there should be a term for it

[deird1]

Is there a word for being flagrantly anti-adoption?

I'm used to reading Agatha Christie and thinking "my WORD, Christie, you're so RACIST". Right now, it's a whole lot of stories making me think "my WORD, Christie, you're so [insert word for thinking that adoption doesn't really count in making you family]", which admittedly makes a change, but...

Values dissonance up the wazoo, that's all I'm saying.

Comments

[lliira]

Ugh, yeah. I love Agatha Christie in a lot of ways, and in many of the ways I don't I can forgive her for simply being of her time, but her anti-adoption stance is weird in a way that really makes me wonder what happened in her life.

[deird1]

I know her mum was adopted by an aunt at the age of eight, and never really got over it...

[velvetwhip]

My late brother was the adopted son of one of my stepfather's ex-wives. I don't care how tenuous our relationship was technically, he was my BROTHER and I will always love him. I don't understand being anti-adoption. Where are children whose parents die or can't care for them supposed to go? The workhouse?


Gabrielle

[lliira]

I guess that would explain it, especially why she kept coming back to it over and over again. And why so many characters in her books were "given up" by their parents to be adopted by rich people who didn't really love them.

[rebcake]

Okay, my late sister was the biological child of my stepmother, and adopted at age 6 by my father, though we'd known her since toddlerhood. Totally my sister, I thought. So imagine my surprise when one Christmas, in the cousin gift-swap drawing I was assigned her. But...sister!?! I'm getting her a gift (or three) anyway! "Well," says grandmama, "She's not really..." This was my nice grandma, the one who helps all the kids learn how to bake and never says anything mean about anyone. Flabbergasted, is the phrase, I think. I hadn't considered that anyone in the family looked at things like that.

Is there something weirdly Christie-esque about our adopted siblings both being "late"? Like there was some cosmic (or internal) force deciding that their lives were less valuable because they had been "given up" by a parent — who may not have had any choice, quite literally in the "died" scenario you suggest. I just know I'm still angry that she's not around, and pretty sure that 99.9% of the people she interacted with adored her.

[deird1]

This is what weirds me out with Christie. One story has a man with an adopted daughter - and she was adopted as a baby - and EVERYONE in the story is surprised at him leaving his money to her, because she's not REALLY his daughter. Until it turns out she's his brother's illegitimate child, which explains it.

It's like the concept of feeling affection towards someone you RAISED is totally alien...

[lliira]

She's also really harsh toward people who adopt kids and then don't treat them well. In The Mirror Crack'd, a wealthy actress can't have biological children so she adopts a few kids. Then when the actress gets pregnant, she jettisons the kids. One of them, as an adult, says the actress did the worse thing possible in letting them believe she loved them and then showing it was a lie.

There's also a book (Murder With Mirrors I think) in which the adopted kid gets treated significantly better than the biological one because the parents are so worried about the adopted child feeling less worthy for being adopted. This, of course, makes the biological child REALLY resent the adopted one.

Adoption just never seems to go well in Christie's books, but I can't figure out half the time if she's saying that it's impossible to love adopted children as much as biological children (and that therefore it's unfair to promise an adopted child you can), or if she's exploring and critiquing attitudes about adoption that were more common in her day and we've forgotten.

[vass]

Values dissonance up the wazoo, that's all I'm saying.

You said it.

I have this vague memory of a novel where Poirot deduces that a young woman is the thief/spy/murderer/whatever, because of the way she dresses. But, her innocent boyfriend says, she's Practical and Modern, that's why she dresses that way. No, Poirot says, it is against the feminine character. No woman would EVER be so unfashionable and inelegant as to wear clothes with LARGE POCKETS unless she had an Ulterior Motive.

I'm probably confabulating, I can't remember if it was really like that, or even which book it was.

[vass]

if she's exploring and critiquing attitudes about adoption that were more common in her day and we've forgotten.

I think a bit of both. The modern Western concept of adoption is very recent and local (which is one of the reasons international adoption can get so terrible, with living parents who gave their children up thinking it'd be something more like sending them to school or an apprenticeship, not permanently giving up all parental connection to their child and having someone else take on that role entirely.)

But I wouldn't ever want to bet against Christie being prejudiced herself, or uncritically reflecting the prejudiced attitudes of her society.

[velvetwhip]

I'm angry about my brother's death too (especially since it could have been prevented if his doctor hadn't been an incompetent jackass) and I feel for your loss. I am so sorry your sister isn't here. Please accept a hug and my very sincere condolences.


Gabrielle

[rebcake]

Thank you sweetie. My sympathies are with you, as well. Early death is a hell of a thing.

[luscious_purple]

Yeah, I think many people in the Greatest Generation (and older) had strange notions that adopted kids were all the diseased children of prostitutes, or would grow up to be "inferior," or whatever. And the truth used to be completely hidden from adoptees, even more so than now, lest they find out they weren't their parents' "real" children. And adoption agencies insisted on exact ethnic-group matches between parents and child. Thank goodness times have changed.

[bruttimabuoni]

You know, adoption wasn't actually a legal thing in England till an Act passed in 1926?

People did it by arrangement, even through agencies, but there was no legal force. An adoptee didn't become part of the family legally. You absolutely could not sever contact with a birth family if they didn't want to go.

Clearly, not the whole of Christie's issue since there were plenty of illegal but happy outcomes, but some of these lines people are talking about are what she grew up with, and what was discussed in Parliament in 1926 too. Was it really possible for the law to change families this way? Was it even right to try?

It's not especially well known; I think people assume adoption has been legal forever, but it's very much not the case.

[frith]

The biological term for entities sharing very close familial descendence would be 'kin'. As in kin-selection, which is an over-arching concept to explain why, for example, older offspring help their parents raise their siblings instead of immediately finding their own mates.

Thus, the equivalent term for racism, but applied to kin, may be kinshiphilly/synkinophilia (love of close family), or kinism, or allokinophobia.

[deird1]

Really? How interesting...