So, I was specifically trying to allow for scenarios like yours by saying it shouldn’t be in the “culture of family planning.” It’s extremely sad that people who want children can’t have them. If they feel a calling to build a family and care for a child whom the universe has failed, then wonderful. They should seek out fostering opportunities, get training and counseling to understand their role in the process, and to find the joy in reuniting when birth parents get their shit together. If that doesn’t happen and they adopt or assume permanent legal guardianship, then they are doing a service by mitigating the trauma experienced by a child. Unfortunately, people like this are exceedingly rare.
What happens more often is people are made to feel like they deserve a healthy infant with no strings attached (look at some of the other posts in this thread), and the large number of them creates a culture of pressuring birth mothers (usually indirectly, but not always), putting resources into tracking down babies or jumping the line, or when that fails, throwing money at the international process where their relative wealth brings out the bad actors and the temporarily desperate. In America at least, there are something like 20 qualified birth parent couples (to say nothing of the single folks who also have the means to support a child) for every healthy infant that enters the system. The normal thing would be to go to the back of the line and hope a call comes before you age out.
Instead, you get a scramble and competition and agencies that are nominally non-profit, but certainly have financial incentives to preserve their jobs and status (to say nothing of attorneys in truly private adoptions), pop up to serve the demand, and there are only so many ways to procure and price a supply, and most of them are at least somewhat unsavory. The international market tends to serve people who couldn’t bubble to the top of the domestic process, so it’s even worse.
-
The genetic details absolutely matter. There’s no one factor that’s determinative, but it’s utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn’t matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.
-
The main thing is the child’s welfare, and what’s best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.
In English, the word “parent” can be used in two important but very different ways.
-
Biologically, conveying causal information about gametes and probability distributions of genetic data.
-
Normatively, implying duties, rights, and responsibilities associated with certain close human relationships.
While it’s true that people often love their biological children and vice versa, the relevant fact is the emotional bond (condition 2), not the biological one, which has no normative import.
