The XX Factor: What women really think.

You Can't Adopt a Child From Syria—But Angelina Jolie Can

A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:

Who knows what to believe when it comes to celebrity "journalism," but it's apparently been confirmed that Angelina Jolie will adopt a child from Syria—something described on the website of the U.S. embassy in Damascus as "a difficult process and often an impossible one." In many countries, celebrity status probably has little affect on adoption matters, but in a country where adoption is "essentially illegal," the perverse effect is that anything pretty much goes—if you've got the required currency ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

I Don't Support Carolyn Savage Carrying the Wrong Baby to Term

A post from Double X writer Bonnie Rochman:

Call me egotistical, but I’m not lining up behind the well-wishers cheering on Carolyn Savage, the Ohio woman who, in the process of undergoing IVF, was mistakenly implanted with another couple's embryo. She decided to carry the baby to term and just passed the 35-week mark ... (Read more in Double X.)

Madonna Wants Mercy: Or, Psst, Wanna Buy a Baby?

Here's the problem: Mercy's grandmother wants to bring her home too, according to the London Times, which reports: 

Lucy Chekechiwa, 61, Mercy's grandmother, described Madonna's interest in her granddaughter as "stealing". "Why doesn't this singer pick other children? It is stealing. I want to go to court, I won't let her go," she said. Mercy has been living in an orphanage and Mrs Chekechiwa claimed it had been agreed the child would go to her when she reaches the age of six. Mercy's 18-year-old mother died five days after her birth, according to The Sun.

Orphanage is the confusing word here. Few Westerners understand that in much of Africa and Asia, what we call "orphanages" are actually boarding schools for poor children—places where extremely poor families in temporary distress drop their children off for food, education, and shelter, and then they bring the children home when things get better. Offering to house these children temporarily and then selling them for international adoption (er, "accepting donations" in exchange for adoption) is one of the common ways of defrauding poor birth families out of their children. (Need I say that not all internationally adopted children are illicitly acquired? But hundreds, and more likely thousands, are—and however large or small the proportion of the total, it's too many. Find more documentation on the extent of the problem here.)

Is it OK to swoop into a country and take someone else's child just because you're rich? Is wealth all it takes to have a "better life" ... or might it matter that you get to stay with the family you already know and love? Madonna's not alone in what she's doing, although she is unusual in knowing there's a family that wants Mercy back. Save the Children and other human rights groups want her to back off. She is setting a dangerous example, leading more Westerners into a "humanitarian" mission that is anything but.

Ethica, an American nonprofit that advocates for ethics in adoption, has launched a fundraising campaign to help Mercy stay home with her family. According to Ethica, Malawi's average annual income is $160. Ethica's goal is to raise $2,240—an annual salary for her grandmother until Mercy reaches adulthood—so that she can stay home. You can donate here.

Is Renting a Womb Worse (or Better) Than Adopting?

Nina, I agree with you that the worst thing about Alex K’s New York Times Magazine article this past Sunday—about her surrogate pregnancy and motherhood—were the slyly critical pictures and Alex’s class-cluelessness. Moe suggests (as do many others) that adoption might have been less genetically vain than surrogacy. But that suggestion presumes adoption isn't exploitive—and, after a year spent investigating problems in international adoption, I can tell you that's not always so. 

Sometimes adoption is good for all concerned, especially if the child is older, sick, or has special needs. But not everyone is prepared to take on those needy children. Far more people are lined up for healthy infant adoption—which isn't easy, it turns out.

News flash: Worldwide, there are more families seeking healthy infants than there are healthy infants in need of new families. Some of the international adoption programs are arguably surrogacy in disguise—but without real payment or protections for the birth families. In some countries, a significant portion of women appeared to have been getting pregnant to sell the babies; in others, babies were being coercively purchased or defrauded or even kidnapped away from the birth families. (The big exception is China, where the adoption program is carefully overseen, but China has become more restrictive.) And that doesn't count the birth families whose children were defrauded, coerced, or flatly kidnapped away from them. (For detailed and heartbreaking stories about this, check my institute's Web site, where we've been posting our adoption documentation and research.)

Adoption depends on tragedy and loss of some kind—like organ donation, except with less oversight or regulation and with much more money to be made for the brokers. As with organ donation, in adoption there are more people on the list than there are children available. I haven't looked as deeply into domestic adoption but have heard enough to know there ARE coercive practices and serious regulatory failures; birth mothers DO get coerced, and adoptive parents get less consumer protection than if they joined a gym.

In surrogacy at least everyone goes into it with eyes open; the surrogates are screened for their emotional stability and are more or less fairly compensated. I’m guessing it’s less exploitive than renting out the body parts that Meghan and Hanna are discussing below. But maybe that’s just me.

But Madonna Did It!

About Clinton I have nothing to say.  But I do want to give a shout out to my girl, Marjorie and say this: I've got your back! Anyone brave enough to write about the fallout from the gender wars for Newsweek, that magazine of Middle America, is going to need it. I mean, even conservative poster girl Condi Rice gets the smack-down when she dares to discuss the reality of race in America. (Thanks to The Root's Jimi Izrael for pointing me to this gem!) But don't worry, Marjorie. I'm pretty sure I can take Lou Dobbs if he comes sniffing for trouble. He looks a little soft around both the middle and the head.

On a different and more interesting note, I've been wondering around the meaning of this report by a nonprofit adoption-advocacy group that concluded that a decade of de-emphasizing race in adoptions might not have been such a win-win idea. The report examines the impact of the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, and finds that although there has been a small increase (17 percent to 20 percent)  in transracial adoptions since the law went into effect, many of these children end up struggling with being "different" and face major challenges in their quest to develop strong identities. Meanwhile their well-intentioned parents have not been prepared by social workers for the racial and cultural challenges they are likely to face because the social workers fear violating the law.

Having covered the foster care system for the New York Times, I can tell you this much: It sucks. No child should be left to linger there one minute longer than absolutely necessary. Yet even with the law, African-American children are still disproportionally represented in foster care and remain there longer than children of other ethnicities. It seems to make only common sense not to discourage any qualified and loving family who wants to adopt a child from doing so. The problem is that, once again, we can't seem to find a middle ground on these issues. Either we insist on only matching like to like, and children suffer. Or we shove these families together, then close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears and shout, "Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind!" until whoever is saying something we don't want to hear gives up and goes away.

Puff This ...

Were you just being provocative, Emily? Describing a best-case abortion as nothing more than "a few not ideal hours'' makes it sound like an afternoon at the DMV without a good book. And aren't you being just as categorical as you say Caitlin Flanagan is when you argue that giving a child up for adoption is definitely trickier than having an abortion? (Except when it's not?) Whether you think abortion is morally neutral, intrinsically evil, or the gray area that hijacked our whole political debate, though, here's what I wish we could agree on: There is no other-than-partisan purpose in lobbies on both sides of this issue raising huge sums that only stoke the argument, like some hideous perpetual flame. And despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, it's the fight itself that keeps us from focusing on the widely agreed-upon need for birth control, birth control, for heaven's sake birth control.

That Erica Jong post on girl-written puff pieces that Dahlia mentioned made me laugh, though; first, why shouldn't we have enough confidence to cop to an interest in not only Iraq and the Darfur and the dollar, but also shoes and Carla Bruni and poor, poor Katie Holmes? (Today's shiniest news bauble: The man Princess Diana considered the love of her life has, as the Daily Mail put it, "run to fat.'' In his first-ever, "world exclusive'' interview Pakistani doctor Hasnat Khan, reveals ... lots less than the photo of him does. "I found her a very normal person. ... I think she did great work for the country. ... I always wanted to follow in the footsteps of my maternal grandfather, who was a doctor.'')  If women really were the lead dogs on the newshound puff patrol, however, we'd completely dominate daily journalism at this point, because we are all style reporters now. There's no mystery about why that might be; as news outfits cut staff to boost stock—and are expected to magically do More with Less—it's way cheaper to provide commentary than reporting. And though women are still overrepresented on the boo-hoo brigades sent out to gather quotes from grieving families, I think I mostly differ with Jong on what the meaning of "puff'' is.

She complains that we delve into such "idiotic'' and trivial matters as a political candidate's marriage—but then also charges that we "never discuss psychological depth because hey, who cares if the president's a bomb-happy dry-drunk trying to play out an Oedipal war with his father?'' I write a lot about political marriages, so I guess her puff pastry is my meat and potatoes. But isn't looking at a candidate's closest relationships how we find out about bomb-happy dry drunks trying to play out Oedipal wars? Not a whole lot of that sort of thing comes of just-the-facts coverage of position papers. Doubtless we can do a better job of covering the issues, even in our current pared-down state. As can any readers who feel deprived of substance.

Juno, Scolded

Dahlia, agreed entirely. And now on to a subject that lies somewhere between the CIA and nail polish: Caitlin Flanagan's complaints about the movie Juno in the NYT over the weekend. (Did anyone else notice that the Times' Sunday op-ed pages were practially all XX Factor fodder?) Flanagan says that Juno is a "fairy tale" because, "As any woman who has ever chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school can tell you, surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure."

It's not the sentiment that bugs me, exactly. Yes, adoption and abortion can be fraught. It's the categorical nature of the statement: Adoption is a lifelong burden; abortion is complicated and scary. Flanagan's argument, here and elsewhere, also boils down to this: Sex is bad for teenage girls. That's sometimes true, sure, but sometimes not—as Juliet has pointed out to us. Sometimes, teenage sex is caring and loving and, well, great. And sometimes an abortion is a few not ideal hours that give you the rest of your life back—nothing more. Check out this new book by abortion doctor Susan Wicklund and the stories she tells about her patients. Adoption is trickier, I grant Flanagan, if for no other reason than it means going through with a pregnancy. But wouldn't the world be a better place if girls could experience it the way Juno did? I'm glad the movie made me imagine a girl who has a baby, hands it over to another woman who desperately wants to raise it, and then goes back to playing guitar with her boyfriend on his front steps. It's a fairy tale with a purpose. I did have one quibble with the movie, though: I wished that Juno's parents brought up birth control in the scene in which they gently chide their daughter for getting pregnant. It was such a no-brainer, and the mother in me rued the missed opportunity.

Birther's Remorse?

Juliet, your post on the Dutch couple who abandoned their adopted child is a nice bookend to this story I'd wanted to blog about: According to (also!) the Daily Mail, the world's oldest mother—she gave birth to her sons last year at 66—is seriously ill. Carmen Bousada , who apparently lied about her age to be eligible for IVF now faces the prospect of leaving her twin sons orphaned. She has no spouse or partner. The folks who criticized Bousada's decision to give birth last year are getting their "I told you so" moment early, and reigniting the big Wendy Wasserstein debate about single women who choose to have babies alone, later in life.

Frankly I don't know what it means to be too old to parent, or too culturally myopic to parent, or too selfish to parent. But your story of the Dutch parents has an extra layer of grossness to it, Juliet. Apparently the parents are "traumatized" and "in therapy" for their decision to ditch their 7-year-old daughter for not fitting in.

Oh barf. It's one thing to be hopelessly selfish but quite another to expect folks to pity you for it. 

A New Way to "Go Dutch"

The Dutch couple's story just doesn't make any sense. The girl grew up with them, how could she fail to "adapt"? If I'm reading the story correctly, the couple's suggesting that the girl's innate South Korean-ness has made it impossible for them to care for her as a daughter.