Nathan and Terica looked after Ben last night so I could work on ads for Venture Marketing, and we got to discussing kid spacing. Nathan is less than 2 years older than his brother and Terica is 5 years from her sibs (excepting that twin of hers, of course).
I still maintain that I do not want Ben to be an only child as I was, but that I am not ready to get pregnant again. These days, the idea of waiting until the Benster is potty trained seems like a good one.
Kris and I also discuss the idea of adopting. I told him that I would not pursue adopting a newborn, because we have had that experience. I’m not saying it’s a hell I don’t want to revisit – I think the scarce supply of domestic newborns up for adoption are better suited to couples having fertility issues.
For me, that leaves foster children (often sibling groups) or the ever-popular China option. In my mind, there is something both beautiful and bizarre about crossing the globe to expand your family, the core of your intimate life.
Today, I ran across Steven Levitt (Freakonomics guy) answering an adoption question from a reader. I appreciate his candor, but I’d also like to hear his thoughts that he deems too complex for the blog.
Q: What is your opinion on how international adoption affects the economy, race and class divisions, and the widening income gap within the U.S.? What do you think of the argument that children are “readily available for adoption” in the U.S., and, further, that adoption is marketed as a product with benefits?
A: I don’t think international adoption affects the economy in any meaningful way. We are talking about very small numbers of children being adopted from foreign countries into the U.S. each year – perhaps 20,000 children total, compared to the 3 million children born each year in the U.S. Adoption does, however, profoundly affect those families that adopt. My life has been completely changed because of the two daughters my wife and I adopted from China.
You’re right that some people in the U.S. really don’t like foreign adoption. Some have argued that it is a form of subtle racism, in that parents like me will go to China to adopt, but won’t adopt a black child here in the U.S. This is a complex issue – far too complex for me to discuss in all its richness here. But let me at least explain some of the thinking underlying my own decision to adopt from abroad. The first factor was that our son, Andrew, had just died. We were not emotionally prepared to navigate the U.S. adoption scene, which is full of uncertainty for adoptive parents for two reasons: 1) the relative scarcity of healthy but unwanted babies being put up for adoption since the legalization of abortion; and 2) the emphasis on birth parent rights.
We did give some serious thought to adopting either a black child domestically, or adopting from Africa. It turns out that African adoption is extremely complicated, as Madonna discovered the hard way. Ultimately, my own view was that the identity issues faced by a black child raised by white parents would be too difficult. Some of my academic research with Roland Fryer has made clear to me the stark choices that black teens, especially boys, have to make about “who they are.” As a parent, I was not willing to take the chance on loving and raising an adopted child, only to know that when he became a teenager he would have to face the choice of being “black” or “white,” and that either choice would be very costly for him (and also for me). That same sort of racial “all or nothing” choice is not at play for Asian youths in our society.
