Consulting the Affected

Surfing around the internet, I found myself on Salon.com, and the title of a recent "Since You Asked..." column by Cary Tennis caught my eye...

We want a kid but don't think it's right to have one

When I first saw that title, I expected to find the position that always annoys me: "We're not going to have kids because there are so many kids out there that need a home."

But when I started reading the letter, I found a different concern:

I desperately want a child. I want, my husband wants, we want.

However, my husband and I purposely will not conceive a child. The reason is, we feel that what we want is not the most important thing. The most important consideration is toward the person who is most directly affected. The most important consideration is toward the child.

Making a life-altering decision without consulting the one most affected seems wrong. Also, there is a chance that once the child is grown, he may look back and feel, 'I would have preferred nonexistence. There, I would have remained safe from all harm.'

That claim strikes me as incredibly important: "Making a life-altering decision without consulting the one most affected seems wrong." Of course it is. At some level, we understand that we should not treat people as objects. Rather we should take their feelings into account.

Tennis points out, in his response to this letter, that it doesn't really work. Not always. We cannot ask "potential people" what they want. We have, in reality, no idea what their interests are. In that way, perhaps the act of creating a child is inherently selfish, but it is probably too much to say that it's wrong.

The same is true about adoption. Even though the child exists, we cannot really ask him or her whether adoption is what he or she would want. But we can ask first parents and adoptive parents to do a bit more by way of thinking about what the child might want if s/he could express those desires.

That's what always gets missed, it seems to me, in these discussions. What would the child want? The child wants, by nature, to stay with the mother.

I'll admit that it's not always possible, but that's what the child wants. It strikes me, then, that if we cannot always accommodate the child's wants, we should at least make sure that the history of the child is not obliterated.

"Making a life-altering decision without consulting the one most affected seems wrong." I think I want that tattooed on every adoption worker and legislator's forehead. If you can't consult the one most affected, you can at least think about what the adoptee might want and what the adoptee might want as s/he grows up.