I’ve used the words “calling” or “purpose” a few times on this blog now. I’m not Christian, but I was raised in a Christian home in a Christian culture, and my concept of a calling is clearly steeped in that tradition.
So for me, reading The Child Catchers (Kathryn Joyce) was mostly a cautionary tale about letting a Call override the rest of your brain. Step by step, Joyce takes you through how a large group of people who fervently believed they were doing not only the right thing, but the best thing, the thing they had been called by their God to do, destroyed the lives of countless children and ripped about whole societies. Some of it came from privilege/White Man’s Burden beliefs, but some of it was just that they had bad or insufficient information.
On a practical level, non-foster-care adoption seems to have the trouble as the pharmaceutical industry: we wanted something (lifesaving medicine, care for abandoned children) but didn’t want to pay for it, so we handed the bill to the deepest pocket around (pharma companies, adoptive parents), and then we got mad when the system inevitably bent towards their point of view. A lot of the problems in adoption stem from that most systems match a parent with a specific child and then start verifying if the child is available to be adopted. Or the adoptive parents start picking up the mother’s expenses before birth. The very impulse that will make these prospective parents good parents- the belief that this is their child– is incredibly destructive at this stage, and the fact that they’re required to invest a lot of money makes it worse. It inevitably leads people to view searches for biological extended family as obstacles, or pressure a birth mother to “keep her word” and surrender the infant. Even if they haven’t bonded with that specific child (which I would find worrying), they may not have the money to try again. That’s just not fair.
Rwanda has chosen a different tactic. International families go on a waiting list. The Rwandan government checks all potentially eligible children, which involves looking for biological family who might take in the child and making sure the birth mother wasn’t coerced, or finding an unrelated local family that would like to adopt. By the time an international adoptive family is contacted, the chances of something going wrong are minuscule.
Callings are important, but they need to be reality checked. That might be my new Effective Altruism slogan.
Aceso Under Glass 