It appears that liberals and progressives are beginning to perceive a connection between abortion politics and adoption politics. The leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade contains a footnote including the now-notorious phrase: “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted.” Here is a sampling of responses from liberal and progressive Twitter:
It’s a chilling phrase, with the air of having been concocted by the evil masterminds of a plan to yoke the pregnant into reproductive servitude. If we need to boost the “domestic supply of infants,” we must find a way to establish a caste of breeders.
A tremendous irony looms here.
The “mind that would string those words together” was, in fact, an analyst writing on behalf of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Domestic supply of infants” appears in a 2008 report titled “Adoption Experiences of Women and Men and Demand for Children to Adopt by Women 18-44 Years of Age in the United States.” It’s on the surface, there in the title. At issue is the “demand for children to adopt.” This is nothing but the counterpart of the supply of children to adopt. Yet you will search far and wide for liberals and progressives professing outrage at the idea of a demand for children to adopt. And yet:
If we accept the idea of a demand for children to adopt, then we are committed to the idea of a supply of children to adopt.
Let us recall a little of what leading figures in the Democratic Party have said about adoption and abortion.
When in 1996 Hillary Clinton endorsed a tax credit for adopting families, she said, “We should make it possible for thousands more children to be adopted by Mother's Day next year.”1
In his commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, President Obama said, “Let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions. Let’s reduce unintended pregnancies. Let’s make adoption more available.”
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have campaigned on a commitment to making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.”
Lest we miss the relevance of this last point, consider that conjoining “more adoption” with “less abortion” gives us Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw’s sloganesque statement, widely denounced by liberals and progressives on Twitter:
This is exactly the position liberal Democratic politicians triangulated their way into.
The primary response I have seen to these points is that it is different when conservatives invoke “the domestic supply of infants.”
The difference, then, is that only Republicans invoke this language to justify forcing births.
But if our question is how policy affects “the domestic supply of infants” available for adoption, we cannot stop with policies that force births. We must enlarge our focus to include all the factors that pressure vulnerable people into relinquishing children, and not only infants.2 Otherwise, the progressive position becomes “More adoptable babies, but not that way.” But if this is the position, then why the progressives’ outcry over attention to “the domestic supply of infants?”
The outcry is hypocrisy, born of an unwillingness to confront the fact that liberals and progressives, no less than conservatives, are eager to adopt.
The demand for adoptable children is so great that hopeful parents compete for the attention of potential relinquishing parents, and they are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for prenatal care, and legal and agency fees, to fulfill their dreams of parenthood. Progressive politicians and operatives proudly announce the addition of adoptees to their families, to general acclaim. In the United States, the only thing generally acknowledged as bad about the demand for adoptable infants is that there are not enough infants to go around.
Let me repeat what I said earlier:
If we accept the idea of a demand for children to adopt, then we are committed to the idea of a supply of children to adopt.
My response to this is to call attention to the core conception of adoption that almost everyone in this bitter and fractious political moment shares: that the first problem adoption solves is childlessness. We speak of adoption as a win-win-win for adoptive parents, relinquishing parents, and adoptees, but this is wishful thinking. Birth parents’ and adoptees’ interests and rights are sacrificed to the desires of adoptive parents as long as our social systems embody the idea of adoption as a family-planning option first, rather than as a last-resort intervention to provide a child a stable environment with a minimum of familial, community, and cultural disruption.3
To me, an adoptee, liberal outrage over “the domestic supply of infants” is unearned. It is unreflective. It is even in bad faith. The history of liberal reproductive politics, since at least the 1990s, has centrally included an effort at triangulation to appear concessive to opponents of abortion, as well as to legitimize the desires of party faithful, mainly affluent people, who seek adoption as a way to create or complete their families.
I’ll accept their anger when I see a shift away from the hegemonic idea of adoption in the United States, which instrumentalizes parents in crisis, and their children, as materials for fulfilling domestic life ambitions. To judge from liberals’ general indifference to the rights of adoptees and birth parents, I have a long wait coming.
Quoted in Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (2001). (As it happens, I write this post on Mother’s Day.)
In fact, not even primarily infants. Dorothy Roberts’ newly published Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, advances a conception of the child welfare system in the United States as an apparatus of family policing that intervenes aggressively to monitor, regulate, and separate Black families, disproportionately placing children and adolescents in foster care.
My Fourteen Propositions and “Why Is That Controversial?” discuss some of the implications of the differences between these ideas of adoption.