Appalled by column on adoption

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Since I'm serving with Mennonite Central Committee in Indonesia, I get The Mennonite late. There may have already been wise responses to the Speaking Out ("A Biblical Consideration for Adoption," Feb. 17). But I feel compelled to add what is hopefully another.

My spouse and I chose to form a family through adoption, and I am an advocate for adoption. However, I found the column by C. Richie an appalling and chilling perpetuation of some horrific and dangerous myths about adoption. I take particular exception to the implication that adoptive parents who relinquish "the ability to have biological children" are somehow paragons of selflessness and generosity swooping in to save unwanted, unloved children from a life of "hell on earth" who will then be rewarded by the great love of the child for the "parents who come and pick them out of a life of destitution."

There is so much wrong with that, it makes me ill. People adopt for a variety of reasons, few of them selfless. Many children and adults live in deplorable and unjust conditions in our world. Children, because they are most vulnerable, too often end up as victims of poverty and politics. But they are not necessarily unloved or unwanted. Extreme circumstances cause some parents to feel their only options are to give a child over to someone else to raise or to abandon them.

Blythe, offhand statements about "parents who didn't want them" hide not only the pain experienced by birth parents but the social, economic and political conditions that we adoptive parents share in creating that pain.

I love my children more than I could have thought possible and am humbled and honored every day to be permitted to be their mother. But I know that my joy in being their mother is built on the backs of injustice that led to their relinquishment by parents and family somewhere in China they may never know and by my snatching them away from a culture, language and heritage that is rightfully theirs.
That there is love in our family is God's grace, not that I saved them.

Associated Issue: Walking with Jesus - Feb. 17, 2009

Associated Article: A biblical consideration for adoption

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