Right Reason for Adoption

What do adoption and Natural Family Planning have in common? They are both methods for planning one's family and for receiving the gift of children. However, the other thing they have in common is the requirement for a good intention in order for their use to be morally good. Could adoption every be considered an evil choice?

The obvious answer to the above question is yes. Certainly someone who adopts a child with the intention of molesting or selling him or her would be committing an evil act in adopting. However, what about the everyday family who adopts out of a desire to have another child? I may not go so far as calling such an adoption evil. However, shallow or selfish intentions can certainly creep into a decision to adopt a child that can tarnish this awesome act of love.

In the January/February 2007 issue of Adoptive Families Theresa Reid, Ph.D. discusses the difficult decision whether or not to adopt a second time in her article "Adopts Again?" She explains,

Like biological parents considering a second child, adopters need to weigh many considerations – whether we’ll be able to love another child as much as we love our first, our ages, the expense – all the questions biological parents weigh, and then some. But what pushes most second-time adopters past all uncertainty is the desire to raise another child.” I so was determined to do it again as soon as I could,” says Emily Breeden, of Oregon. Susan Olson, of Colorado, and her husband agree. Despite qualms about their ages – Susan is 44 and her husband is 57 – they’re planning a second adoption. “For us, the overriding reason is the joy we get from parenting” (31).

Much of this statement is very legitimate. Couples thinking of expanding their families do have a lot to think about. Ages of the parents and the expense of adoption and of raising a child may be morally legitimate reasons for choosing not to adopt another child. However, they can also be selfish intentions not to adopt. If the expense is a road block because you want to use your financial blessings for self-pampering, using your money to adopt another child would certainly be better use of it. If your consideration of age is that you are not healthy enough to chase after another child, it can be a morally legitimate reason for considering your family large enough. However, if your consideration of age is because you want enough retirement years to take your cruise around the world, perhaps using your time would be better used raising another child. What’s the big deal? Why shouldn’t a couple decide to use their time and money to enjoy themselves? Because we are called to love, we will only find our fulfillment in giving ourselves to others as a gift. What better way to offer yourself as a gift of love than to invest yourself in the life and eternal destiny of another human being as a mother or father? In the long run, what will make our lives more fulfilled? Buying a new car? Taking a long cruise? Or will you find your fulfillment in the investment of life and love into the life of a child?

What do you make of statements like, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to love another child like I love my first”? I find such statements perplexing. There seems to be a bit of confusion about what exactly love is. My guess is that most people, if they really though about it, would define love as an emotional state of bonding or closeness. Dr. Reid confirms my suspicion as she explains, “They worry that it won’t be as easy to bond with a second child, or that the relationship they have with their first might be upset by a new addition to the family” (31). What is love, though? Love has many levels or dimensions to it. Emotional love, as is being described here, is the emotional recognition of something good. This kind of love is not sufficient to constitute familial love, or even true human love. First of all, emotional love (also called “erotic love” – not necessarily sexual) is selfish. It looks toward how the good can benefit me. I think this is the main problem I have with basing a family planning decision on this kind of love. Is parenthood really about feeling good as a parent? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling I get when my 10 month old daughter cuddles into my shoulder. But is such a feeling really a good reason to have children? Ask yourself, “Can a selfish parent be a good parent?” The second reason emotional love is insufficient is because it is temporary. Like all emotions, love waxes and wanes with our circumstances, energy levels, and attitudes. If I adopt a child in the hopes of gaining warm fuzzy loving feelings, what happens when parenting two children becomes more stressful than enjoyable? Do I stop loving my children? Finally, emotional love can be deceiving. It is possible not to feel emotional about something that is objectively good. It is also possible to feel emotional love for something that is objectively bad. I may feel like I could love another child despite the fact that my circumstances would make it impossible. I may not feel like I could love another child, even though having another child would be very good. We cannot rely on our emotions. A much better understanding of love is “To will the good of another.” This is the kind of love families are founded on. We become parents, not for our benefit, but because we want to share the goodness that has grown in our marriage and in our home. We want another life to benefit from the goodness that we have gained. The best understanding of love is the definition of love that Christ gave us. “No greater love is there than this: to lay down one’s life for a friend.” To give ourselves to others as a total gift is what Christian love is all about. We are called by Christ to be completely selfless, to give away our very lives. This kind of love is not altruism. We are able to give ourselves away completely because we know that the reward for doing so will be great. Love has great rewards, the greatest of which is participation in God’s divine life. Pope John Paul II, borrowing from the Second Vatican Council, says, “Man comes to fully know himself only by making a gift of himself to others.”

Dr. Reid handled the issues she brought up with a great deal of grace. I was impressed with most of her answers, and placid about the rest. She was not writing from a Christian point-of-view in her article. Adoptive Families is not a Christian publication. So, while her answers reflected my thoughts in this blog entry pretty closely, she seemed to accept that the fear of not being able to love another child as much as the first child as a legitimate concern. To me, it is a sign of a culture that needs to learn what true love really is.

Rampage time: the most odious statement in this article came from the author’s mother-in-law. Dr. Reid used this quotation to open her article:

“Oh, you guys,’ my mother-in-law fretted when she learned that my husband, Marc, and I had started out to adopt a second child. ‘Look what you have! You’ll never get another child as wonderful as Natalie! Why not just be happy?”

Yikes! What exactly is this woman saying! I can’t even begin to understand where such a statement comes from. It just screams “It’s all about me!” You see, the nature of love is to expand. If we are really loving like families should, our love should grow to encompass as many people as it can. It’s not about getting wonderful children. It’s about participating in the life and eternal destiny of a human person. It’s not about enjoying parenthood (not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t enjoy parenthood, just don’t make that your reason for doing it), it’s about making yourself a gift of love!

Unwanted babies?

An advertisement for Planned Parenthood in Minnesota claims that babies are noisy, smelly, and burdensome unless you want them. Planned Parenthood exists to make sure that every baby is planned and wanted. I teach teenagers and there are days when the same could be said of them. They are noisy, smelly and burdensome unless you want them. There are days when I definitely don't want them. Please, Planned Parenthood, can I kill them too?

Have we really fallen so far as a culture, or is this just a loud voice from a decrepit minority? Have we forgotten what family is all about? Are children and family really about the pleasures outweighing the burdens? Since when have children and family been about me?

Planned Parenthood has forgotten, and perhaps wants us to forget, that children are noisy, smelly, and burdensome whether you want them or not. That’s not the point at all. The point is that they are human persons. Precious human persons are worthy of our self-sacrifice to love. As a father, I put up with the noisiness, smelliness, and burdensomeness of my daughter, not because the pleasures outweigh the burdens, but because she is worthy of love and care. She is worthy of love and care simply because she is a human person.

What about the desire for every child to be a wanted child? This is a beautiful sentiment, if it meant that our hearts would expand in love to accept and care for every child. However, when it means that we demand the right to kill any child that isn’t “wanted,” this statement becomes ugly and evil. What does it mean for a child to be wanted? Planned Parenthood’s main concern is ostensibly that no child be born outside of a loving family environment. Again, this sentiment has the potential to be beautiful, if it meant that we would set aside our desire for sexual pleasure until it could be enjoyed in the context of marriage for the creation of family. Unfortunately, self-sacrifice does not seem to be in Planned Parenthood’s plan. When we as a culture decide to put the enjoyment of sexual pleasure above human dignity and human life, we become shallow, ugly, and selfish. The sentiment that no child should be born outside of a loving family environment paired with the sentiment that sexual pleasure should be pursued on a hedonistic, narcissistic level creates a dark, evil sentiment indeed. Let the children die that I may have my orgasm.

I pray that the billboard posted by Planned Parenthood is a minority voice. I would like to think that people passing by this billboard were as disgusted by it as I was just hearing about it. However, I fear that we may have been lulled into acceptance of such nonsense. We have been inundated with propaganda about “reproductive rights” and “sexual freedom.” Now that we are struck with the idea that a child is useless unless it is “wanted,” do we even bat an eye? We are being drawn along slowly, imperceptibly toward a public acceptance of narcissism, hedonism, and death. Do we really want to go there?

In the love of Christ,

Jeff

Just Another Frenzied Christmas?

Yesterday was the feast of Epiphany and the official end of the Christmas season. It was a great Christmas for me. It was the first Christmas for our daughter, which made it all the more special for Jodi and me. It was also my first Advent at home, which gave me much more time to prepare my heart to celebrate Christ’s birth. However, this Christmas season was not unburdened by clichés. Yes, 'tis the season for holiday clichés. I tend to hate clichés - even the "Keep Christ in Christmas" message has grown old for me. I prefer to proclaim, "Keep the Mass in Christmas," just to be different. However, it would be foolish indeed to ignore the ideas that stand behind these clichés.

One of the worse Christmas clichés is the "Frenzied Christmas" cliché. It is actually just an extension of the larger cultural cliché - the busy life. "Everyone is so busy." To me, it's not a question of how "busy" we are. After all, isn't every moment of life filled with activity of some kind? If I'm not "busy" with my projects and commitments to our parish, I'm "busy" raising my daughter. If I'm not "busy" raising my daughter, I'm "busy" playing video games. Life isn't "busy" in the sense that it could ever not be busy. I think that when people say, "I'm so busy," they are really saying, "I'm not using my time in the way that I find most fulfilling."

The December 25, 2006 issue of the Marshfield News Herald, our local news paper included an article by Matt Crenson from the Associated Press entitled "Christmas has been frenzied for centuries, history shows." The link for the article is below, under a different title. Matt Crenson bases his article on a book by Stephen Nissenbaum called The Battle for Christmas. Of course, Nissenbaum begins his examination of Christmas with the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was apparently a topsy-turvy free-for-all filled with drinking, gambling and sex. Nissenbaum points out that Saturnalia was not unique for winter solstice celebrations in the pre-industrial era. Indeed, as a United States History teacher (and amateur scholar) I have discovered Catholic feast days in pre-industrial England were very often excuses for drinking and carousing. The vision of a peaceful, domestic, Norman Rockwell painted Christmas was nothing more than crowd control imposed by entrepreneurs of 1820s America (specifically, New York City) to keep their unruly labor force in line. And, hey, why not make a few bucks off the poor slobs in the process? Let's sell them the ideal of buying gifts for everyone and his brother. Matt Crenson offers a comment from Russel Belk, "Christmas and America's consumer culture have fed off one another ever since."

The ideas expressed in this article and in the book that it is based on are interesting and, as far as I can discern, historically accurate. However, as are most secular commentaries on Christian customs, these ideas are incomplete. You see, there is a fundamental difference between the pagan celebrations of the winter solstice and the Christian celebration of Christmas. While winter solstice celebrations were narcissistic, hedonistic escapes from harsh reality, the celebration of Christmas is a celebration of love. Specifically, it is the celebration of God's gift of Himself when the Second Person of the Holy Trinity united Himself to humanity by taking on human nature. What we commonly call the "Christmas Spirit" is the realization that such love from God demands a response from us. We are called to give the gift of ourselves to others.

Michael Medved, a Jewish radio commentator, put this all in perspective for me in an interview on Catholic radio. Is Christmas "frenzied" and busy? Sure, for most people it adds a number of responsibilities to our normal daily business. However, as I said at the beginning of this post, what are we busy with for Christmas? All of that frenzied activity is done for the sake of others! We are busy during Christmas making ourselves a gift for others! All of the food we cook, all of the gifts we purchase, all of the time we spend cleaning and decorating the home is for other people to enjoy. Christmas is rarely the peaceful, idyllic season that we expect it to be. But it is a Christian holiday. It is a season of love. I agree with Michael Medved - a Jew who says, "how wonderful!"

In the love of Christ,

Jeff