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Our next chapter gathering will provide a break from the normal meeting format, as we once again hold our annual meeting banquet-style at the Joyce Chen Restaurant in Cambridge. The annual meeting is the best-attended and most social event of the year. Please attend if you are interested in learning more about us, supporting the chapter, or just meeting the faces behind the newsletter and chapter activities. Our menu will include appetizers, plates of meat, poultry, and vegetarian dishes; and of course, pineapple and fortune cookies for dessert.
After the meal, the meeting format will consist of an abbreviated briefing on normal business, the holding of chapter elections, and a presentation by a special keynote speaker. Mr. Roland Van Liew, president of Hands on Technology Transfer, Inc. will present an intriguing view of conflicts surrounding family planning in his talk, "Global Population Politics."
Elections will be held for the four major chapter offices: Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer and Secretary. In addition, several liaison or coordinator positions will also be open. Most notably, we are looking for someone to help replace Frances Cameron as our newsletter mailing coordinator. We wish Frances well, as she will undergo knee surgery in June. If you have any questions about active positions in the chapter, please contact Howie at (617) 225-8905, breinan@alumni.stanford.org
The banquet: We will gather Monday, May 18 at 6:15 PM at Joyce Chen Restaurant in Cambridge. Dinner will begin at 7:00, with elections and our speaker to follow the meal.
Cost: $12 in advance (drinks extra). Please make a reservation by sending your payment, (check payable to ZPG), to Mary Van Vleck, 146 Chestnut Circle, Lincoln, MA 01773 to arrive no later than May 14. If you cannot send payment by May 14, but still wish to attend, please contact Mary by Sunday, May 17: (781) 259-9828, e-mail: MVVLINCOLN@aol.com. After May 14, registrants will be charged $17 to be collected at the event.
Directions: Joyce Chen Restaurant is located in Cambridge at the intersection of Alewife Brook Parkway (also Route 2) and Rindge Street. This location is basically across the street from the Alewife T-station (the western termination of the Red Line). From Route 128/I-95 take Exit 29A for Rt. 2 in Arlington & Cambridge. Drive east toward Boston almost 7 miles until the route splits at the first set of lights. Stay to the right (with the large T-station garage on your right). After the curve, make your first left at the second of the double set of lights. You are there! Joyce Chen telephone: (617) 492-7373
Please see the meeting schedule for general information and other meeting dates.
As I prepare to leave Massachusetts for a career in teaching in Connecticut, I would like to thank those who have contributed to the chapter over the last year and gave me the opportunity to serve as your Chair. If any of these roles describe you, please accept my most sincere thanks: website guru; chapter officer; event organizer; tabler; meeting host; speaker; newsletter editor; the take charge person of xeroxing and mailing; article author/contributor; meeting attendee; organizational/informational liaison; coalition member; ride coordinator; lecture attendee; donor. Also special thanks to everyone who made even one contribution in letter writing, providing food or support for an event, alerting us to an event in your area, or introducing other individuals, politicians, or groups to the idea of zero population growth. I apologize if I am forgetting any of diverse ways in which you have all defined our chapter.
I hope that the activity of the chapter will continue, and, more importantly, expand in the years to come. While I will be leaving the immediate area, I anticipate being close enough to stay in touch and interact from time to time. Thank you again for making this year possible, and best of luck to the chapter in the future.
Howie Breinan breinan@alumni.stanford.org (permanent) (also, hbreinan@mit.edu works for now) 500 Memorial Dr. #255 Cambridge, MA 02139
Population is one of the most interesting - and scariest - subjects for a writer to take on, because we haven’t established a way to talk about it as a culture yet. Or, rather, we have -- but it’s a peculiarly abstract and ineffective rhetoric that we use, full of "birth rates" and "demographic trends" and so on.
If we were really serious about having a discussion about the environmental future of this country, there would be no way to avoid discussing this question. How many children are you planning to have? At one level, of course, the answer to that question is none of my business or anyone else’s. On another level, however, if we can’t manage to start asking it of ourselves and each other, our nation’s population will continue to grow fast. At the moment, somewhat more than half of our population growth comes from natural increase, and the rest from immigration - and what that means is that even reproducing at a "replacement" level, because of the momentum of our numbers, is pushing our population towards 400 million.
For me, the place to start this necessary conversation is not with the environment, key as it is. (It’s the next fifty years that really count for issues like global warming, so slowing population growth now in this high-consumption society would be extraordinarily helpful). Instead, it’s with a look at the reason that most parents give for having more than one child: the fear that their first born will be scarred by growing up alone.
As it happens, the last two decades have produced an explosion of data on this topic. I’ve looked through almost all of it for my new book, Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families, and can say with utter confidence that the myths about only children are in fact myths - they are not spoiled, weird, asocial or anything else. Though they score a little higher on achievement and personality tests, only children are in fact essentially indistinguishable from any other child. This is good news -- and good news I can confirm within the walls of my own house where my daughter is growing into a happy and fascinating little girl.
With those stereotypes shot down, it seems to me we can move on to thinking about other hard topics: What would a nation look like with a stabilized or even declining population? How would we handle problems like Social Security? But these are all topics we must talk about before we can legislate. Even if you thought it was right or necessary for the government to coerce people into having fewer children (which I don’t), we’d have to have a real conversation first: in a democratic society you have to convince people before you convince lawmakers. The day Congress is ready to pass a law limiting the size of our population will be the day that law is no longer necessary.
All I’m trying to say is: let’s talk. Let’s talk about aquifers and global warming and species extinction, but let’s talk about families too: about how great kids are, and how best to raise them, and where to find companionship for them when there are no siblings. Let’s have a real conversation; it’s time to take this off the list of taboo topics.
Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature and other best-selling environmental books. His new book, Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families, will be published this month by Simon & Schuster.
Elizabeth Bartholet, a tenured Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, teaches courses in Family Law, Employment Discrimination and Adoption and Reproductive Technology. She is the author of Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting (Houghton Mifflin 1993, paperback edition 1994) and is working on a new book on child welfare issues, including abuse and neglect. She is the mother of a 30-year-old son by birth and of two sons adopted from Peru, now ages 10 and 12.
JL: Thank you for your willingness to talk about your ideas with me. To begin, I’m wondering what kind of obstacles people face when they want to adopt, within the U.S. or internationally? Should we make it less difficult to adopt?
EB: If you look at the way we organize adoption in terms of social policy we regulate it in an almost entirely negative, restrictive way. We do a lot to make it difficult. We claim this is for the best interests of the children but in fact it makes it more difficult for children who need a home to get one. The law sets it up so that prospective adopters have to be screened for parental fitness, and in addition have to surmount a range of very expensive obstacles. Even though there are millions of children in the world who need homes, the law makes it hard for any child, whether in the Third World or in U.S. institutional care, to be freed up for adoption. So the basic message for prospective parents who can’t have biological children is, "It’s impossible to adopt, there are no healthy young kids, so you should pursue reproductive technology and create more kids."
Our social policy and that of most other countries systematically pushes people away from raising kids who already exist and toward producing new ones.
JL: You’re saying that countries outside the U.S. have similar restrictive policies?
EB: Adoption policy works much the same way on a global basis. Kids are often three or four years old before they are released even if they were abandoned at birth. I maintain that nothing good happens to kids from the point when they leave their biological home until they are adopted. For example, let’s look at Russia and eastern Europe; these countries generally free up only a limited number of kids for adoption, typically when they are two, three, four years old or older, after they’ve spent many years being damaged in institutions. Lots of those who need homes never get freed up, and those that are freed are often so damaged that by that time it IS hard to find homes for them, whereas it would have been relatively easy when they were infants.
At our end of things the U.S. refuses to allow into this country any child who can’t satisfy the restrictive "orphan" classification. To be an "orphan" you have to have been abandoned by both parents or have only one living parent. For example, if there’s a couple in Latin America that is desperately poor, already has eight kids, can’t raise another, wants to surrender the additional child for adoption -- and if a prospective adoptive parent from the U.S. satisfies all the foreign country’s requirements, and indeed, even completes a legal adoption in that country -- the child would not be allowed to enter the U.S. with its adoptive parents because he or she would not qualify as an "orphan."
This results in nothing but hurt children, because parents are almost forced to abandon their children so they will qualify as orphans, rather than proceeding in a systematic, orderly way. It’s an irrational and very damaging U.S. policy.
JL: We’ve all heard a lot of criticism about China’s coercive population policy, but at least they seem to have a systematic approach to the care and adoption of their "excess" children.
EB: In terms of international adoption, China’s system is working well compared to most others, but recently I’ve grown concerned. Why? Until about a year ago China released children for adoption around three to four months of age. Recent adoption law reform may have dealt with some abuses but the net effect seems to be that children are now about a year old by the time they’re freed up. From a child’s perspective that’s a disaster. To grow up for the first year of life in an institution, (even a good one, and many of China’s orphanages are good, particularly the ones from which the adopted kids are coming), to spend an extra six to eight months of life in an orphanage, rather than in an adoptive home, is not good either in terms of short-term happiness or long-term development.
JL: So we structure adoption in ways that mean that children available for adoption are often older and more damaged than they need to be and therefore less desirable for prospective parents, and this as it were creates a need to use reproductive technology.
EB: It’s an irony. We structure a reproduction world that encourages people to use their own genetic material if possible, or that of others if necessary, to produce kids, and then we have employment and health insurance policies that work together to tell people that it’s free to produce a child, whereas it’s very expensive to adopt one. There has been an increasing tendency in this country to require that insurance companies cover in-vitro fertilization and other high-tech methods of reproduction. Thus in Massachusetts and the dozen other states with mandated insurance coverage, an infertile couple may feel that they have no choice but to pursue IVF or other methods of trying to reproduce biologically, because adoption will cost ten to thirty thousand dollars whereas reproduction attempts are "free" in financial terms.
JL: Is there a cap to the number of IVF attempts that will be covered?
EB: In some states there’s a cap, but in others there’s none.
There’s another irony that’s important here. In the reproductive world, so long as you’re in the business of creating a new child we encourage people to do what you might call social adoption, although we don’t require they satisfy the legal form of adoption. We encourage them by free market policies and often by insurance to buy sperm, eggs, and pregnancy services -- whatever they need to produce the product most people want which is an infant. In this reproductive world we don’t make the people who are going to raise these non-genetically related children go through any adoption process, so they don’t have to be screened for parental fitness, for example.
JL: It’s actually another way to adopt.
EB: It’s another form of adoption except that society facilitates it rather than discourages it. For anybody concerned with population control issues, it means that at the same time we encourage people to produce more kids we’re driving them away from giving homes to kids who already exist. We’re subsidizing high tech treatment to produce new kids while society pays for all those kids in foster care.
JL: Sounds as if social policy makers don’t have a clue.
EB: You have to assume there’s some reason behind social policy even if it doesn’t make sense on the surface. When I back off and try to figure how to make sense of what’s going on, one way to understand the picture is in terms of race and ethnicity. What you really have is privileged white people encouraging other privileged white people to reproduce their own. You look at state-supported kids here and abroad who need homes and what you see is that they are overwhelmingly black and brown skinned children, and other non-Caucasian children. In this country over half the kids in foster care are black.
JL: a not-so-subtle de facto segregation. (Jean, I wouldn’t call it that though you may see it that way.)
EB: This country has very strong policies against African-American kids being adopted by white people. Public adoption agencies make it extremely difficult for whites to accomplish a transracial adoption. The message is clear: if you want a child the thing to do is to produce him or her with your own genetic material if you can, with technology if you have to, and with other people’s genes as a last resort, rather than giving a child of another race a home. What’s interesting is that the impetus for race-conscious policies doesn’t come only from the Caucasian group but from black and brown and various nationalist groups as well. Since 1972 the Black Social Workers Association has insisted that black children belong in black homes, and that transracial adoption should be seen as racial genocide.
JL: So it goes both ways. What’s the reasoning behind this "exclusiveness?"
EB: I think in part it’s a sense of some racial and ethnic minority group leaders that they should hold onto what they see as their own "resources" and empower themselves for the next generation. Overseas some political groups read international adoption as American imperialist exploitation. In response the dominant white group says, "O.K., you keep your ‘own.’ " and I think this relates to a perhaps unconscious sense that they would prefer that their people go out and reproduce "their own."
JL: I’ve heard concerns expressed about the difficulty of getting medical records about forebears of adopted children. Do you consider this an obstacle to adoption?
EB: It depends on what the perspective is. I think we ought to try to get that information and make it available for adoption as well as for sperm and egg donation. It’s certainly better to have records but, on the other hand, I think we exaggerate the importance of those medical records and that allows people to say, "Unless I know everything about a child’s parents it’s just too risky to do adoption."
Most of us don’t know everything about the medical history of our own forebears. Our kids aren’t likely to suffer and die from a disease that we could have prevented had we only known it was there in the background. If there’s a slightly higher risk of breast cancer are you going to have a happier life knowing that? I know almost nothing of the medical background of my adoptive kids. Do I agonize over this? No. Do I sit around and worry about missing some genetically vital information that would make me a better parent? No. I just think people get too hung up in the importance of medical records so kids wind up not being adopted. Parents won’t ever be protected against every kind of risk.
JL: How about AIDS?
EB: Kids won’t be allowed by the I.N.S. to get into this country if they are HIV-positive.
JL: If you’re willing to continue a bit longer I’d like to hear your views on foster care and how it fits into all this. Was it set up to be just a temporary haven? How has it developed?
EB: It was originally designed to be a temporary haven for parents in trouble but it hasn’t worked that way. Now children stay in foster care either because the system doesn’t make enough effort to help the biological family get back on its feet or because the family has gone beyond any possibility of family restoration. I think most of the time it’s both. Kids stay in foster homes because society is all too ready to treat them as if they were the property of their biological parents and is reluctant to terminate parental rights and put them up for adoption.
JL: I hadn’t thought of this twist on adoption.
EB: Well, it’s part of what I call the pattern of negative, restrictive regulation in the adoption area: on the one hand the system drives prospective parents away by creating parental screening, financial and other barriers. And on the other hand the system limits the number of children available by being so reluctant to terminate parental rights. Of course we don’t want to make it possible for a child to be taken by the state for any or no reason. My sense, however, is that we’ve gone way overboard to the point where kids in the country are basically locked into foster care in a huge number of situations where they never should go back to their homes of origin. All too often when they do, it’s only to more abuse. Close to one-third of all those reunited with their biological families end up removed to foster care again.
Just a few months ago Congress passed a law which said the federal government had gone too far in the direction of family preservation, and that in cases of extreme unfitness, such as torture, it’s no longer required that states make reasonable efforts to preserve biological families. You wouldn’t think you’d need a federal law to say that!
JL: Clarify for me who’s making the decisions for a child to be adopted in these various situations?
EB: In the U.S. there’s something called private adoption whereby birth parents can surrender their children directly to adoptive parents who go to court to finalize the adoption without any need for extensive screening by social workers. Public adoption agencies have jurisdiction over children in foster care and allocate those that have been freed up for adoption only to prospective parents who have been screened for fitness.
JL: Who acts as the agent for the state?
EB: That’s the social worker.
JL: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk about these important issues and for enlightening so many dark corners of our current social policy for me and my fellow members of ZPG.