We Must Stop Asking Infertile Women ‘Why Don’t You Just Adopt?’

You’re asking them to do far more than you realise

Unsplash+ with Getty images

Don’t miss the Sustack LIVE conversation between Ali Hall (Life Without Children founder) and Charlie Brown (writer of this piece). It’s on Thursday, 6th June, 6pm UK time (10am PST, 1pm EST, 7pm CET).

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I’ll admit, I’ve thought it myself a few times over the years.

If you’re so desperate for a child, why don’t you adopt? There are millions of children in the world who need a home, isn’t it selfish to only want a child if you birth it yourself?

Back when I was on the fence about having children, I would often say well, I can always adopt. For a while, I considered adoption as my preferred child-rearing method. It was a comforting thought that I could do some good for the world.

After I was diagnosed with premature ovarian insufficiency, I went down some pretty steep adoption rabbit holes and I came out the other side with one crystal clear thought.

When we say why don’t you just adopt we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

The adoption landscape has drastically changed over the years. When you truly understand what adoption means, you might not be so quick to assume all infertile women have the mental and financial capacity to handle not only the adoption process but what comes after.

And how unfair it is for you to assume they can.

Monica and Chandler are NOT great adoptive role models

When I watched Monica and Chandler adopt twins in FRIENDS back in 2003, their journey seemed pretty legit to me. Go through an admittedly stressful process, get a newborn at the end of it.

It jived with my personal experience of adoption — two of my cousins are adopted. Yes, it was a stressful process for my aunt and uncle but at the end of it, they had two kids under 6 months old.

That’s not what adoption looks like for most people now.

The idea of there being millions of babies ready for their “forever homes” isn’t true anymore — this isn’t the 1970s. That was the so-called baby-scoop era, a time when an increased number of pre-marital pregnancies led to increased adoption rates. I recently discovered this happened to someone in my family. She fell pregnant as a teenager in the early 70s and was sent to a home for unwed mothers, then forced to give up the baby for adoption.

She wasn’t the only one.

But that was nearly 50 years ago. Nowadays, the number of unwed mothers giving up their child for adoption has dropped to just 1%.

And if you think there are plenty of teenage mums prepared to give up their kids for adoption, you’d be mistaken. According to American Adoptions, this is a myth. Teenage pregnancies have dropped 11 years in a row and if they do get pregnant, many teenagers now choose to keep their child.

The reality is that most kids waiting for adoptive homes are older. In the US, 52% of adopted children are over 6. Where I live in Portugal, the most common age for children waiting to be adopted is between 10 and 12 years old.

Many of the kids waiting for adoption have either a sibling, serious emotional and mental health issues, or both. These issues significantly contribute to why a large number of adoption processes are interrupted.

It’s heartbreaking. But it’s also interesting that society assumes that infertile women are the ones who should shoulder the responsibility for these kids. Because that’s what we’re saying when we ask them why don’t you just adopt?

There’s nothing “just” about it.

Adopting an older kid with mental health issues requires an entirely different skill set from adopting a baby or having a baby yourself. This is a big undertaking for anyone to take on and we can’t expect all infertile women to have the capacity to do so.

These women have already had a sledgehammer smash up what they thought their life would look like. It’s a huge mental undertaking to pick yourself up from this and turn your attitude from being a mother to one of your own to being a mother and carer to some of society’s most vulnerable kids.

It’s a massive ask and not a fair one at that.

The idea that society says infertile women should adopt — lest be branded as selfish — feeds into society’s pro-natalist narrative. The one that dictates all women must become mothers at any cost.

Including, in some cases, at the cost of their morals and ethics.

Not all infertile women want to do a Madonna

Adoption rates are down across the Western world. Waiting times are protracted. In Portugal, the average is close to seven years.

There are also far more people willing to adopt than there are children available for adoption. In America, it’s 36 families for every child.

So people look beyond their borders. After all, society believes the developing world is filled with children who could benefit from being adopted by a nice Western family. This has been in part fuelled by media attention on adoptions from poorer countries, from rescue missions for Korean war orphans in the 1950s to the portrayal of Romanian orphanages in the early 1990s.

The argument is, if you can’t adopt at home, why not adopt abroad?

However noble this concept may seem, the ethics surrounding inter-country adoption are beyond complex.

Madonna is a perfect example of this. She adopted two children from Malawi, both of whom were not orphans. This isn’t uncommon — many kids in African orphanages still have family and the assumption is that one day, they will return to them.

There’s also a dangerous power balance between the Western countries wanting to adopt and the developing countries with adoption-ready children. A power balance that leads to horrendous corruption which further damages the very kids they are supposed to protect.

As one newspaper reported during the Madonna adoption era:

Many orphanages actively recruit children to access per-head grants from foreign churches and charities — the more children, the more money. In the worst cases they provide handy pick-up points for child trafficking, child labour and the sex trade.

Scandals and corruption have led many inter-country adoption agencies to shutter, meaning the number of international adoptions has significantly decreased.

We may think that there are millions of children out there ready to come to America or Europe and there may well be. But it’s not as easy as getting on a plane and picking up a Vietnamese child, like Cameron and Mitchell in Modern Family.

And not everyone wants to do a Madonna.

I believe it when the president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans says:

The priority in international adoption should be keeping a child with her family or, failing that, placing her with a stranger in her home country, and taking the child abroad only if the first two options aren’t available. And always, always, in that order.

Furthermore, the founder of OrphanAid Africa says, “We believe that poverty is not a reason to separate children from their families.” Yet that’s exactly what you could contribute to if you choose to adopt internationally.

It’s ironic that society sanctimoniously assumes people unwilling to adopt internationally are the baddies in this story when the reality is much more complicated than that. It’s about power and ethics and the consideration that you are taking a child away from their heritage.

As someone struggling with infertility, I’ve considered adopting from abroad — especially when I discovered Portugal’s seven-year wait. But I don’t want to wade through the ethical, financial, and moral landscape that is international adoption and it’s unfair to judge me for that decision.

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What we’re asking infertile women to take on is a tall fucking order. In my case, I’ve just gone through 19 months of trying for a kid naturally, a premature ovarian insufficiency diagnosis, and now IVF.

My emotional tank is close to empty. I do not have the mental capacity right now to take on a lengthy and stressful adoption process.

Adoption is a completely different beast from what it used to be. It’s always been an incredibly difficult process but now, it’s even more so.

To judge infertile women for not adopting — or preferring to go down the IVF route instead — simply isn’t fair. Yet that is what society does when it dismissively tells them to “just adopt instead.”

Many adoptive kids need far more support than we can give. Than many nuclear families can give (I’ll save my thoughts on the failings of the nuclear family for another day).

Kids like this need a lot of help and support. Anyone who feels capable of taking this on is a fucking hero.

And not all infertile women are heroes. They’re just women.

So please. Think twice the next time you talk to an infertile couple or comment online “why don’t you just adopt”. Think about the fact that adoption isn’t as straightforward as society makes it out to be. That it’s not ethically cut and dry. That there are far more people willing to adopt than there are children.

Take it from me, infertile women are already at the bottom of their emotional barrel. Try to not roll them down the hill in it.

By Charlie Brown

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Remember - Charlie and I have a Sustack LIVE conversation coming up. It’s on Thursday, 6th June, 6pm UK time (10am PST, 1pm EST, 7pm CET).