By PLS
Now that pop icon Madonna has crawled down off the cross, from which she crucified the sensibilities of tender believers this past year, she has decided to adopt a child from Malawi. In the process, she has succeeded in riling up the sensitivities of the social worker set.
The question here is: who owns a baby? For that matter: who owns anybody? And what are the obligations of people owners? To supply food? Shelter? Clothing? Humane treatment? Rest and recreation? Education and training? Elements of autonomy? Eventual manumission? The latter is what well loved (or not so loved) children in families get. Having reached maturity in mind and body, children no longer need custodial care. They are set free, more or less.
Slave systems allow some people to own and work others like domesticated beasts. Slavery has largely been delegitimized these days, but it exists in places like Mauritania. What’s more, enslavement is one result of the trafficking in women. It’s a subject that “decent” people prefer not to think about: let the brutalized little girls languish; out of sight, out of mind. But other workers end up in slavery situations, too. Filipina housemaids in Saudi Arabia. Illegal immigrants locked away in LA sweat shops. They’re freed when they’re found—if anyone ever bothers to look. There’s also debt slavery in places like India and Pakistan. Some people never manage to pay off their debts, which enslaves their children after them. So slavery is far from dead.
In some countries males—fathers, husbands, even sons—own the women of the family, their mothers, wives, sisters, a custom which used to be the case in western society, too, and not so long ago. Such women have no legal rights, no control over property or movement or their own bodies. Rich or poor, they give sex on demand, usually unprotected, and bear the resulting children whether it kills them or not. Legalized abortion eliminates some of the burdens of sex slavery in or out of marriage, but the question of fetal ownership intervenes: to whom does an occupied womb belong? Mother? Father? Society? Who has the obligation to raise and educate an unaborted unwanted child? The unwillingly impregnated woman? Society? Ha!
In general, ownership implies responsibility. People who abuse pets lose their pets. People who abuse or neglect their own children lose parental rights. Their children are placed in foster care and if the parents don’t shape up the children may be legally adopted. Some orphaned children, those without living relatives, may end up in orphanages. Generally, in our society, adoption into a “good home,” where parents give love as well as material things, is preferred to a kid’s having to grow up in an orphanage or fostering situation. But sometimes otherwise humane social workers would rather keep kids in limbo.
Now we come to the Madonna issue. Who owns a baby when its mother is dead? Most people would reply, “The father, of course.” But who owns a baby when its father and all his clan have deposited a baby in an orphanage? Who owns a baby when that baby has grown to toddlerhood and never been visited by the father or other relatives, even when sick? Such total emotional neglect has been claimed in the Madonna case. Let’s accept the claim, because I’m not really concerned about Madonna.
Let’s get this out of the way, too. If a parent is duped about the circumstances of adoption, the process clearly is null and void. In the Madonna case, there are different versions of what the father believed he was signing, but even if he understood what he was doing and the paperwork's perfectly in order, it wouldn’t be surprising if he developed an acute case of remorse. The fear of finality would hit hard. At this point another question arises: to what extent has the remorse in the Madonna adoption case been generated by social workers determined to undo a perfectly good agreement between a willing adoptive parent and an emotionally and physically absent father?
Deception aside, on what other grounds could the do-gooders dissolve the agreement? Not for the good of the child, who is so young he'll adapt easily to a new life, but the pride of the nation! A Malawi child should not be allowed to leave Malawi, they say. Let Madonna endow orphanages instead, they insist, which incidentally will give some of them, the social workers, some very nice cushy jobs. Do I smell a conflict of interest here?
Does anyone believe that being adopted by a rich Westerner automatically guarantees a life more miserable than growing up in a Malawi orphanage? Maybe wealth doesn’t guarantee uninterrupted happiness, but it guarantees a good education, without which the boy in question here will end up as destitute as his father. He will be no good to Malawi or himself.
So who owns a parentless child? The state? The nation? The race? A culture or ethnic group? Some social workers in the US don’t want black children to be adopted by white parents even if there are no black adoptive parents in the offing. Is such non-adoption really in the best interests of the child–or does it just satisfy some group’s sense of racial or cultural pride? In Rumania children starving in orphanages were not available for international adoptions. Was that really in the best interest of the child? And don’t interracial and intercultural adoptions make sense in an increasingly integrated society?
What I’m advocating is more emphasis on the practical well being of each flesh and blood orphaned or deserted child and less worry about the nebulous pride of a group of origin unable or unwilling to nurture or protect this particular child in the first place. I see another benefit. The more we blur the lines between races and cultures (note: I include my own here) the harder it will be to fight wars on tribal, ethnic and racial bases. If that compromises global cultural diversity, so be it.
And then there's this: should anyone ever own anybody for "good" or bad reasons?