Bringing Home Baby

Trey Smith

Many Americans are incensed that President Vladimir Putin recently signed legislation to halt the adoption of Russian children by American families. While there is some international political intrigue involved, for me, this is yet another case of American Exceptionalism. How dare a foreign government limit the access to babies for potential American parents! Who does this Putkin guy think he is, anyway?

As Laurie Penny writes in The Guardian, while some American's are upset over the ban, there are children in THIS country begging to be adopted.

What makes Americans so desperate to adopt children from overseas? Right now there are 23,000 American children waiting to be adopted. Most of them, however, are older than prospective parents would like – between five and 16. Also, most prospective adoptive parents in the US are white, and a great many of the children available for adoption are black or Latino. There are many reasons why a white American couple might want to adopt a child from Russia, Romania or Ukraine, rather than be matched with a black child from their home state, but race is no doubt one of them. The more you look at the overseas adoption business, the less the US looks like a nation of philanthropists.

But here's the main point I would like to draw out. As far as I know, there is no program in which potential parents of foreign countries regularly adopt American infants! You don't find couples in Botswana, Germany or Indonesia going to their local adoption broker to leaf through pictures and bios of American babies.

It's not that we don't have children born here to poor families who struggle to meet their most basic needs. It is not that we don't have areas of the country that are the victims of severe blight. And it's certainly not that we don't have thousands of children in need of adoption.

What IS different is that these babies are born in "the greatest nation on the face of the earth." Since Americans live in "the greatest society in the history of the world," our infants are better than any foreigner who might adopt them. In other words, it would be a step down to leave our blessed shores to go live in some far off land.

Those kinds of paternalistic attitudes are the very essence of American Exceptionalism!