Twelve Things You Can Do to Make Sure Your Adoption is Ethical
Watching Beasts of the Southern Wild started me thinking about ethics
in adoption. I know I wrote some hard things yesterday. If you're on this site,
you probably want to have an ethical, kid-centered, health-building adoption. I
want to be a part of making that happen.
Here are some of my gleanings from the online adoption community, and from my own practice as an adoption social worker - twelve things that you can do to make sure your adoption is an ethical one.
Here are twelve ways to make sure your adoption is an ethical one:
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| flickr.com / Tsahi Levent-Levi |
1. Ask your adoption agency how they find children who need to be adopted.
2. Ask what sort of counseling that they
provide to the child’s first family. Is their counseling a balanced
representation of all options geared at helping the person make the choice
that’s best for them, or is it a one-sided “sales pitch”?
3. Ask whether they still extend full services
to women who, after contact the agency, choose to parent their child – or, do
they only provide services if the woman says she’ll relinquish, but only provide
referrals if she decides to parent?
4. Ask how actively they pursue the involvement
of the birth father. Do they seek his input and participation, or do they just
do the legal minimum standard of notification and assure you that he “probably
won’t show up.”?
5. Ask how thoroughly they train and assess
adoptive parents.
6. Ask how they feel about openness. Do they
speak of it as a wonderful commitment, or as something that adoptive parents can
agree
to, but then quickly change their minds on, once an adoption is finalized?
Do Your Research
7. Research the adoption practices in the
country you’re considering adopting from.
8. Research your agency – if they’re “for
profit” their motivation might more easily be on the side of pleasing the
adopting parent (and although that sounds good, it increases the risk of
unethical treatment of the birth parents.)
9. Speaking of that term, "birth parent" – does
the agency use the post-adoption term “birth parents” for women who are still
pregnant? That might communicate an expectation which makes it difficult for
pregnant women and expectant fathers to feel like they have the freedom to make
whichever choice they see as best.
10. If your agency is non-profit, check out
their profile on Guidestar.org and see where they get their funds from and what
they do with them. If they’re for-profit, try to figure out how they avoid being
driven by profits rather than by people’s real needs. Friends of mine who were
considering adoption once told me of a for-profit agency that would have charged
them around $25,000 up front, and which expressed a commitment to encouraging
pregnant women to choose adoption once they’d expressed an interest in it. My
friends ended up adopting through a different agency. They expressed that it
“felt like the agency was more on the birth mother’s side than ours,” but that
they were comfortable with that balance. It seemed healthier that way.
11. Visit your agency’s website, and read the
pages for adopting parents and for expectant parents. See if the message is
consistent, or if they seem to say different things to different people.
12. Check out the Internet
adoption community. There's lots of insight from all sides of the adoption
community. Some excellent articles have been Shannon LC Cate's “Ten Red Flags That Your Adoption Agency Might Be Coercive,"
Creating a Family's "Red Flags for Unethical Adoption Agencies" and
adoptionbirthmothers.com's post, "Is Your Adoption Agency Ethical?"
These are some hard questions - but if you work through them now, you'll be able to proudly share your adoption story with your child. Adoptive parents, birth parents, social workers, adoptees --- I'd love your input. Which questions belong on this list? Which don't really matter? Which should be added?
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