The Truth about “Gay Adoption” and Religious Freedom

I saw a video recently of Newt Gingrich claiming that gay rights gains in some states had “forced” Catholic Charities to end its adoption services because the government was insisting they allow equal access to gay prospective adoptive parents.

Newt claimed this was a violation of the First Amendment (which says the government may neither establish nor impede religion, for those of you outside the U.S.).

In fact, Catholic Charities (and/or the government) were already in violation of the First Amendment, because Catholic Charities was receiving government funding. Their choice was to refuse further funding or to open their doors to everyone, regardless of sexuality.

They took the third route and quit doing adoptions and foster services.

I wrote about this for BlogHer a while back, when last summer, Illinois (my state) began offering marriage-like “civil unions” to same-sex couples and a local branch of Catholic Charities shuttered its adoption and fostering services.

See that post here.

Guest Post at Declassified Adoptee for National Adoption Month

…isn’t [the] ability [of queer people] to reach beyond our immediate and most obvious relations to make family among strangers—perhaps to include adoption—something that should guide us in opening our hearts to the biological kin of our children, when we have an opportunity to learn about, or even get to know them?

For more on GLBT family matters and open adoption, see Amanda!

I think this is what I’m going to make with my silk. I found it here.

I also got a 1950′s shirtdress-ish thing from the same site. I have some checked, polished cotton to make that.

Wish me luck!

UPDATE 28 November

I just cut out my shirt dress pattern. Get this: in 1950 I am a size 16. SIXTEEN. Now, I’m a 4 or a 6 depending on the label. Ha! I knew they had changed sizes over time but wow.

Home School Update

Yes, yes, we put the kids in school. But I have mentioned before that this does not mean we are not still home schooling just about 24/7–as most parents do, without thinking of it in those terms.

One of the down sides of school for Nat, in particular has been that she is absolutely wiped out by school and we don’t have any time left to do much of anything else. That said, school is good. It about covers most of the things we want the kids to be doing anyway. It’s just that some of those things would be nice to do–or also do–at home, or otherwise within the family.

So. Weekends.

Cole signed the girls up for dance lessons on Saturday mornings and they do “creative movement” and “pre-ballet” and “hip-hop” for a total of an hour. I have to confess here, that if Selina were not the “Me Too!” baby sister of the family, I wouldn’t bother signing her up to continue. She wants to do what Nat is doing, but she really doesn’t seem all that interested in the dance classes per se. But it’s not a huge thing and so they go along with Cole and I sleep late on Saturday mornings. Sundays, one or both of them go to church with me and Cole gets the morning off.

So that has been about it as far as any official activities are concerned. Anything else you might call “home schooling” has been easy-breezy unschooling in the sense of just looking for chances to push their little brains a bit further in whatever direction they are wandering in at any given moment. Yesterday, Selina and I brainstormed jobs one can do when one grows up that involve spending lots of time with animals. We discussed being anything from a veterinarian to a rancher.

But lately I’ve been feeling guilty, given the importance food has in my parenting philosophy (which is the philosophy of MY parenting–not yours, so please do not misread here and think that I am being prescriptive for anyone else!), for not spending more concerted time in the kitchen with, at least, Nat, who is over six and a half now.

The recent BlogHer Book Club selection I’ve been reading and discussing (Lunch Wars)  has done nothing but deepen my chagrin. After reading about Jamie Oliver in Lunch Wars, I looked up Food Revolution on Hulu and Cole and I watched it obsessively. Now, it definitely has its shortcomings. Cole’s family is from West Virginia and the cultural and class aspects of the problem were, essentially, not discussed at all. But, it was network television, so they are hardly going to take on The Man, now are they? Otherwise, we found the thing moving and educational (if a little grand stand-y at times–but again with network television) and motivating.

Now, our poshy-posh-posh private Montessori school (for which we are exceptionally grateful every minute of every day) doesn’t do food service for most kids. But for the whole-day preschoolers, they cater in meals from a local company that provides all-organic, mostly locally-sourced food with a complete and attractive vegetarian option to schools and nursing homes and other institutions. I don’t know what it costs the parents at our school because we are not its market. But I pored over the website and discovered that the company won a grant to participate in programs to get food like theirs (and indeed their food) into the most underserved public schools in our area too, so that made me feel good about it. They are not just a luxury item for the wealthy, but a movement of a sort. Their food service also includes visits from a truck carrying veggies growing in pots and field trips for the school kids to visit farms, so it’s a very wholistic approach.

But it’s hardly a wide-spread phenomenon, and Jamie Oliver’s TED talk about this stuff suggested that every public high school graduate ought to be leaving school able to cook ten easy, healthy meals. That sounds wise to me. (Again with our poshy-posh-posh school–the 4th-6th grade room has a full kitchen where the kids cook meals for themselves and the staff and teachers on the reg.) I didn’t really learn to cook until Cole and I decided to adopt. Then I knew I wanted to give my kids a different food culture from the one I grew up with and I bought The Joy of Cooking and learned to boil an egg.

The upshot of my investigations into and thinking about all this is that I started feeling really guilty about not cooking with Nat.

So today we have started at the very beginning–”Get the colander” “What’s a colander?” Then we cleaned and chopped broccoli and cauliflower and potatoes (I helped her with the chef’s knife and am going to teach her to use it). We learned about how sometimes we put stuff into the compost, but sometimes (given our limited compost space and long winter) we put it down the garbage disposal. Yes indeed, we do. She and I are making a delicious soup.

The plan is to do this every Saturday.

Wish us luck.

Cornbread Stuffed with Yum

Melt two tablespoons of bacon grease in a medium skillet.

Add some chopped green tomatoes (I used what was left on the vine of my grape tomato plants) and some sweet red pepper.

Saute.

Mix up a batch of cornbread batter, leaving out butter oil or shortening.

Add sauteed veggies along with the grease to the batter and blend well.

Pour the batter back into the greasy skillet and put it in the oven at 350 degrees (F) for twenty minutes (or however long your cornbread recipe calls for).

Serve to hungry people and pretend to be humble while they gush.

Lunch Wars

I just finished reading Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food Revolution and Win the Battle for Our Children’s Health by Amy Kalafa. It’s one of this month’s BlogHer Book Club books.

I am an armchair food revolutionary, so I was immediately interested when the book came up on the listserv and I jumped to participate. I have to admit, the book itself disappointed me, though I still find the topic–and lots of the information in the book–fascinating. My main problem with the book is its haphazard organization. It jumps way too much from sound-bite to sound-bite, with loads of “sidebar” stories interrupting the flow. In a way, it reads like a book written by a filmmaker, which is exactly what it is.

(Before writing the book, Amy Kalafa made a film called “Two Angry Moms” about her own battle for better food in her kid’s school, as well as similar battles throughout the United States. I still haven’t had a chance to see it, but Kalafa suggests screening it and/or other films as one way to launch your own lunch war in your own school.)

To be fair to the book, it is all about the byzantine National School Lunch Program. It is hard to imagine how any writing on that topic could flow neatly and clearly from beginning to end, because the system itself is such a big wad of conflicting interests, history, multitiered regulation and red-herring authorities. Most of Kalafa’s side-bar tales of local activists and professionals trying to improve school food are chock-full of road blocks due to arcane, out-dated regulations, deep-frozen stored commodity food from the government that no one can afford not to use, chasing the wrong person or the wrong committee for months before discovering the real power lies elsewhere and other Kafkaesque frustrations.

As I read it, what it all boiled down to, for me, was money. As with so much else about public education, we just aren’t willing to pony up the money it takes to do right by our children. Kalafa explains that the average school lunch budget is limited to one dollar per meal for lunch and less for breakfast in schools that also offer it. She also mentions that school cooks–or nugget defrosters, as the case may be–are usually the lowest paid people at a school–lower paid, even, than the maintenance/cleaning staff. Asking such ill-paid workers to do much more than heat up a “cheese substitute” pizza for a thousand kids a day isn’t really reasonable without skill training, more staff, and the pay a truly skilled worker deserves.

Much of the book focuses on that kind of training–and how to cover the costs of training. Many schools also need equipment and more hands on deck in order to achieve better results on the lunch tray. In addition, schools often can’t afford to turn down the surplus commodities the government gives or sells them very cheaply. Those commodities might have been a lovely boon in the 1950s, when the apples were apples, but nowadays, government commodity “apples” will more likely come in the form of apple sauce full of added sugar and preservatives, sealed in an individual-sized plastic container.

With so many problems, where the heck do you start your own food revolution? Kalafa suggests you begin by having lunch with your child. Head to the school and join the kids for lunch. Invite other parents to come along. Kalafa says that it will only be through the desire of enough parents that change will come–hence her film’s title. And some change has come in some places. Even given the herculean difficulties, many school systems have improved their food, even if they haven’t made it all the way yet. Kalafa’s book has useful information on where the real power lies in most school food systems, how to approach (and perhaps more usefully, how not to approach) the people you will need on your side and all kinds of suggestions for small, immediate changes you can push for right away, (like getting your kid’s teacher to stop giving food as a reward for academic achievement in the classroom).

We’ll be talking about the book and about school food in general, for the next few weeks over at BlogHer. Come join the discussion and share your own perspective. Kalafa’s book was certainly an eye-opener for me. We are lucky that our kids go to a small school where everyone brings lunch and the food culture is healthy and even reasonably refined, for a bunch of 6-year olds. But I plan to look for and start supporting the Lunch Wars for better public school lunches in my own area, now that I know what’s out there. Whether or not you have kids in the system (or kids at all), you might find you want to do the same.

BlogHer.com paid me a pittance to write this review. Don’t worry, it wasn’t nearly enough to influence my true opinion.

Siblings in Adoption: Yes, No, Maybe, Why?

A friend on an adoption forum on a website I occasionally drop by has been thinking about adopting a second child. That is to say, she has adopted one already and is now considering siblings. She asked us all, in the forum, about our own decisions about siblings in adoption and I told her I’d answer here, both to go into more detail and to share with a larger audience.

In addition, I thought some of you might just pick this up and meme it around a bit for her–and anyone else out there thinking through these issues. If you do, please leave us a link in the comments.

Here are her questions and my answers:

Before we tried to build our family, my sweetie and I envisioned having at least two kids. Now – thanks to open adoption – we have our precious son, and we are contemplating whether and when to adopt again. So, I’m interested to know:

- How will/does/did adoption influence the number of children in your family?

I don’t think that in our case, adoption has influenced the overall number of kids in our family at all. It’s funny, because we have two kids and I had always envisioned myself as one of three things: childfree, the mother of an only child or the mother of three or more kids. I never felt that I would settle into the typical two-kid life. My partner had no particular vision of these things at all and when I married her I told her I didn’t want children. The truth is, I was deeply ambivalent. We ended up adopting rather quickly after getting together and then were ambivalent again about whether or how to adopt a second child. After Selina, I considered getting pregnant briefly, but about thirty minutes of discussing that with an enthusiastic Cole made me realize it wasn’t what I wanted at all. I wrote a book instead.

The upshot? Life is what happens after you’ve made other plans. And we’re quite happy this way, though occasionally I dream about that third baby. Hopefully that’s my writing career coming to fruition.

- What do you think a family should consider before adding another child, or not? Which issues are adoption related, and which aren’t?

I think the main thing a couple should consider before adding children is “Do we want more children?” That’s more than half of it, right there. And both people need to want it. Someone (raise your hand if it was you, because I forget) told me once that the person who wanted the least number of children should always win. Adding children is too straining on a marriage to go into it without both people on board. (All this assumes there are two or more parents involved, of course.)

After that, I would look at your existing child or children and ask how it will affect him (since the questioner happens to have a son). Is the certain risk of adding more children worth the possible benefits?

You can never know with any certainty what kind of relationship siblings will have. There’s no way to guarantee that they’ll benefit each other, though the odds are they can, if you raise them well. But there’s also no way to know with certainty that your new child will be free of health or other concerns that might rock your existing child/ren’s world in ways beyond the usual rocking of any kid’s world when a new sibling arrives. This isn’t really adoption-related unless you’re specifically considering a child with known special needs. I have a lot of friends with kids with special needs and they are easily a 50/50 bio/adoption bunch.

I suppose cost could be an adoption-specific concern. It wasn’t in our adoptions, which cost very little–no more than birth would have cost us as lesbians who would have needed medical intervention above and beyond the typical pregnancy.

In our case, the only part of the decision that was related much to adoption was race. One thing we figured was that Nat would be better off with another family member here who looked like her. Guess what? Selina is biracial and almost “passably” light-skinned. We do talk about how both girls are African American no matter how they look and we have books that specifically address phenotypical differences among “Black” Americans. But all the same, the girls look very little alike. So much for that.

- If you’ve already completed your family, how do you feel about your decision now? Which issues are adoption related, and which aren’t?

I still sort of wish we had three kids, but now that we’ve got a 6 and a 4-year old, I see just how expensive raising them is going to be–because of our choices about how to raise them. People with less money than we have can happily and healthily raise more children than we have, because we are making expensive choices and we like those choices and want to stick with them. (For example, we live in a major city, which, even though it’s in the Midwest and is cheaper than the coasts is still city-expensive. We are sending the kids to a private school, which is a change from our original home school plan and thus an unexpected expense. We eat very, very well and 90% organic. These are all choices we have the extreme privilege of making. I am more than aware of that. We could cut back and raise another child, but we’d rather do it this way. Others want the bigger family more than they want private school and organic food. This is just what we’ve chosen.)

None of it is adoption-related at all.

Sometimes people are concerned about how adopted siblings with different levels of openness will be in the same family. Our girls have different birth families with very different levels of openness and it’s really just another thing to talk about when we talk about adoption in general–why one family is in more contact than the other, how that feels, what we wish were true, how to express our feelings productively, etc.

We did turn down a pre-birth adoption “match” before we adopted Selina, because we sensed we were not going to be able to have an open adoption with the baby’s mother. We have a decent level of openness with Selina’s mother, but it’s not what we would have ordered in a world in which we had a real choice or control over the situation. And that’s just adoption. Whatever everyone says they will do going into it, that may change dramatically once people are actually trying to live it out.

We are very lucky that our girls get along so well. They have very different personalities and don’t compete for the same niche in the family. This isn’t really adoption related because siblings by birth can end up getting along or not getting along, can end up being very much alike or being very different. It’s all a crap-shoot, really, what any child is going to bring to a family dynamic, adopted, birthed, or dropped by circumstance outside your control.

I actually think if we had decided to try for a baby by birth it would have raised more issues than adopting again did. Mixed adoptive/biological families have another ball of wax. Some of my readers are living that out, and can address it far better than I. But we felt no particular need or desire to try the birth route (besides my brief moment of “I’m turning forty next year” bio-clock panic), so we didn’t.

Again, these things are so individual, so based on your preferences, desires, values, hopes and dreams that I can’t tell you what to do. But this is what it is (so far) for us.

Please share your own insights if you are so moved!

Repost from BlogHer: Baby Selling is Everybody’s Business

The following was originally posted to BlogHer.com on 12 August 2011.

It came across Twitter. Just an AllTop adoption link. Sometimes I click them and sometimes I don’t, but “Baby-Selling” caught my attention.

And that’s how I found out, via Malinda at AdoptionTalk, that Theresa Erickson, big fish in the small pond of surrogacy and assisted reproduction, had pleaded guilty to fraud. The charges are related to wire fraud, but the meat of the story goes like this:

Ms. Erickson hired gestational surrogates abroad (to avoid certain surrogacy laws in California), transferred embryos to their bodies, and when they passed the second trimester of their pregnancies, she found prospective adoptive parents for the to-be-born babies, telling them the babies were planned for intended parents (that is, the people who hire surrogates to bear their children) who had since backed out of the surrogacy arrangement. (Just to clarify, there were no original intended parents. The gestational surrogates were literally bred to provide healthy infants to a hungry adoption market.) When the babies were born, they went to these “new” parents to the tune of 100 to 150 thousand dollars.

My jaw was on the floor when I read this. I even cursed on the Internet — something I rarely do — in the blog comments. But then again, however horrible the case, however wildly unethical the scam, it wasn’t all that very surprising.

The fact is, neither the assisted reproduction nor the adoption market in the United States is very well or consistently regulated. People frequently shop around for the state laws that most benefit them when using these means to grow their families. And when it comes to profit in these industries — (I’m calling adoption an industry because in many ways, it is. I leave aside foster-adoption for now.) — there is woefully little oversight for insuring that people are not taken advantage of — people in any part of the equation, whether prospective parents or pregnant women (however they came to be pregnant).

My opinion of surrogacy is pretty much the same as my opinion on adoption. I believe there should be no profit involved and that there should be as much openness as possible regarding the gestational mothers and their gestational offspring (regardless of genetic ties or their absence). That’s not a mainstream opinion within the assisted reproduction world, but nevertheless, there I am. The Erickson case flies in the face of honesty and openness and non-profit ethics, of course. But it also highlights something that a friend mentioned in a Facebook conversation about this case. Children are commodified in the world of assisted reproduction and adoption. Nine times out of ten, (really, more often than that) adoption is about finding a baby for parents who want one rather than finding parents for children who need them (again, I am not speaking of foster-adoption). And of course, given that it involves the production of a whole new human, assisted reproduction is always about babies-for-parents rather than parents-for-babies.

Now, adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents and their correlates in the world of assisted reproduction will often say, “so what if I just want a healthy newborn baby? Other people — fertile people, people who didn’t choose adoption — just want healthy newborn babies and nobody holds them up to ethical scrutiny about that desire.”

(This isn’t entirely true, plenty of women who fall somewhere on the margins of middle-class white marriedness are absolutely scrutinized and criticized for their desire to be mothers.)

Mel at Stirrup Queens, said it thusly:

“I am so [f***ing] angry that the majority of people in this world don’t have to navigate the ethical concerns that come with assisted family building.”

She is right, of course.

But what I would add, is that they should.

Every child in the first world is commodified and fetished by capitalism. Every prospective parent ought to think long and hard about why s/he wants a child and what the ethical questions about any form of parenting and family are, before jumping in and doing it. (I’m speaking here of people who don’t find themselves with unplanned pregnancies.)

We are lambasted twenty-four-seven with images of little mini-mes and fantasy versions of adults in child form, from Baby Gap to Toddlers and Tiaras. Parents cast their fantasies and desires onto their children all the time. They project them in place of themselves. All those Facebook avatars featuring children rather than the adults whose pages they represent come to mind. Internet handles like “Ashley’sMom” come to mind. Tee-shirts like “Daddy’s Slugger” come to mind.

Children are the ultimate commodity in a society that trades on everything, including human relationships. Weddings, after all, are not about people becoming a family, but about wise and tasteful shopping. Just watch cable television for lessons on how much to spend on a dress.

But that’s not all! The children of developing counties are commodities too, and I’m not talking about international adoption, though that is the place many go to point fingers. I’m talking about all the kids who work in the factories where our clothes — from wedding dresses to Baby Gap rompers — are made. Cheap labor is the best product out there in our times.

In a world like this, is it any wonder that an experienced third-party reproduction lawyer found herself willing to slip from making real surrogacy arrangements and real adoption placement to merging those two in a convenient way that benefited (however unknowingly — and the eventual parents did not know) the “customers” she wanted to please, made the surrogate labor happy (presumably — she paid them the going surrogacy rates) and made her a tidy profit?

Really, it’s just corporate synergy in action.

I’m an adoptive parent. I never tried to get pregnant, but being a lesbian, if I had, I would have required assistance. So I could be in any number of boats with the people who get the most finger-wagging about the commodification of children. I do what I can to reduce that commodification by advocating for openness in adoption, taking the profit out of adoption, asking tough ethical questions of myself and others using similar means to build families.

But working to end the commodification of children is hardly just the job of us third-party reproducers. A case like Erickson’s is simply a glaring example writ large. Everyone who cares about children — who cares about how capitalism diminishes human values universally — ought to join us.

How are you fighting against a society that prizes stuff above people; goods above relationships; money above families? What are you doing to assure that what Theresa Erickson did is unfathomable in the future?

I Used a Pattern!

I have avoided sewing for years, because I just can’t wrap my head around the language of patterns. But once it occurred to me that I can see how a piece of clothing goes together, I decided to try a pattern and fill in what I didn’t understand with instinct/vision.
I found a pattern that required nothing but thread (no zippers, buttons, anything but seam-sewing required) and knocked it out in three days with the same muslin I made that last dress with. (I have enough of that muslin to make underwear for an army.)
I did pretty well, though I won’t be cutting the silk I am sitting on anytime soon.
With this dress, I dyed it in tea to a nice sepia tone. Next I’m going to take some photos of this really nifty urban scene down the corner from our street, photoshop them up a bit, print them in black and white onto iron-on fabric and put them all over my dress.
Meanwhile, I’m going to try yet another pattern or maybe the same one in different fabric before I do my silk dress.
What silk dress? You ask?
I have raw silk left over from a number of sources (one was my first wedding at age 23) in a number of close, but not matching shades. I am imagining a very simple, A-line dress with the different panels made of different colors of this silk so that it has a subtle color-block effect.
A dress like that should be lined though, and I think I mentioned I don’t line things.
So I will either end up making it badly or won’t be making until I’m out of practice muslin.

Sewing Projects Update

My dress est complete! It looks rather like a dress made by someone who can’t sew. I trimmed it with some braid I crocheted. Here is some of the detail:

I wore the dress around the house and then around the block to take the children for a walk, but I probably won’t be wearing it to the Academy Awards when the movie made from my book is nominated for an Oscar.

Meanwhile…yesterday, the girls and I were walking down a busy street and Selina spotted a certain commercial product in the windows of a store. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Look! We could go to that store and get one of those!”

“We could” I agreed. “But actually, Mama Shannon could probably make something like that for you.”

“I know!” Selina suggested. “You could make it tonight.“

So I did. Then I put it beside her in bed while she was sleeping. Cole said she was very happy and excited about it this morning. Here it is:

P.S. The fabric I used to make this doll was purchased several years ago to make extra throw pillows for a couch we no longer own. It’s “suede” micro-fibre. The eyes and mouth are color swatches of similar fabric from a company from which we briefly considered buying a chair.