Letters to the Editor
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why the nastiness Nulla?
If the mothers in Guatamala didn't have more children than they could possibly care for, they wouldn't need to give them up. And there's worse things that could happen to a little brown baby born in Guatamala....staying in Guatamala, for example.
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@AnnieOrchids
Did you mean to say that staying in Guatemala or staying in an orphanage would be a worse fate than transnational adoption? Cos I'm sure staying in Guatemala with a loving family would be fine for a Guatemalan orphan.
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Praise and Condemnation
I applaud the author for making the choice not to adopt a special needs child since its obvious that she wouldn't be able to deal. People should know and accept their limitations, especially when it comes to children. There is no need to screw up some child's life to feed your ego.
That being said, a number of things Mrs. Gross said in her article are with out question the silliest, most narcissistic things I have ever read.
She liked traveling throughout India, has an interest in Eastern philosophy and enjoys an nice curry...this made her think that she was good candidate for adopting this baby from India?
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I'm not writing to praise or criticise Ms. Gross.
But as the mom of 3 kids, two of whom have autism, I'd just like to request that folks with a baby on the way STOP SAYING: "We don't care if it's a boy or a girl, as long as it's healthy". And if it's not healthy, or what you expected? Will you try to give them back? Send them to a foundling's home? To their credit, I think most people who said that when they were expecting, and had a child with something in the way, accept their child wholeheartedly. Most of us know that children are people, and people aren't perfect. But please--stop with the "as long as it's healthy"
rhetoric. And please have the sensitivity not to say that in front of those of us whose children have disabilities. It's as thought you are saying that those with special needs are "less than", and not perfect enough. My kids are not "perfect"--but they're perfect for me and their Dad!
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Facing Reality
I think you did the right thing. My family knows a couple who adopted a toddler from the former Soviet Union despite all the warnings that children were often terribly mistreated in his orphanage. They were too in love with the dream to listen to the warnings.
The boy has behavior problems like you would not believe. He pees in the corners of his room, sets fires, rages, hits, hates, bites, hurts animals, and all the specialists in the world have not been able to help this poor angel find peace. Nothing has helped him - not coddling and love, not medication, not therapy. Nothing. His rage is a part of his being and he's a teen now. He has barely been able to absorb an education of any kind. God only knows what he will do or become as an adult.
His adoptive parents are broken. Their dream has become a nightmare. They have never said it but I think they would have rather been childless than endure this.
Congratulations on your pregnancy! As the mother of a child who has just flunked out of community college, I remind you that our children, biological or otherwise, can be a pain in the ass.
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The Truth About Families and Disabilities
I am the aunt of a disabled adult child. My best friend has a disabled child she adopted. I teach college where an increasingly number of students with behavioral and learning problems enroll. (The increasing enrollment of students with rather serious disabilities is happening at four-year colleges across the country. It's not a bad thing at all -- but it makes for very different classroom dynamics.)
So I think I know a little about dealing with disabled children in families and in the larger world. The bottom line is this: Disabled children have a right to be and to live and to thrive. But the care they require often breaks the spirit of the other family members. Any other siblings usually come in a distant second with their parents. Slavish devotion to the disabled is what society expects nowadays. (The hideous, inhuman, warehousing of the disbaled has ended, thank God, but was deifying them the answer?) Disabled children are no more likely to be sweet or loving or more caring than the rest of us. Some of them are total jerks -- no doubt, in part, to the unceasing attention they tend to get from parents, siblings and teachers.
In addition, they often develop physical problems because of the myriad medications they need for behavioral issues. Not to mention the fear parents and siblings have that the children will somehow get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. Because despite it all, the people who have a disabled child, brother, sister, student, niece or friend REALLY do love them. It's just that life is so terribly hard for the people in the disabled person's life.
Jessica Berger Gross, you did the right thing. You have nothing to be ashamed of or sorry for. Good luck to you. I wouldn't have done it either.
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Angelina Jolie-syndrome
This article is a perfect example of why international adoption has run amuck, and why it is so often not a good idea, and not the "solution" to infertility that it is posited as (nor does it qualify the adopting parents for the glow of Jolie-type sainthood, i.e., "I have saved an exotic -- and very attractive -- child from poverty!")
In fairness, I think in Ms. Gross's situation, the agency was blatantly trying to cheat her and probably fill some sort of quota. They had no right to present a severely handicapped child to her as healthy. This was not a little girl who was on the low end of healthy -- she had severe developmental disability. I agree that not everyone is cut out to care for severely handicapped children (not even their own biological parents sometimes), and I don't feel that the Gross's were obligated to go through with the adoption.
Still: there is a nagging feeling reading this, that something is very, very wrong.
For starters, how old were the Gross's when they started this process? Especially, how old was Ms. Gross? This is critical information in evaluating their situation. An infertile 31 yr old is one thing -- a 45 yr old, going through a natural decline and end to fertility, who has deliberately put off having a family for over two decades, is another. An awful lot of educated, white, upper-class women have been told they can be "ambivalent" about having kids (and giving up a posh yuppie lifestyle or frequent world travel) and then in late mid-life, they can "easily" become the moms they "always wanted to be" by adoption or extreme fertility intervention.
Why is this a problem? Because people (men, too) who put off children until late in life for materialistic reasons are often too selfish to be really good parents. It's all about me, me, me (plus lots of shopping for expensive baby acoutrements). It's not about children, or giving them a good life. It's about aging people who can't accept not being young anymore.
It's also about people who fetishize travel and vacations. I notice Ms. Gross and her husband were obsessed with India, not because of cultural ties, but because "it was SOMEPLACE THEY ALWAYS WANTED TO TRAVEL". The baby became a justification for not one, but two lengthy foreign trips. (How many people can afford a "walkabout" trip to India, not simply to do the adoption paperwork, but just to "get a feel" for the country???? How much does Harvard pay junior professors these days?)
In the meantime, the Gross's have no interest in adopting one of the THOUSANDS of children available in the United States. Yes, there are literally thousands of waiting children (of all ages, though not so many babies -- but the Indian child at age 2 was not a baby either), and the majority of those children are cleared for adoption, with little chance of an "interfering birth parent". These adoptions are very inexpensive, sometimes free, and often include state-paid health care and services. But few white upper-class yuppies avail themselves of such adoptions -- why? Why don't we as a culture ask ourselves why? Because it is obvious that those children are African-American and that's not as cool, not as exotic, as a baby from a third world country like China, Guatemala or India. To say your kid is from the local run-down slum is not "sexy" like saying you saved a precious little exotic baby from India from a terrible orphanage.
Lastly, some posters have mentioned a previous Salon article by Ms. Gross, where she spewed about her desire to cheat on her husband, implying the marriage is not all it could be. (And, YES, this Ayelet Waldman type of tell-all IS wrong and damaging -- if you want to confess all about your real-life intimates, for god's sake, USE A PSUEDONYM.) A baby -- foreign, adopted or natural -- is not and never has been the "cure" for a dying marriage. You are not giving a child much of a gift by bringing him/her into the home of spoiled yuppies on the verge of a divorce.