I do not immediately judge those who are unlike me, but I am a part of the childfree crowd (and to an enormous extent promote adoption over childbirth, which is in no way atypical among childfree people), and the topic of being childfree showed up in the most unexpected conversation today.
So… I’m not going to go into specifics since many of them are already overblown topics, but I’ll start off by summarizing and saying a lot of people hold a “neutral people are as guilty as the wrongdoers” viewpoint. A kind of Edmund Burke or Anakin Skywalker way of thinking that has been used when it comes to neutrality in promoting world leaders, not helping human lives, etc. I saw two people debate about this, and one of them brought up the question “how do you feel about people who don’t adopt?”
“I don’t judge them, it’s not even that common. Why do you ask?”
“Visualize a bunch of children. Some are on the streets and some are in foster care centers. They suffer and suffer, and they look out onto the streets to see parents who willingly chose to go through the pain of childbirth to use their bodies to spend and convert a bunch of inanimate atoms into an entity that will be using more of our air and needs to eat [rather than going the painless route of adopting a child that is already in existence and needs a home]. Then they look at other people who don’t want to give birth and have birth children but still look in indifference at all the suffering parentless children. Around half of adults on Earth are currently childless, and yet around a fifth of children are in broken homes or are parentless. It is the closest thing to willfully being evil that the majority of humans come to. I’m sure most of the people obsessing over insurance for example are going to opt for no children or for birth children.”
That last part resonated with me. I’m testing this out because I’m interested in this as a mental exercise. What’s your view on people who don’t adopt, including yourself if you can justify it?
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Adopting children is more difficult than giving birth to them in some cases. Also, the nice thing about reproducing your own children is that you can be sure that you’re not effectively human trafficking them or otherwise participating in family separation schemes. Idealism gets in the way of us realizing that adoption is kind of an industry with some dark aspects to it. Of course, good people choose adoption for good reasons and I am supportive of them. However, I don’t think there’s any good basis for judging negatively parents who choose biological reproduction. The only logic for that is Malthusian, which is a worthless, repeatedly failed doomsday prophecy as far as I am concerned.
For there to be a meaningful criticism to be made against people who don’t adopt, adoption would need to be accessible to folk who want kids.
In Australia, queer folk have only been able to adopt since 2017. Even for the straight folk, accessing adoption is next to impossible for most folk. It takes years and lots of money, and it involves the couple (only couples, not singles) being greenlit by the birth parents, which means queer and racial bias is another hurdle.
In theory, you can do international adoption, but that has to be by the books, or the adoption isn’t recognised. And and that means dealing with the adoption systems of two countries. It takes time and even more money that adopting locally, and most countries don’t allow same sex parents to adopt.
Visualize a bunch of children. Some are on the streets and some are in foster care centers
Kids on the streets can’t be adopted. The system doesn’t work that way.
And kids in the foster system can rarely be adopted. It’s sometimes possible, but if adoption is your goal, fostering isn’t the way to go about it, because most of the time, adoption won’t be possible. Mostly, foster kids get moved around, and returned to their birth families after a period of time. Fostering is laudable, but it’s not adoption.
And all of this altogether means that the adoption system is inherently biased towards rich, white straight couples. If that’s not you, you’re effectively locked out of the system. And on top of that, it doesn’t even help the kids in your hypothetical scenario
There are parts of my country where, even though adoption traditionally costs lots of money and effort, I think if you are a child’s in-loco-parentis for six months, you can automatically officialize your status as their caregiver, all without the traditional hurdles.
