the history, we're still not at a point
where the death of a queer character doesn't hurt the community.

(01:06:35):
Who says death specifically completely fits in the trope, especially
because of the low number of queer women of color
on TV and in most media right now. Well, thank
you for filling us in on that, Priscilla, and thanks
to everyone who's written into us. Mom's stuff at how
stuff Works dot com is our email address in Caroline.

(01:06:56):
Where else can people find you? Well, I'm over Twitter
at the Caroline IRV and you can also bug me
on my personal website, Caroline Irvin dot com because I'm
too cool for the m You can also find me
on Twitter at Kristen Conger and if you head over
to tiny letter dot com slash Kristen, which is c

(01:07:19):
R I S T E. N it's often misspelled, you'll understand.
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(01:07:40):
There's just one place for that, and it's stuff Mom
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