Hop on over to the Chase website which touts the product as "helping adoptive parents finance the most important addition to their home." Nice, catchy, Madison Avenue inspired patter. A handsome white Anglo Saxon family all dressed in white sport a pretty Asian-looking "new addition" to their otherwise "normal" looking (but boy dominated) family.
Adoption-speak phrases like "adoption adventure," "heart and home," "realizing the dream," "traveling to meet your new little one," "heartwarming reality" litter the site. Clearly the product - the loan product at least - is aimed at foreign adoption.
Look a little closer and you see the loan is "endor$ed" by the Dave Thoma$ Foundation. Read the fine print--always important for those embarking on an adoption adventure of Disney-esq proportions and costs--and you find that:
The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is a nonprofit 501(c)3 public charity dedicated to dramatically increasing the adoptions of the more than 140,000 children in North America's foster care systems waiting to be adopted. Created by Wendy's founder, Dave Thomas, who was adopted as a child, the Foundation spearheads programs such as Wendy's Wonderful Kids, which puts adoption recruiters in 50 states and Canada to find permanent, loving families for children in the foster care system, and Adoption-Friendly Workplace, which encourages employers to offer adoption benefits to their employees. The Foundation also works with adoption advocates and officials to streamline the adoption process and make adoption more affordable for families.
No word of foreign adoption here. Perhaps this redemptive "disclaimer" is designed to help purge this "public charity" from the evil influence of cold hard adoption ca$h.
When I was adopted from foster care in 1965 I don't think my working class adoptive parents were thinking about either an "adoption adventure" or a home loan. They were too busy working hard, paying the bills, and saving money for college. The kindly social worker who helped the process along wasn't motivated by money. She wasn't hawking adoption songs, pendants and poetry (although I did somehow get an adoption scrapbook which I still treasure), the agency wasn't cross marketing with global financial service firms, travel agents and foreign "facilitators," there were no big Washington lobbying groups supporting "the cause."
Yet we now know that most of those sixties foundlings were removed from their gestational carriers under the most coercive of conditions. Fathers did not count for much; despite having an extensive social history of my father his actual name is absent from the records. "Unknown" in social work speak. The young teenage girls who gave birth to the bastard babies were herded into maternity "homes" which were really more like jails or work camps. They were subject to cruelty, degradation and scorn by the social work establishment and religious charity do gooders whose sole mantra seemed to be "labor will set you free."
Perhaps not much has changed. Except the globalization and marketing of adoption as a "service" for waiting families and not children. As many commentors have pointed out in other posts on this blog, "who do you turn to," "who do you tell," "where do you go for help or accountability?"
When you discover that "social work thinking of the 1960s" or "legal standards dictated" or "sociological and cultural shifts resulted in blah blah blah" are used to justify of the "old" ways of thinking, you wonder how will we justify our current ways of thinking, especially as it applies to foreign adoption. Will foreign adoption someday be equated with slavery or child trafficking or cultural colonialism? And what about the hundreds of thousands of domestic children needing homes today? "Our children" as so many slogans tout (when they really mean "not those damaged children over there but these nice clean middle class children over here" or as an ownership assertion really meaning "my children.")
Where is the truth and reconciliation commission to address the old and the new ways of thinking? When will the adoption industry give up on it's endless quest for cash and focus on the difficult, low paying, charity-inspired work of providing real homes for real children in need (in the so called social work speak of "child centered practice)?
And how about home equity loans for single 17 year old moms struggling to keep their baby? Unfortunately their income from flipping burgers at Wendy's probably doesn't allow them to qualify.
When we started our investigation into adopting back in 1996 we went to Florida Social Services. We were bluntly told that we did not qualify to adopt a baby. If we insisted on going that route we were told that because we were a bit older, white & Jewish that the only baby we could get would be as aids or drug dependent baby. In hind sight it was a gift as we then turned to International adoption. Our beautiful, smart, wonderful daughter came to us from China in 1997 at 13 months old. She has been a wonderful addition to our family and we wouldn't change it for 3 newborns. Our country does not treat prospective parents with any respect. They want you to be perfect and in my lifetime I have yet to meet that perfect person. I am sorry for the kids in this country that never find a forever family but all of us International adoption parents are not to blame. Everybody should open there eyes and realize it is our government.
ReplyDeleteI am a father who adopted his son at birth in 1970. This Chase bank advertisement does not surprise me. Our country has changed in basic ways. We are now a country with a dominant corporate view. Adoption is a business. When we adopted Chris, there was a "we" view in this country, communities helping communities, "the people" We didn't buy Chris. We chose him.
ReplyDeleteWe may not have all the answers but there are a few questions that spring to mind.
ReplyDeleteIf we can have a $200 abortion, why don't we have a $200 adoption?
While the federal government subsidizes everything from airlines to failed banks, why aren't subsidizing the entire adoption system with serious incentives to adopt AMERICAN children?
Why aren't state child welfare agencies held accountable for holding children who are LEGALLY FREE for adoption hostage while well qualified American families wait?
Why hasn't anyone really examined how the profit motives and extended waiting periods have worked against the interests of America's waiting children and American families unable to afford unrestricted fees?
Why are we focusing enormous amounts of time and money to create "safe havens" for several hundred children a year while we have failed to focus on those children already in the system?
If it's illegal to sell human organs why is it legal to effectively "sell" human beings?
If there are millions of American families waiting to adopt infants why are hundreds of healthy American babies being exported to foreign countries with little or no oversight each year?
The answer in almost every instance is that adoption is a multi billion dollar industry in the US with virtually no regulation. That lack of regulation has ensured that thousands of children here and abroad and millions of willing families will never connect while market forces and unlimited fees create ever larger barriers to finding loving homes for children desperately in need.
Unfortunately, us APARENTS are TO BLAME. Yes, that's right. WE ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
ReplyDeleteDid it ever dawn in us, the AParents, that we readily, happily, and willingly paid those adoption fees to China, to Russia, to Romania, to Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Guatemala to get "our" baby? That a majority of us did not question where that money went, how many hands that money slipped thorugh? Why some of our children, once they came home to us, are ill because of time spent in institutions?
How can we blame the "the government" when we tossed money into an already corrupt system, with too many layers between us and our children - and their biological families.
Let's face it. Adoption is a privilege. Not a right. Nobody in a foreign country "owes" us their children because we can afford to "adopt" them.
Who can blame Chase, then, for issuing such a credit card? They're only following the money which we have readily spent on I.A.