Tag: Cognitive Distortions

Who Is Really Responsible

Sharing some intelligent and knowledgeable thoughts today (no, not my own but so good, I had to share) –

Responsibility In Adoption

WHO IS REALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR FORCED ADOPTIONS?

A few people make the point that sometimes foster parents are forced by the state to adopt their foster children. Since there was some demand for a topic addressing forced adoptions from foster care, I thought this topic was important. Let’s start with some language.

ARE FOSTER PARENTS FORCED OR ARE THEY COERCED?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, “force” includes situations where a person may be threatened into cooperating with an action they would prefer not to perform. In this way, you can say that adoptive parents are “forced” to adopt from foster care under some circumstances. But I think the word “coerced” is better because it is a more nuanced word that conveys the fact that while there were no good choices, adoptive parents still made a choice.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THESE FORCED ADOPTIONS?

There’s a who and there’s a what. Let’s start with the “what.”

What we’re talking about is the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), a Clinton-era law intended to encourage state agencies to find and secure permanent homes for children waiting in foster care following the termination of parental rights. This act provides Federal monies for state agencies for each child adopted out of foster care in a given fiscal year. In order to continue to receive this stipend, the state agencies must increase the number of adoptions compared to the previous year. Agencies, therefore, train their caseworkers to push for (or coerce) adoptions so that they continue to receive these federal funds for their services. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) is largely responsible for the number of children in foster care waiting to be adopted as well as the coercion in adoption.

The “who” is the adoptive parent.

I know you don’t want to hear this. It is so much easier to blame someone else for your involvement in a system of oppression. But let me put this simply: You would not have been forced to adopt, if you had not been involved in foster care as a foster parent in the first place.

Leaving aside any feelings many of us have about adoption and foster care in the first place, this is factually true. The caseworker could not have coerced you to adopt, if you had not already been fostering, which most of you signed up for in the first place.

THE REALITY OF FORCED ADOPTIONS

They do happen. Period. But when we put the emphasis on adoptive parents, we shift the tragedy of forced adoptions away from the helpless party: The adoptee. We also shift the emphasis from the party who truly had no choice and was literally forced: The natural family. Because the adoptee didn’t choose to be in foster care — the adoptive (formerly foster) parent did. Because biological parents didn’t choose to engage with the system — the adoptive (formerly foster) parent did.

Before you argue that biological parents chose to engage with the system, sit down and listen. Please.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) demands a supply of children to be adopted out of foster care, and Child Protective Services uses increasingly aggressive techniques to source these children. Many children in the system, even post-Termination of Parental Rights, are in the system because their parents were facing temporary situations and then the system saddled them with requirements they simply could not complete. When parents don’t complete the objectives of their case plan, their rights are terminated. Their children may be adopted “for the sake of permanency.”

ADOPTIVE PARENTS AREN’T VICTIMS

It is harmful to adoptees and their original families when adoptive parents make themselves out to be the victims in adoption. Not only does this potentially (likely) harm the adopted child and/or their first family, but it prevents the adoptive parent from healing the parts of them that are wounded by whatever causes led them to adoption. You have to be responsible for your choices. Period. As a first mother who lost her children to CPS and is now in reunion, I strive to recognize that whatever I may feel, I am not the victim. My children were. For the sake of your child, keep things in perspective. In the long run, it will also help you.

BUT WHAT ABOUT KINSHIP ADOPTION?

Kinship adoption is a true tragedy. The majority of kinship adopters didn’t set out to foster or adopt in the first place and accept responsibility for a relative’s children to keep them out of the system. In many states, they are then threatened with stranger placement, if they don’t adopt their kinship child. Adoption isn’t the right answer, but keeping children with family has to come first whenever possible. No adopter gets a free pass, but if there is an argument that can be made that kinship adopters have almost no choice because they didn’t choose to participate in the system apart from the pressure applied by the need for care inside the family.

YOU CAN DO THE WRONG THING WHILE TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING

It’s easy for those suffering cognitive distortions (often as a result of childhood abuse and trauma) to believe that participating in a broken system makes them a bad person.

Nobody’s saying that. We recognize the choicelessness you felt when confronted with the option to either adopt or allow a child you care deeply for to be removed from your home to be adopted by strangers — and you may never see them again.

But it is important, for the sake of your adopted child — that you not make yourself the victim of some third party — especially when that third party is faceless and nameless (“the system”).

LET’S GET VISIBLE!

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Really ? Infertility Called You To Do This . . .

The image comes from from Natasha Metzler’s essay LINK>Adoption is Not a Fix for Infertility.

She writes – I can tell you, without question or qualm, that adopting did not and could not fix our infertility. It wasn’t a cure or a correction. Adoption is actually an entirely different everything from infertility. It has its own set of highs and lows, good and hard, beauty and trial. So if you’re ever tempted to say to someone who is struggling with infertility, “Why don’t you just adopt?” I’m letting you know that’s like telling someone who lost their minivan in a car wreck, “Why don’t you just get a Mack truck?”

I started into this topic after reading someone in my all things adoption group write – I made a post on my own wall about my frustration with the Christian belief that one is individually “called” to adopt via infertility.

My adoptive mother’s cousin (my cousin, who is one of my truly favorite people on earth and who I adore) commented. And, in typical traumatized fashion, I instantly reached for the most harmful cognitive distortion I could find: I assumed that if I told her what was true for me (that I am an abolitionist) that it would come back to my adoptive mother (with whom I’m currently living) and I’d be on the streets.

Now. It’s not like my cousin to spread things that could hurt other people, for one. For another, my adoptive mother knows I’m an abolitionist. And finally, even if she hadn’t and this “news” got back to her, she isn’t likely to throw me out — our relationship is better than that.

So the easiest way for me to avoid painful cognitive distortions like this is to avoid talking about adoption in public at all. When I do, I am always very careful to only say what is palatable for people whose lives are otherwise touched by adoption in other ways (including other adoptees who are still experiencing the cognitive dissonance we refer to as “the fog”).

The adoptees you know are the same, whether they are “happy dappy adoptees” or they are “angry adoptees.” I promise you they don’t tell you everything they feel about adoption and that the reason (whether conscious or not) is fear.

You will always come closest to a real understanding of adoption through adoptee voices. But you must understand that many of us are STILL holding back the truth of our lived experience and our reality as adoptees.

So when you think you know, and you’ve just begun to hate this industry as much as we do, know this: You still don’t know how bad it is for us because so many of us are terrified to tell you.

So I went looking for that post she referred to. She wrote – This post is going to offend some people who simply think adoption is a wonderful way to help children in need.

Here’s the first quote: “We have always wanted a family and after two years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, we feel that the Lord is leading us to expand our family through adoption!”

I have two problems with this. The first is that it took until after two years of struggling with fertility treatments for this couple to decide they wanted to adopt. This means that adoption is Plan B. It means that we, as adoptees, are plan B. (I’ve accepted this a long time ago.)

The second is that if God was calling you to adopt, would He truly have used your suffering, pain, and personal trauma to prompt you to follow a calling, or would He give you signs that didn’t require you to become so broken *before* becoming parents? (We know that broken people don’t make the best parents, regardless of the process they had in becoming parents.)

“We are open to any gender and we would prefer a newborn.” So God called you to become one of the 100+ couples waiting for each newborn who becomes available for adoption while hundreds of thousands of children wait in the American foster care system for permanent homes through adoption or guardianship — and many want to be adopted AND can consent to it? This is not a way in which God calls people to help solve a societal problem because there is no lack of homes for newborns, only a lack of newborns for homes.

“After much consideration and prayer, we have decided that we want to have a closed adoption.” So God answered their prayers about adoption and told them that the best way for them to serve Him is to sever a newborn permanently from their family tree of origin and then to make it as difficult as possible for that child to know where they come from. All so they can make the baby truly theirs.

She ends with this – As much as I cannot understand this mindset, I’m sharing this in the hopes that some of you who have never thought about what it means to adopted people to live with adoption might take a moment to think about how weird these beliefs are. I cannot imagine that God has called anyone to participate in family destruction for the purposes of family planning.