by Harry Goldhagen
First published November 13, 2002 by Medscape Pediatrics
In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age,[1] a sprawling tour de force about nanotechnology, global politics, and the nature of culture and society that takes place perhaps 100 years in the future, a Mandarin from the Confucian tradition has come up with a plan to educate millions of female Chinese orphans — he blackmails a neo-Victorian engineer to hand over the plans for an intelligent, interactive book that teaches by reacting to what the child reads and says and presents just what the child is ready to learn, in pictures, text, voice, and challenging simulations and games. A brilliant plan, and not so far beyond what our computer technology can create today. If you ever read the book, you be the judge of the plan’s success.
In any event, many would consider this a better idea than Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal,[2] in which he suggests that most of the roughly 100,000 unsupported Irish children born each year:
“be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.”
There are lots of unwanted children in the world right now. There are AIDS orphans in areas hard hit by the HIV pandemic, especially central and southern Africa. Orphanages in China are filled with girls as an indirect result of the country’s 1 child per family laws (and these families’ desire for boys rather than girls). The collapse of communism and the introduction of capitalist markets to the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, with their concomitant economic dislocations and loss of state-supported services for the young, as well as a growing HIV epidemic, are also producing a large number of orphans in these struggling nations. And wherever there is poverty in the developed world, you will find orphans, foster children, and children with parents but no safe place to live.
I am certainly not recommending that we all go out and adopt a child or two. Becoming a parent is an enormous responsibility, and not something to be considered lightly. And adoption brings its own additional costs and difficulties to the process. But when you talk with parents who are considering starting a family or having another child, you can certainly suggest they consider adoption rather than “growing their own.” Although the parents might prefer to continue their bloodline, cement their love, pass along their good genetic stock, or whatever other reasons people have for creating children “from scratch,” you can suggest they think about trying “imported” rather than “domestic.”
For those who aren’t sure whether they would like raising a child who is “not their own,” temporarily being involved in foster care is certainly an option. Although foster children are usually older than adoptees, caring for such children can give parents-to-be the sense of what it would be like once their own cute baby starts growing up. Many foster agencies discourage forming lasting attachments with the children in their charge, but the prospective parents can nevertheless cultivate a beneficial environment and provide a respite from homes that are sometimes less than optimal educationally and socially. An added benefit is that the parents who opt for this can find out about their own and their partner’s inner resources and abilities to raise a child in a loving and supportive home, in a way they could never discover otherwise.
If you are not sure about all this, there are many resources you can find to educate both you and prospective parents. Jane Aronson, MD (New York, NY), is deeply involved in adoption medicine and focuses on international pediatric health services; you can read about her work and her Orphan Rangers at orphandoctor.com. For our North American readers, here is a list of international adoption medicine clinics. Rainbow Kids is another site I came across that provides useful information about international adoptions.
There’s no shortage of children out there. A word from you may make a big difference for an unwanted child.
References
- Stephenson N. The Diamond Age. New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell; 2000. Ordering information available at:
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/ detail/-/0553380966/qid=1036440599/sr=5-3/ref=cm_lm_asin/002-2155251-0107205?v=glance. Accessed November 4, 2002. - A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. by Dr. Jonathan Swift. 1729. Available at:
https://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ nonfiction_u/swiftj_modest/modest_all.html. Accessed November 4, 2002.
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