Elizabeth Marquardt outlines the three avenues from which group marriage will come: the fringes of the left, from the darkest corners of the fundamentalist right, and from the laboratories of fertility clinics and hard scientists around the world.
The debate about legal recognition of polyamorous relationships is already well underway. A major report issued in 2001 by the Law Commission of Canada asked whether marriages should be “limited to two people.” Its conclusion: probably not. A British law professor wrote in an Oxford-published textbook that the idea that marriage meaning two people is a “traditional” and perhaps outdated way of thinking. Elizabeth Emens of the University of Chicago Law School published a substantial legal defense of polyamory in a legal journal. She suggested that “we view this historical moment, when same-sex couples begin to enter the institution of marriage, as a unique opportunity to question the mandate of compulsory monogamy.”
Mainstream cultural leaders have also hinted at or actively campaigned for polyamory. Roger Rubin, former vice-president of the National Council on Family Relations–one of the main organizations for family therapists and scholars in the United States–believes the debate about same-sex marriage has “set the stage for broader discussion over which relationships should be legally recognized.” The Alternatives to Marriage Project, whose leaders are featured by national news organizations in stories on cohabitation and same-sex marriage, includes polyamory among its important “hot topics” for advocacy. The Unitarian Universalists for Polyamorous Awareness hope to make their faith tradition the first to recognize and bless polyamorous relationships. Meanwhile, a July 2009 Newsweek story estimates that there are more than half a million “open polyamorous families” living in America. Nearly every major city in the U.S. has a polyamory social group of some kind.
November 22nd, 2011 | 11:23 am
Celebrities like Newt Gingrich and Larry King and Bill Clinton will be happy.
November 22nd, 2011 | 2:23 pm
None of the three seem very convincing to me. From the right, I think what may happen is that polygamy may be decriminalized. Right now states like Utah can and do prosecute people for living a ‘polygamous lifestyle’ even though they are legally married to only one person. There are many who think this is more about the Mormon Church using its political muscle to prosecute heretics. Although its true that most polygamous ‘compounds’ are not the ‘nice normal’ type of family depicted in Big Love.
From the fertility clinic angle, I suppose developing a reproduction system that uses 3 or more people may create situations where a child will have more than 2 biological parents. But the writer seems to have brought the right’s Kool-Aid about marriage. Marriage law isn’t about kids, its about couples. Plenty of people make babies who never get married to each other. I’m not at all clear why 3 or more people who contribute genetic material to produce a baby will feel a particular need to join into a legal and economic union.
That last point addresses the ‘from the left’ angle. Academics can spin off possibilities all day long but legal changes happen as a result of pragmatic needs. An example I use is corporations versus communist communes. There’s a huge body of law regarding corporations. If you want to start one, there’s plenty of legal tools that you can tap. There’s no much for communist communes. If you want to start one you’re probably going ot have to jerry rig something out of a combination, maybe, of corporate law, non-profit law and so on.
Why has the law for corporations been so fully developed but the law for communist communes been so poorly developed? Because lots of people want to use the corporate business form to engage in a lot of economic activity. Very few have felt so motivated for communist communes.
Even an anti-SSM advocate like Joe can probably admit the reasons two people, opposite gender or not, would want to join into a economic and legal unit. That clearly forms the core of the argument for SSM. Group marriage, though, is a very different beast. The most important difference is there’s is nearly no guidance on what form it should take. Yes you say they had polygamy in many cultures, both Biblical and non-Biblical. Yes true but those were not our culture. Biblical polygamy, for example, had strict gender roles that modern law ditched long ago. Marriage as we have right now just can’t be ‘extended’ to 3 or more people by just altering the qualification rules.
Another analogy I use is football. Can you have football teams made up of girls? Sure. You can even have co-ed teams. This doesn’t actually alter the ‘core rules’ of football….but it would obviously make for a very different type of game. But what if someone came along and said “why not let 3 teams play against each other at once”?
If you think about it for a moment, you’ll see that this wouldn’t be doable by just saying “three teams can play now” the way co-ed teams could be doable by just saying “girls can play too”. One would have to sit down and rethink how the whole thing would work. Even things like the shape of the field would have to be rethought.
Now here’s where the problem comes. Liberals are great at doing intellectual exercises like that. But if someone said “let’s have 3-team football” and you sat down and came up with a whole system to make it work, you’d probably discover that lots of other people would do the same thing. The hitch, however, is that many people would come up with many different sytems for doing 3-team football. Some may keep the original field, others would invent a new one. Some would make teams take turns going against each other in traditional style plays…others would have all teams playing at once. Some might have 3 balls in play, others 2 and others 1. And so on…. So before you actually get to ever see a game of 3-team football, all the different factions are going to have to fight it out and decide on which set of rules the game will work on.
So now let’s go to polygamy and group marriage. Once you decriminalize it you’ve probably made the fundamentalist Mormon types happy. Going from there to actually creating a legal institution of group marriage becomes a totally different story. Progressives and liberals are not going to go for the strict fundamentalist type system most in the ‘dark corners of the right’ use. Coming up with a free form system of ‘do whatever you like’ may sound good but misses the point. A positive that legal marriage has is that you *don’t* have to sit down and write up books of rules for how the thing will work in terms of property, debts, income, rights etc. You’re just adopting what’s already there. Do you buy a computer with Windows on it or would you rather buy a computer with nothing but a command line so you can code your own operating system?
I don’t see any critical mass of interest that will push ‘group marriage’ beyond tinkering and pondering and into actual real life legal development.
November 23rd, 2011 | 2:19 am
Boonton,
They won’t need to come up with all the law all at once. In common law systems the first judge will just make the rule as he sees fit and it will get adjusted from there.
Given how fast same-sex marriage has gone from inconceivable to commonplace, the “there’s no possible way it can happen” argument needs more support than what you’re offering.
Especially since you set the bar so low:
“I don’t see any critical mass of interest that will push ‘group marriage’ beyond tinkering and pondering and into actual real life legal development.”
Is there something specific about group marriages that make them impossible to spin sympathetically in TV shows or 60-second ads? If not, doesn’t that mean that they’re only a decade or so away from becoming established legal fact somewhere?
November 23rd, 2011 | 4:11 am
Shari’a courts in the UK are already acting quite successfully as arbitrators for couples who entered into actually or potentially polygamous marriages in their countries of origin, before settling in the UK. Islamic law has a highly developed body of jurisprudence to deal with them. The courts are having greater difficulty with non-Muslim African polygamous marriages, where an accessible and authoritative body of jurisprudence is often lacking.
In a world of greater personal mobility and the trans-border ownership of assets, no country will be able to ignore the existence of polygamous marriages. I know of no European country that does not recognize them for the purposes of succession to moveables sited within its territory, where the marriage is valid by the law of the domicile or citizenship of the deceased.
Many countries have long operated with “statut personnel,” in matters of family law, India having, perhaps, the most highly-developed system amongst modern democracies.
November 23rd, 2011 | 7:23 am
This is why we need to recognize marriage as being inherently about the links that create family – the child’s relationship with both paternal and maternal families, the woman’s relationship with the man she has entered into the child-making act with, and the man’s relationship with the woman he has entered into the child-making act with.
We can’t make people accept monogamy. We cannot make all parents live with their children. We are within our rights however to recognize the many interests at stake (individual and collective) in the relationships that make up kinship – a set of relationships that is under direct attack:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-roTwhF9qMM
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-18/politics/30413965_1_nancy-pelosi-child-care-health-care-reform
We have a moral obligation to uphold the child’s right. One thing gay marriage and polygamy have in common: both are associated with “reassigning” a child’s parentage – reducing both the child and the detached parent to the status of chattel.
November 23rd, 2011 | 10:59 am
Blake
I fail to see how polygamy involves any reassignment of parentage. Each child has one father and one mother and, usually, there is no juridical relationship between a child and his father’s other wives.
November 25th, 2011 | 8:55 am
I fail to see how polygamy involves any reassignment of parentage.
I don’t know whether it is in fact necessary, but in practice, it is how polygamists do things.
I suspect it is because it is not natural for one man to hoard all the women, and therefore “alpha male” fire hydrant behavior is necessary to keep people in line.
Polygamy is patriarchy taken to an extreme; whether it needs to be that way is, at this point in time, still a matter for speculation.
November 25th, 2011 | 9:56 am
Frank
They won’t need to come up with all the law all at once. In common law systems the first judge will just make the rule as he sees fit and it will get adjusted from there.
Not quite. In common law the ‘first judge’ makes the rules as he gets cases that have to be resolved and legislated law always trumps common law. And its not quite as whimisical as “the first judge gets to make the law”. From wikipedia’s article on common law:
In order to get a ‘law via common law’ you need a case to bring to a judge, then the judge applying the above and then ‘determining what the law is’. While it may seem like a bit of a fiction to you, the fact is there’s a big difference between the judge ‘making the law as he sees fit’ and ‘determining what the law is’. In the latter the judge has to make some convincing argument that his proposed new common law follows logically and coherently from previous case law and actual written law. If he doesn’t do so, then his ruling will either be overturned on appeal or simply ignored in future cases and not become a precedent that carries weight.
I don’t think you’d have a viable path to group marriage via common law unless you first had a huge groundswell of popular support for it. If you did I’m not seeing why group marriage wouldn’t just be enacted into legislative law.
Given how fast same-sex marriage has gone from inconceivable to commonplace, the “there’s no possible way it can happen” argument needs more support than what you’re offering.
Certainly you’re not saying the arguments for SSM are based on common law! I didn’t say “no possible way it can happen”. Strictly speaking if aliens landed on earth and threatened to blow up the planet if we didn’t adopt a system of group marriage, I’m pretty sure we’d have one passed in less than a week. But I’m not betting on aliens landing anytime soon nor would I bet that if they did their primary motivation would be spreading group marriage law throughout the galaxy.
More realistic scenaros for group marriage in law would require either very small changes that have little or no real impact on most people (same sex marriage is in that boat, despite the hysterical claims about ‘redefining marriage) or a massive groundswell of popular support. I could see the former coming if you accept that simply decriminalizing polygamy (while not actually making it a legal institution) qualifies as ‘group marriage coming’. For the latter, well I’m not quite seeing right wing fundamentalists taking a old Mormon or Old Testament view of polygamy uniting with left-wing academic law professors and fertility clinic novelists into a grand political coalition.
Is there something specific about group marriages that make them impossible to spin sympathetically in TV shows or 60-second ads? If not, doesn’t that mean that they’re only a decade or so away from becoming established legal fact somewhere?
Well there’s nothing specific about being a woman weighing 120 pounds, having three kids, having the body of a porn star but also working as a full time crime fighting cop who can bring down 200 pound muscle bound criminals and badguys with skillful kicks and punches that’s impossible to put in 60-second ads or TV shows. How many women do you know in real life that fit that profile or are trying too?
I think the problem here can be summed up with my ’3-team football game’ problem. It’s quite possible to imagine a type of 3-team football game. To actually make it happen, though, you need to do a lot more than just imagine it. To really make it happen you’re going to have to pick a set of rules and sell it. To do this you’re going to have to overcome other 3-teamers who want to try a different set of rules and get them to unite with you to push the idea. Can it be done? Of course but will it? I’m not betting on it. Can the NFL ‘rule it’ into existence by applying the current set of rules? Highly unlikely IMO.
Michael PS
Shari’a courts in the UK are already acting quite successfully as arbitrators for couples who entered into actually or potentially polygamous marriages in their countries of origin, before settling in the UK. Islamic law has a highly developed body of jurisprudence to deal with them. The courts are having greater difficulty with non-Muslim African polygamous marriages, where an accessible and authoritative body of jurisprudence is often lacking….I know of no European country that does not recognize them for the purposes of succession to moveables sited within its territory, where the marriage is valid by the law of the domicile or citizenship of the deceased.
I think we have slightly different issues here. Courts have always recognized that there are other jurisdictions that apply other systems and rules which they will have to consider and sometimes even recognize. Consider a woman married to a man who has two other wives. Just say the man and his two other wives die in a plane crash and the Islamic court gives her all of the money of both her husband and his two deceased wives (just go with it, I have no idea how actual Islamic jurisprudence would address t his). She comes to England and gets mugged. The mugger goes to jail because the English courts recognize the wife as the proper owner of the cash in her pocket, but that cash came from a polygamous marriage that wouldn’t have happened under English law. No matter, its her money and the mugger is guilty of a crime by taking it.
But this is pretty small tomatos compared to discovering a right to polygamous marriage in the Constitution which requires a bit more than just some tangled estate cases from polygamous families from other jurisdictions that happen to be in one that doesn’t have polygamy.
November 25th, 2011 | 2:07 pm
I fail to see how polygamy involves any reassignment of parentage.
I don’t know whether it is in fact necessary, but in practice, it is how polygamists do things.
I don’t think this is quite true. Polygamous Mormon groups, I believe, assign parentage by biological parentage. So called ‘alpha males’ control the group by having the authority to assign wives to men thereby granting or denying the ability to be a legitimate parent by loyality. Likewise I don’t believe in either Islamic or Chinese instances of polygamy does the man ‘reassign’ the mother of the children. Parentage follows biology in most cases.
November 26th, 2011 | 8:26 am
So called ‘alpha males’ control the group by having the authority to assign wives to men thereby granting or denying the ability to be a legitimate parent by loyality.
Parentage follows biology in most cases.
Parentage follows biology as long as the biological parents cooperate.
Unless of course the alpha male wants his favorite wife to have a child, but she’s barren.
In this way it is like gay marriage: the children and the breeding stock are inherently less than equal. The family centers around a “more than equal” figure whose pleasure is paramount, and other family members are required to dance backwards, in high heels, as needed.
Contrast this against marriage as it is practiced in the USA: the institution itself creates equality, rather than creating inequality.
True marriage grants to the woman certain rights, and it grants to the men certain rights, and it grants to the children certain rights.
It is for this reason that our more civilized vision of marriage succeeded more primitive social arrangements: because our institution of marriage offers a real advantage – it is an institution that is actually capable of protecting all family members against exploitation at the hands of more powerful family members, to create a more stable, more just, more societally beneficial social unit.
Gay marriage is a step backwards – away from stabilizing and empowering the family unit, toward the bad old days where some family members were powerful and others were mere chattel (a problem gay rights advocates seek to get around by insisting the breeding stock “isn’t really family” to begin with – denial – and insisting the kids “don’t mind” – the Happy Slave fallacy).
November 27th, 2011 | 7:40 am
Booton
Engaging as your example of the mugger is, the more typical case is where the assistance of the court is required in establishing title to assets, especially intangible assets following a death – bank accounts, share holdings and so on. Banks and company registrars want to be sure they are transferring title to the right people.
Basically, the court orders the estate to be distributed in accordance with the applicable foreign law. There have been several cases, over the years, where the funds held in London or Paris by foreign residents in polygamous marriages have been far from trivial.
November 27th, 2011 | 9:21 am
Yawn. We’ve been through this probably several dozen times now, when Blake gets refuted on one thread, he simply starts on another.
Anyway, he has not presented anything about polygamous groups ‘reassigning’ biological parentage. In fundamentalist Mormon type groups, the ‘alpha male’ may take more than one wife, esp. if an original wife turns out to be barren, but once children are born they are the children of the biological couple that created them, alpha male or not.
November 27th, 2011 | 2:58 pm
Yawn. We’ve been through this probably several dozen times now, when Blake gets refuted on one thread, he simply starts on another.
Oh, I’m sorry, when you said,
I didn’t take this as a refutation.
I took this as an admission that you had no refutation.
November 27th, 2011 | 3:01 pm
Let’s go back to my claim:
November 28th, 2011 | 3:17 am
Blake does not appear to be describing the “traditional family.”
As the Pécresse Commission reported, “Robert Neuburger sees a cultural oddity in “the current family, the ‘conjugal’ family, to use Lévi-Strauss’s term, which I call the ‘PME’ family [père, mère, enfant, or father, mother, child].” He notes that “the farther back we go, the rarer such families are, including in the history of France, since in this country, the model has long been the peasant family, structured around a patriarch and expanding from hearth to hearth. Children were raised within an expanded group and not by two parents.”
André Burguière shared this view, “the state, alarmed by the development of the misalliances allowed by “clandestine” marriages based on love matches, imposed strict controls by families over the choice of a spouse… The authority of the father was absolute, including in the choice of a spouse, and limited the autonomy of individuals.”
November 28th, 2011 | 7:25 am
In this way it is like gay marriage: the children and the breeding stock are inherently less than equal.
I’m not clear, who in a SSM is the ‘breeding stock’?
The family centers around a “more than equal” figure whose pleasure is paramount, and other family members are required to dance backwards, in high heels, as needed.
This view hardly seems to be required by SSM and also hardly seems to be exclusive to SSM. There are plenty of cultures and religions that take a ‘more than equal’ view of family members. Nothing in the US especially bans such a view or prohibits those practicing it (although limits are in place). Children in particular are always viewed as ‘less than equal’ in terms of adults in a family. While adults have a legal duty to act in childrens’ best interest, adults clearly have the right to make most major decisions in a family.
I don’t recall ever seeing a rebuttal that adequately addressed these claims.
If I were you I’d worry more about your failure to adequately support your claims. What have you cited? In the past you’ve cited a slapstick comedy (the Birdcage), you’ve cited a wedding photographer who had a discrimination suit or charge because she didn’t want to do a SSM ceremoney, you’ve cited kids who put up youtube videos supporting their parents SSM as being ‘forced’…yet you’ve presented no evidence of such, and you asserted ‘rights’ by children to ‘know their biological parents’.
What exactly have I missed and more importantly while we can and have spun off long discussions of each of these issues, nothing cited by you supports any of your assertions.
November 28th, 2011 | 10:26 am
Indeed, Blake seems to miss that the ‘traditional family’ is not based on equality but on authority, namely the authority of the man in the marriage.
Ironically, the ‘equality view’ lends itself to SSM. If all are equal, then why can’t two men or two women marry? The traditionalist from an earlier era would have an easy answer, in marriage men and women have different levels of authority. If two men or two women married who would be the ‘head’ and who would be subordinate? But Western law long ago ditched ‘male and female’ roles in marriage law.
The traditional view, though, also made polygamy easier. If a man married two women, he simply had authority over two instead of just one. The old school made polygamy more viable and SSM less, the new school does the reverse. Rather than trying to insist that SSM implies polygamy, its actually the opposite.
November 29th, 2011 | 9:01 am
Indeed, Blake seems to miss that the ‘traditional family’ is not based on equality but on authority, namely the authority of the man in the marriage.
A family is a biological unit – a man, woman, and child.
Every social unit called “family” ever to have existed, is nothing more than the rules of how humanity will deal with this biological reality.
Polygamy is based on the idea that some men can hoard all the women and children, while other men get no family at all.
Group marriage outside of polygamy is based on the fantasy that family is irrelevant. I have known several groups who try such things – all have been characterized by extreme levels of denial and dysfunction; the groups tend to last but individual members come and go, which is an extremely unstable and unhealthy environment for children.
Gay marriage is based on the same ideals as group marriage – the idea that biological family is irrelevant. It’s bad for children because it’s inherently unstable. Of the three bonds that bind a family (affection, law, and kinship), affection is the most fickle. When there is no biological kinship, there is nothing “real” holding the family together – it’s all lies, and everyone knows it.
It is a tragedy of the commons situation – right now the concept of “family” enjoys great respect and prestige, and it’s only a tiny minority of people trying to piggy-back on that prestige and respect while not honoring the principles that confer this respect. If most people accepted the rule that “family is whatever we say it is”, then this prestige and respect would break down, and the concept of being “family” would enjoy no greater respect – and be entitled to no greater societal support – than being “friends” currently enjoys, because the two words would mean about the same thing.
November 29th, 2011 | 9:12 am
I put forth that not a single child has ever been denied its biological father or mother by a same sex couple, ever.
Every child raised by two mothers is deprived the opportunity to have a healthy, strong relationship with a father.
It’s like all the pain of adoption plus another pain on top.
And just because you don’t see pain doesn’t mean there isn’t any.
I know of one adopted person who showed an interest in biology in the teen years, then abruptly dropped interest for three decades. Then this person absolutely blew up after the parents died. This person had tremendous pain yet kept it inside for fear of hurting the parents – not because the parents deserved it, particularly (kids don’t work that way) but because this particular person was “parentified” to a high degree.
Adoption done badly causes great pain. Adoption is never without pain. It is the best solution only when the child’s well-being is the priority in EVERY decision made throughout the entire process.
You minimize other peoples’ rights in ways you wouldn’t want your own rights minimized. I have known gay people who were perfectly happy not being married, but I am not dishonest enough to pretend that therefore I can use them to represent “all” gay people – because for one thing they’re a self-selected and tiny minority, and for another I don’t know what’s really in their hearts.
For all you know, your adopted friends could be hiding a great deal of pain in their hearts.
That could be why they’re your friends – because they share your propensity for denial when it comes to tough and painful emotional issues. Because I certainly have known a lot of adopted people, from people who loved their parents very much to people who had complete falling-out with their parents in adulthood, and even the ones who love their parents have felt the need to hide pain. It isn’t the adoptive parents causing the pain – it is the abandoning parents.
I have also known people who learned to be stoic about being whipped with belts and beaten with batons. The fact that they don’t cry in public does not mean there is no pain. There is always pain when a parent abandons a child. The argument for adoption is not that there is no evil, but that adoption is the lesser evil (compared to the greater evil of being raised by a parent who is unwilling, unable, or otherwise not prepared for the role).
November 29th, 2011 | 9:26 am
BTW I came back to this thread b/c even though I must INSIST that it is the burden of those who want to change the world to do the impact analysis, I did have some thoughts on what would have to happen to “prove” that gay families are “just as good”.
There are two basic problems with existing studies.
The first is that the samples aren’t appropriate. You would need a large group and you would need to collect enough data to compare against various scenarios:
- children raised by two gay men* (*see below)
- children raised by two lesbians*
- children raised by “coparents”**
- motherless children
- fatherless children
- control group
It would be nice to also have IVF and adopted groups available for comparison.
Only with all of these scenarios available for comparison can we begin to speak meaningfully of what happens when a father is replaced by a stepmother.
The second thing I would say is that the current testing methods are inadequate – there are many criticisms of methodology and I assume that any good testing would fix those problems (interviews and psychological opinions do not count as evidence and should stop being treated as such; methods must control for the desires of parents, children, and testers to control the outcome, etc.)
But one method-related issue that I would absolutely have to see is the issue of what, exactly, is studied. And this is why it is important to have lots of information about different family scenarios, because we need to know not only about the consequences of motherlessness, but we also need to be able to break down the consequences so that we can see what issues are related to motherlessness in general as opposed to issues that are related to death or abandonment.
Specific questions that have so far been avoided – but that need to be examined in great depth:
- grief issues?
- parentification?
- identity issues?
- issues involving same-sex parent (role modeling)?
- issues involving opposite-sex parent (differences in the desire/ability to form healthy relationships with the opposite sex?)
- taboos?
This last is what I would view as the most important: are there issues that the children or the family treat as unspeakable or even unthinkable? And what is the consequences for violating the taboo?
(Comical – and hopefully very extreme? – example of what I mean: in the film The Birdcage, Val is not allowed to say “I have always wanted to meet my mother.” The consequences? Albert – a man who is prone to drama-queen drug overdose threats – throws a tantrum and has a complete meltdown.)
________________________________
*it is important to know, if children raised by two lesbian parents have more of trait or quality X, whether children raised by two gay men have less of trait or quality X.
Any difference between gay couples and intact families must be accounted for. The argument that the children of gays are “more ______” (more mature, more well-adjusted, etc.) is unsupported; if there are any differences, those differences must have a cause – and it is erroneous to assume that any difference at all can be presumed to be proof that a child raised by gays is “better” or “better off” or “more well adjusted” than a child raised with an intact family.
**children raised by gays or nongays who contracted with the child’s other coparent for the express purpose of raising a child together, in a relationship that is not primarily sexual or amatory
November 29th, 2011 | 9:30 am
err what ARE the consequences.
Or what is the consequence-no-s.
Once again, my brain and my fingers refuse to work in harmony :(
November 29th, 2011 | 4:04 pm
Every child raised by two mothers is deprived the opportunity to have a healthy, strong relationship with a father.
Non-responsive to the question/assertion:
I put forth that not a single child has ever been denied its biological father or mother by a same sex couple, ever.
Saying some hypothetical child has been so deprived misses the point of the assertion. Who has deprived them? At this point you make it very clear you are missing the point on purpose because you have no interest in an honest discussion.
I know of one adopted person who showed an interest in biology in the teen years, then abruptly dropped interest for three decades. Then this person absolutely blew up after the parents died.
This is very sad, but perhaps you should use it for further reflection rather than sweeping assertions and conclusions. Simple Buddhism might be of service here, life is painful. Unless we die young, we will all loose our parents. Some of us will take it in stride, some it will barely phase, others will be broken by it. Dealing with life is both hard and risky. Maybe if this person’s adoptive parents acted differently things would have been better for him…or maybe not. This doesn’t tell us much of anything about adoption in general. It doesn’t even tell us much about adoption in the case of your friend. Perhaps he will work through his pain and become stronger for it. Neither you nor him have any idea what he would have been if he had been raised by his biological parents. That being the case, you have no right in accusing his adoptive parents of anything wrong unless they did something really specific and really obviously wrong.
And let’s face it, we all have ‘issues’ with our parents. None of us had perfect childhoods. We call, if we were so inclined, could wallow in a victimization game of grumbling about being cheated out of some essential aspect of what childhood *should* have had.
Your proposal for a large multi-arm study of children created and raised by different combinations of biological and/or adoptive parents misses an important issue, existence! Just say that IVF children have more depression than non-IVF children. Before you go off screaming at the parent who has a depressed IVF child, take a very important note. That child exists because of the IVF parent. If the parent didn’t go to the IVF clinic, the child wouldn’t exist with a biological mommy and daddy raising him, he wouldn’t exist at all! Would you rather exist being ‘depressed’, exist having ‘issues’, or not exist at all? Your system of thought misses an important need, the need for children to be grateful because whatever imperfections their parents have, at least they get to an opportunity to make what they want out of life. Maybe your adopted friend would do better if you stopped playing into his notion that he is some type of victim who was cheated out of his entitlement of biological parents. Maybe his psychological problems would be better managed by trying to see things through his adoptive and biological parents eyes and realize that while they might have made very grave mistakes, the consquences of their actions at least allow him the opportunity to sit on a park bench on a nice day and watch the leaves fall.
For all you know, your adopted friends could be hiding a great deal of pain in their hearts.
Try wife (as well as other family members…there’s a few friends as well but I haven’t really probed their feelings about it in great depth). And yes I was there to witness the discovery and meetings with the biological parents. I also was there as a witness when her adoptive father passed away literally in her arms. Whatever pain might be lurking in secret, I can tell you the fact is biology doesn’t trump reality as its lived in the way you think it does.
(Comical – and hopefully very extreme? – example of what I mean: in the film The Birdcage, Val is not allowed to say “I have always wanted to meet my mother.” The consequences? Albert – a man who is prone to drama-queen drug overdose threats – throws a tantrum and has a complete meltdown.)
But has Val never meet his mother because of Albert? No, he hasn’t meet his mother because his mother has little or no interest in him. As over the top as Albert is, he does more for Val than either his biological father or mother in his efforts to see him win acceptance from his future father-in-law. Perhaps Albert isn’t perfect, but its Val’s mother who has denied him a mother and no one else.
I have also known people who learned to be stoic about being whipped with belts and beaten with batons. The fact that they don’t cry in public does not mean there is no pain. There is always pain when a parent abandons a child.
A very valid thing to talk to the person who abandoned a child about. No relevance at all to SSM or Polygamy or this thread.
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