Hellobee

If you can believe it or not, there are yet more decisions that need to be made when you are going through a domestic infant adoption. We are now into the most granular and discomforting decisions that we had to make when preparing to adopt.  I’ll be frank; it felt weird to be able to designate all of these things.  I mean with your own baby, you get what you get, whether that meant cleft lip or family history of bipolar disorder.  Yet in adoption you are allowed to designate that you will not accept certain things. It is a little easier to imagine stating preferences on drugs, smoking and alcohol, but even with these designations you become very mindful that you are significantly narrowing your pool of situations.  Have I mentioned that this isn’t easy?!

Most agencies have an extensive questionnaire that goes over your preferences on:

• Race (some ask for specification down to the 1/4)
• Sex
• In-utero exposures (smoking, alcohol, drugs)
• Family health history
• Special needs
• Openness of the relationship with birth parents

Each of these questions could be a separate blog topic, but let’s go over some of the more basic considerations.  I know that race and sex can be difficult topics, but I think it’s important to be real about them!

We read a lot about race before we made any decisions, though our hearts told us we would love any baby of any race.  We learned that there is a movement in the US and UK to keep adopted children in their community of origin.  Needless to say, this can be challenging when there are a limited number of families of color available to adopt these children.  I learned about this ongoing debate in In Their Own Voices by Rita Simon and Rhonda Roorda.  This book interviews trans-racial adoptees who grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s in the United States.  They go over the research on the subject up until the late 1990’s (so a little out of date, but still important reading).  The book points out that many families think that because biracial kids share some of their heritage that it might be easier to select a child that is 50% African American rather than 100%.  Interestingly, biracial African American adoptees talk about how it is actually harder for them than their full African American peers to understand their own self-identity when they are adopted into white families.  That was eye-opening to me!  They also talk about the importance of finding ways to expose your child to their community of origin.  It could be tempting to raise children in a “color-blind” fashion, but the rest of the world doesn’t see the adoptive family when looking at the adopted child.  It is, therefore, important to prepare your adopted child to face the world as a black woman or man.  If you aren’t prepared to do this, it might be wise to tailor your racial designations accordingly.  We ultimately decided that we could be prepared to parent a child of any race!

I also read Inside Transracial Adoption by Gail Steinberg & Beth Hall in my exploration of the topic.  There is a nice discussion of adoptees from multi-racial backgrounds in this book.

I was surprised to see that some agencies allow you to designate the sex of the child.  If you do designate, you’ll definitely be limiting the number of situations in which your profile will be presented.  There are many expectant moms who do not know the sex of the baby, and in order to be fair to those women, couples who are looking for a particular sex, will not be presented to those women.  This leaves significantly less than 50% of the situations in which you will be eligible to be considered.  This translates generally into a longer wait to be matched.  Still sometimes there are compelling reasons to need to specify one sex over the other, such as shared bedrooms or already having more than 1 child of a particular sex.

Another consideration with respect to sex is the intersection of sex and race.  Some folks who decide that they would like to be considered for matches with African American children, then designate that they would like to only be considered for girls.  This is a well-known phenomenon in trans-racial adoption, and one that is somewhat concerning.  The phenomenon may be attributed to the fact that families do not feel prepared to parent a black boy as he transitions from child to teen and adulthood.  However, the challenges that families face with respect to race and prejudice are the same, whether the child is a boy or a girl.  It just ends up being more in your face with a boy, because of societal issues… but that doesn’t mean your adopted daughter won’t face the same issues. Racism exists regardless of the sex of the child. So, if you are thinking of designating girl and adopting trans-racially, it may be of benefit to really question yourself as to the “why” of that decision.

Finally, don’t forget that if you plan to parent black girls, also plan on becoming an expert at doing black hair.  Trans-racial adoptive parents are under scrutiny by individuals from their child’s racial/ethnic group.  Hair is very important in African American communities (see the documentary Good Hair for further discussion of this issue!), and you don’t want anyone to think that you are neglecting your child’s needs!

So what did we do about sex?  Mr. Jacks and I thought we might have a preference (we absolutely adore having a daughter, and we would have loved to raise two strong independent sisters), but we decided not to make decisions based on sex. Rather, we chose to focus on the other aspects of the match that we felt were most important to us.

We’re not getting into any easier territory here.  Each couple has their own comfort level on this issue.  Alcohol consumed in any amount in pregnancy is a teratogen (any substance, organism, or process that causes malformations in a fetus), and can result in Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.  These can range from mild deficits to severely effected children, and you won’t know until well into toddlerhood or beyond where the child falls on that spectrum.  So if you are willing to accept a placement with alcohol exposures, I think you must be prepared to parent a child that might be significantly impaired.  Also remember that you are relying on self-reporting by the expectant mom, which may mean that actual exposure was different than what was reported.

Smoking is a frequently reported exposure and something you’ll likely have to come to terms with in order to be matched.  The biggest risk of smoking during pregnancy is low birthweight and prematurity, but there is also risk of some learning problems and SIDS.

Other drugs also hold significant risks to the fetus and neonate.  Rather than go through them all here, I would refer you to the March of Dimes website for in-depth coverage of each drug to help you decide about what are acceptable risks to your family.

If you are still confused after reading, there is also an online contact at March of Dimes, and they can be very helpful in talking through a situation.  You can also get in touch with an adoption medicine specialist who can be very helpful!  We actually did talk to one about another unrelated issue that we were considering.

This is really getting into the minutiae of the process.  Some families may have many members with diabetes or cancer.  Will you be ok with that?  How about mental health issues? No family, including each of our own has a perfect health history, so it’s just a matter of which issues are deal-breakers for you.  I can’t think of very many that would really change my mind, except maybe autosomal dominant fatal diseases such as Huntington’s Disease.

There is an adoptive family for every child, and some adoptive families feel called to focus solely on special needs.  You should never feel bad if you are not prepared to parent a child with special needs, though it is worth considering.  There are some issues that are easily addressable, but some that mean lifelong therapies and medical care.  A friend once told me, and I think it’s good advice, to not waiver on this once you make the decisions in an objective manner.  I say this because over the course of this journey I’ve seen many adorable pictures of already born beautiful infants who have complex chronic conditions.  Seeing those babies makes me want to say, “Ah, multiple heart surgeries and neurologic delays… We can do that!”  But the realities can be much harsher in the Emergency Department at three in the morning.  Knowing your limits is an important factor.  And boy do I know my limits in this regard, since I work with special needs kids every day.  If something happens to one of our children in the future, we will deal with whatever comes… but we decided to not look for extra challenges.

Historically, adoption was a hushed affair, where birthmothers would hide their pregnancies to avoid shame and adoptive parents would represent their child as their own.  Birth records were sealed and adoptees had to wait into adulthood to search for birth families.  Now the preferred adoptive strategy is open adoption.  But openness can range from a letter and pictures once a year to frequent in person meetings.  There is no real way to know what is the right amount of openness for a particular situation, but I think it is worthwhile for people to understand their limits. If having the biological parent regularly involved in your lives is uncomfortable for you, then it is best to negotiate other arrangements.  It’s only fair to the expectant parents that you are honest about what you can handle so that they can find adoptive parents whose needs match their own.  We felt fairly strongly that we’d want an open relationship, especially since we were open to adopting transracially.  We thought it would be helpful to have our child really understand their heritage.

Hopefully, I didn’t make these choices seem too overwhelming.  When we were making our decisions, it was kind of empowering to arm ourselves with as much knowledge as possible and to feel like we were in control of some aspects of the process.  There were things that were non-negotiable to us, while we were surprised to discover that there were others that we could live with.  It’s intensely personal and there are no right or wrong answers… only those that are best for your family.  I’m really curious to see what other people would and would not consider for their own families, and if others have more input on the difficult issues of race and sex.