THE AUTHOR Joyce Maynard, divorced and 55, has satisfied a serious case of maternal lust by adopting two children from Ethiopia. Joining the significant number of Western parents who pursue global utopianism in their own homes, Maynard spent $20,000 to adopt the two girls, taking them far from their own county to bring them to California. Several months into the experience, she has written about it for More magazine, explaining how this new home filled with Western comforts and the love of strangers is better than the modest orphanage these girls left behind.

“I didn’t do this to be noble,” Maynard writes. “I was a mother in need of some children.” Well, at least she is honest. (A father is irrelevant; he doesn’t even come up as a necessity in any way.) Nevertheless, one suspects, given the amount of time she spends detailing the life she has created for her adopted daughters in More (a magazine devoted to more of everything), that she does indeed see her actions as noble.

Maynard notices that she no longer has time to pay much attention to her three grown children. She writes:

My house is often a mess. When friends speak of trips they’re taking, I know I won’t be traveling for a long time, if ever. I don’t go shopping either; it’s easier to just live in T-shirts and black yoga pants. Harder to deal with is the knowledge that I am not as available as I once was to visit my three older kids. But the truth is, they had me when they needed me—the same as their new sisters (which is how my older kids refer to them) do now. Most of the time, the older ones are off living their own lives, but every now and then they blow through, and for however long they stick around, there’s hip-hop dancing in the kitchen and love all around. By the time Almaz and Birtukan leave, I’ll be closing in on age 70—at which point I expect to be totally cured of my child-raising addiction.

At that point, she may be too old to notice the emptiness she is fleeing.

Maynard’s sacrifices for her new children create a defensive shield; who dare criticize such parental attention? But in trumpeting the fatherless, pick-me-up, transracial family that centers around feminine feeling, she diminishes the prospects of other children, if not of these two displaced girls, on whose chaotic existence a warped vision of global harmony rests. This is not maternal love.

In a previous post, I wrote:

On the face of it, maternal desire seems a wholly good thing. The powerful drive to bear and nurture children is basic to our collective survival and elevates the individual above common self-interest. How much good has been accomplished by the loving mother? The sum is incalculable.

But, on closer scrutiny, especially in light of recent developments, maternal desire is like other human desires, such as the drive for sex or money or love. It can be good but it can also be greedy and promiscuous. A woman who wants a child no matter what – even if that child will never know his father and even if she is not married – takes maternal desire to an unreasonable extreme. She may be a nurturing mother for the children she bears. She may sacrifice herself for years to raise them well and her children may praise her for what she has done, but the egotism and maternal lust remain and this negatively affects them, indeed altering their entire existence.

                                                              — Comments —

Joe writes:

I am 23-year-old student who like many others have greatly enjoyed your common sense, traditional, and often eloquent solutions to many problems that the world faces today.

You wrote previously,

“But, on closer scrutiny, especially in light of recent developments, maternal desire is like other human desires, such as the drive for sex or money or love. It can be good but it can also be greedy and promiscuous.”

Agreed, I have never thought about adoption in this category. I was wondering however, if you could put forward some reasons that you think would be good or even healthy for someone to adopt? Obviously some women are unable to have children of their own and choose adoption for a way of having children. But I would like to know more specifically, are there instances in which a traditional nuclear family should consider adoption?

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

I am not anti-adoption. In fact, I think many more young unmarried women should consider offering their children up for adoption so that they can then go on to marry and have a traditional family and so that their children can grow up with fathers. Strangely, once the stigma was removed from unmarried motherhood, fewer women have chosen this route. There is a huge and understandable demand for adoptable children and couples who are infertile face significant struggles. I sympathize with them. Who wouldn’t sympathize with them? Their situation makes the millions of abortions all the more tragic.

But adoption should occur within national borders and within races. There will always be exceptions to this, but the practice of violating borders and disregarding race has become commonplace. It is more difficult for adopted children to adjust to foreign cultures and to live in a family that is racially different. Child trafficking is more apt to occur, as has been seen in the cases of Chinese families pressured to give up their daughters, when national boundaries are not honored, and when wealthy nations can take advantage of poorer countries, removing children thousands of miles away from their homes. International adoption is too tempting to poor countries and the potential for rackets too great. And, needless to say, it is very tempting to liberals who wish to prove in their personal lives that race, culture and nationality do not matter. They have the tenderest of feelings when it comes to foreign children and are chillingly eugenic when it comes to children aborted within their own nation. There is no question some individuals are using international adoption for baldly self-aggrandizing and ideological purposes.

Many Western couples clearly have given of themselves in raising foreign children: their sacrifices and love for these children are real, they are family, but the answer to the plight of the infertile should be found within their own countries. Perhaps if these couples could not adopt internationally, there might be more of an outcry against abortion and the infertile might make their situation better known to young unmarried women who become pregnant. 

Adoption should not be available to the unmarried or to homosexuals. Perhaps exceptions should be made in the case of unmarried women who wish to care for handicapped children from their own country. Whether adoption should be available to fertile couples or to older couples who have had their own children, it seems only when the needs of the infertile are met. There are some fertile couples, for instance, who especially want to take care of handicapped children or those with Down Syndrome.

Brittany writes:

I know children have a difficult time adjusting to a new race and a new culture but is it worse than suffering from poverty in a Third World country? There are kids in countries that dig through garbage and face AIDS. So with international adoption we are giving these kids a better life.

Laura writes:

If the main issue is the poverty of these children, then Westerners can make more donations to their care so that they can be raised well and grow up to contribute to their countries as adults. It is noble to want to help them.

Twenty thousand dollars, which is what Maynard paid to adopt, is an enormous sum of money in Ethiopia. These large sums are a temptation; who is to say whether children who might otherwise be cared for by extended families, which is often the case in Africa, are not handed over to orphanages? The point is, we can oversee adoption within our own borders, but we have little control over what goes on in other countries.

James P. writes:

“Maynard notices that she no longer has time to pay much attention to her three grown children.”

At least she had children of her own, unlike the movie star types who adopt a colored child as a hip fashion accessory after somehow failing to find the time to reproduce themselves.

White parents who have adopted Chinese girls are very common where I live. Most of the time it looks like they don’t have any natural children of their own. Are they infertile? Who knows. But it’s hard to believe there are so many of them.

Lisa writes:

The same society that praises “mothers” who adopt transracially heap condescending derision on me for the simple reason that all my children share the same DNA. I am accused of being “maternally lustful” for just functioning as a mother in ways historically very common and ordinary until the last forty years. A culture obsessed with collecting the latest in figurines, pets, CDs, electronic gadgets, or experiences can see a husband and wife with ten children only in terms of trying to judge my motives by their values.

(We didn’t have a large family to be noble or because we were wanting another child “no matter what”; it was, and always will be, an excruciating and delightful existence waking up to trust God for another day. I would never recommend that anyone have ten children. Likewise, I would never recommend that anyone NOT have ten children. I would advise them to seek God in all things.)

Hurricane Betsy writes:

You said,

“I am not anti-adoption. In fact, I think many more young unmarried women should consider offering their children up for adoption so that they can then go on to marry and have a traditional family and so that their children can grow up with fathers. Strangely, once the stigma was removed from unmarried motherhood, fewer women have chosen this route. There is a huge and understandable demand for adoptable children and couples who are infertile face significant struggles. I sympathize with them. Who wouldn’t sympathize with them? Their situation makes the millions of abortions all the more tragic.”

Your commentary on this subject implies that, over and above the disadvantages of single motherhood for the child, the real problem is the sadness and disappointment caused by infertility – a situation “curable” by taking a single woman’s baby and handing it over to a right and proper married couple with their cozy little home. “Plight” you call it. Encouraging single girls to give up their babies for the sake of childless couples – pretending it’s for the biological mother’s and baby’s benefit – is criminal in my judgment. Almighty God has given every person a row to hoe in this life; some people are infertile. It is no justification for encouraging the single mother to be cut off from her child for the sake of satisfying someone else’s needs and her own supposed future happiness with marriage and non-bastard children. It was never, traditionally, the function of adoption to assuage or buffer the misfortune of inability to have children normally. The function of adoption was to provide a good-enough home for an orphan or rejected child.

Yes, it is true that a single woman raising a child alone is a bad situation. Nor am I making light of fatherlessness. It is equally bad that our society has removed the stigma from unmarried motherhood. However, these facts don’t make adoption a good thing, unless the adopted child is an orphan (who will one day be able to accept death of parents much more easily than abandonment, which is what “giving up for adoption” really means.) Mother and child are a biological, God-designed unit. To encourage separation is a most serious transgression against nature’s laws and there will be a lifelong sting in the tail. Even then, every effort should be made to find the orphan or rejected baby a home with a blood relative. I know that this has been the policy in some other cultures and they should be congratulated for getting it right in this matter.

I know several adopted people. They are miserable. They are either struggling for years to find their biological parents or they grimly assert they don’t want to know who their parents are and you can tell they are lying. There is one exception to this: a woman I know, whose parents died, was what adopted by her aunt and uncle and is to my view of a normal mental conformation.

It is my hope that you will take these facts into consideration.

Laura writes:

Your commentary on this subject implies that, over and above the disadvantages of single motherhood for the child, the real problem is the sadness and disappointment caused by infertility – a situation “curable” by taking a single woman’s baby and handing it over to a right and proper married couple with their cozy little home.

I did not state that the needs of the infertile are paramount. If I implied it, that was not my intention. The tradition of young, unmarried women giving up their illegitimate children for adoption balances the interests of all parties: the mother, the child, the infertile and society at large. Adoption is not ideal for the mother and child and does not satisfy all of their interests, but all their interests rarely can be satisfied once a woman has born a child out of wedlock. There is no happy resolution unless the mother marries the father of her child. Not long ago, young couples were often forced to marry in the event of pregnancy. That too has its drawbacks but there is no pain-free way to create a standard of intact families.

Single mothers are relatively undesirable as potential spouses for men and many never marry or sustain healthy marriages. Research shows they have a dramatically lower chance of marrying and of marrying well. Unfortunately, many single mothers are unaware of this reality and have romantic hopes that they will go on to find normal lives for themselves and their children.  

Separating a child and mother entails great pain (it’s interesting how that pain for Third World mothers who see their infants go to the other side of the world is rarely acknowledged). But the alternative is often fatherlessness for the child and a chaotic private life for the mother, with the burden of raising a child on her own. For society,  the progressive social acceptance of single motherhood is an unmitigated disaster. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates grew up in fatherless homes.  Bristol Palin refused abortion, and that was good, but she has done much harm by further normalizing single motherhood. Roughly 30 percent of American children spend some part of their childhood in a single-parent home. The figure seems to increase by the day. There is copious evidence of the harm done to children by the rise of single motherhood.

Hurricane Betsy responds:

Thanks for posting my thoughts on this matter. It is gracious of you to do so when so many others would try to hide anything that gores their own particular ox. (Or maybe you are a person who enjoys intellectual jousting.)

You stated, “The tradition of young, unmarried women giving up their illegitimate children for adoption balances the interests of all parties: the mother, the child, the infertile and society at large.”

I actually chortled out loud when I read this, for it immediately reminded me of the expression jokingly attributed to an actuary who put his head in a hot oven while his feet were in a bucket of ice water, claiming, “On average, I feel fine.” Right. What kind of “balance” is being obtained here? One person bawling in pain for years, another overjoyed to have her infertility artificially reversed through the deliberate imposition of agony on another, yet another often fruitlessly searching for his biological origins?

There is no misery greater, not at the moment of relinquishment, nor 50 years later, when adopting out was done for the immediate and ongoing benefit of others (the infertile), and being told by cunning manipulators, “it’s for your and your baby’s own good”. What a foul lie. Yes, if the mother keeps the baby, she & her child will indeed have a greater than average chance of going through the serious challenges you list. But at least she and her child have a chance, however diminished, to make a good life for themselves. I see people in normal, intact, nuclear families who have been through, or are going through, one sort of hell or another. God decides what you need. Denying and ignoring one of His major laws of nature – rending the biological bond, established by Him, between mother and child – is a crime whose effects are neverending. Abortion is wrong but breaking this most powerful of bonds isn’t?

I will never stop saying it: the true reason that unwed mothers gave up their babies in large numbers in past decades is that they were strongly encouraged to do so for the benefit of the childless. “Your baby is going to into an incredibly loving home etc etc”. This is an offshoot of the pro-abortion argument of “Everybody is better off”, and is shameful. On the other hand, at least where white people are concerned, it isn’t much of an issue anymore, is it, with so many women killing the unplanned baby beforehand. This is all a racial issue one way or another. White women kill their fetuses, then years later spend $100,000 running to Africa or China to appropriate some nonwhite woman’s child. It is a fallen world and I have no use for anyone claiming to have a solution to all or any of this.

Allowing a single girl to keep her child, if that’s what she really wants, and helping her out, does not have to go hand-in-hand with encouragement of promiscuity, a situation which is rampant. In our cesspool of a culture, we don’t necessarily have to choose between branding an unmarried woman with a scarlet letter on her back, and encouraging unmarried motherhood. That is a false choice.

One more thing: catering to people wanting to adopt was at one point so extreme, that, as recently as the 1960s & 70s, a couple could indicate an exact ethnic preference in adoption based on their own backgrounds. I was told this by a woman who worked at the adoption agency. I personally know a couple where the mother was Polish, the father German, and by golly, the Children’s Aid Society rustled through their files to come up with the perfect little Polish/German girl for them. Hot damn, Laura, life was good…for some people, anyway. By the way, this couple already had a biological child but with the ready availability of “unwanted” children, they simply decided to forego all the trouble of gestation, labour and delivery.

Laura writes:

First, let me say, I did not post your comments because I enjoy “intellectual jousting.” The idea of discussing such an important issue for the sake of jousting is not appealing to me. The adoption of children is a very serious matter and it may shade into child trafficking very easily if there is not the underlying assumption that it is always preferable for a child to be with his biological parents and that concerted effort must be made to make this happen or the entire adoption process is illegitimate. That is always the best way. The question is what to do when this is not a possibility.

You say the mother-child bond is sacred and powerful. Indeed, it is. But if it is so sacred and powerful, why then are so many young women aborting their children? Adoption is preferable to abortion. Young unmarried women who are pregnant should be informed of the large number of infertile couples who are longing for children and who would give their children a loving home with two parents. The pain of giving up a child for adoption does not compare with the pain of knowing one has destroyed a child altogether, and women should be informed of this fact. Abortion should be discouraged at all costs. The best would be for pregnant, unmarried women to marry the father of their children. But if this is not a possibility, adoption is preferable to abortion. It is not true that the lives of all those who are adopted are virtually ruined. Adoption is painful, but fatherlessness is painful and destructive too. And, you will never change the reality that most men do not want to marry a woman who has a child by another man.

Is adoption always preferable to single motherhood? Not always, but I would say in many cases of young, immature women in a world where men have no obligation to marry them in the event of pregnancy, it often is. I have never said that young unmarried women should be pressured to give up their babies for the sake of infertile couples. I object to your implication that I am calling for babies to be torn out of the arms of young mothers. I did not say that single mothers should be led to believe that they have an obligation to the infertile. If it is a question of aborting a child, then I would say that, yes, they do indeed have an obligation to the infertile, but obviously, they should be free to keep their children. They should also understand what they face. They should know that their chances of a decent marriage are greatly reduced. Let them decide, but they need to know the facts. They should be pressured into marrying the father of their child, and the fathers should be pressured into marrying them. That is the ideal, and if we lived in a world where paternity was upheld and respected, many more men would marry, whether by coercion by other men or choice, the mothers of their children.

You suggest that giving up a child for adoption is dishonorable. I disagree. Yes, it causes pain to both child and mother, it is tantamount to a lifelong handicap for some, but it is an honorable alternative for a woman who has no husband. I do not see anything wrong with a couple who is adopting stating their ethnic preferences only as preferences and not as conditions. However, as I said, I do not see fertile couples as generally worthy of adopting.

In our cesspool of a culture, we don’t necessarily have to choose between branding an unmarried woman with a scarlet letter on her back, and encouraging unmarried motherhood. That is a false choice.

If unmarried motherhood is not shameful, I’d like to know how it can be discouraged. Why do you think unmarried mothers were branded in the past? Do you think it was out of pure hatred for mothers? The maternal drive is very powerful. We both acknowledge that. But it should not be satisfied at the expense of the general welfare of children. A world of single mothers is not kind to children. In fact, if one looks at neighborhoods where there are large numbers of single mothers, the first thing one notices is the level of casual neglect, even sheer brutality toward children, that is tolerated.

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