https://www.wired.com/story/adoption-moved-to-facebook-and-a-war-began/?utm_medium=social&utm_brand=wired&mbid=social_facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=facebookSamantha M. Shapiro
Backchannel
03.04.2021 07:00 AM
Adoption Moved to Facebook and a War Began
As the adoption industry migrates to social media, regretful adoptees and birth mothers are confronting prospective parents with their personal pain and anger. When Erin and Justin decided to adopt a child at the beginning of 2016, they paid $25,000 to sign on with one of the largest, most reputable adoption agencies in the United States. They imagined an orderly process, facilitated by lawyers and social workers. They didn’t foresee the internet trolls who would call them cunts and psychopaths. Nor did they imagine they’d be filing a police report, or pleading with Facebook to delete posts that called them human traffickers. They didn’t expect the internet to be involved in the process at all. Erin and Justin (not their real names) met in Chicago in 2010 on a dating site. Erin was 37 with blond, beachy waves and a Michigan accent. She was divorced at the time and approached the dating market pragmatically, uninterested in wasting time with men who were not serious prospects. When she met Justin, she knew she’d found what she was looking for. “He was so kind, different from anyone I’d dated, and I knew he’d be a good dad,” she told me.
They married in 2011 and planned to have children, but when Erin got a job offer that took them to New York City, they decided to wait until they were settled. Then, when they were ready to start trying, Erin learned that she had gone into premature menopause. “I wasn’t devastated, because I knew I wanted to be a mom, and it didn’t matter to me how my child came to me,” she said.
They forged ahead, excited to adopt. But several months after they signed with the adoption agency, it filed for bankruptcy. Erin and Justin contacted an attorney, who advised them to move their search online.
The adoption industry has never been very well regulated, and there is a history of certain firms engaging in unethical practices. But when agencies were the primary facilitators of adoption, they could at least perform basic vetting of birth mothers and adoptive parents and manage complex legal processes. The open marketplace of the web removed that layer of oversight. A 2012 report on adoption and the internet, by the now defunct Donaldson Adoption Institute, found, among other things, that online adoptions create opportunities for fraud and for financial incentives that might push expectant mothers to give up their children. Online, prospective adoptive parents negotiate with birth mothers directly via Craigslist ads. People who adopt children, often from overseas, and then change their minds find new homes for them in Facebook “adoption disruption” groups, without any supervision from child welfare agencies. “One thing that is true about adoption and the internet is that no one is paying attention,” says Adam Pertman, who was the executive director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute. “Whatever is happening is happening because it can, and it’s having enormous impact some good, some bad, and some unknowable without any repercussions.”
