Having children is one thing; truly caring for them another. If the novel, Sophie’s Choice, is any indication of real parental love, then a certain attitude prevalent in society is woefully misguided. . Perhaps it is just a fantasy. But the idea is extraordinarily profound and moving, namely that a mother’s love is so great that she would rather die herself than see her children harmed. In the Old Testament, there is the story of two female prostitutes claiming that a child is theirs (I King 3: 16-28). King Solomon orders the child cut in half. One woman continues clamoring for the child; the other is willing to give up the child so that he may live. Solomon orders the child given to the latter woman.
His reasoning was rather simple: A mother’s love is so altruistic that she would rather see her child alive and well than dead, even if seeing the child remain alive meant that he would be raised by another woman. There is no gainsaying the power of Solomon’s point. Surely no mother would rather see her child dead.
The relevance of these introductory remarks is this: We live in a culture that has become a little too besotted with the idea that blood is thicker than water—so much so that parents themselves are prepared to harm their children.
Every now and then, I am tempted to recant the central thesis of my recent book, The Family and the Political Self, which is that parents are fundamentally motivated by altruism. I am tempted because so often nowadays parents seem more self-centered than altruistic. What gets in the way of my giving in this temptation is that I can see that society has played a major role in cultivating rather indefensible and implausible attitudes.
For instance, no one in her or his right mind believes that women are exactly alike except for differences with a few plumbing parts. Thus, the idea of a wrestling team that includes both females and males is just repulsive. Wrestlers sometimes grab one another’s crotch in order to execute a given maneuver. There is no way for a man to grab a woman’s crotch or conversely without there being sexual overtones. And this is to say nothing of the general differential between a woman and a man with respect to physical strength.
An example of a different sort that is also mind-boggling is the phenomenon of parents forgetting their infant and leaving the child in the car—sometimes resulting in the very death of the child. But there is a respect in which things gets worse; for many people sympathize with the parents. By contrast, I have trouble distinguishing between leaving one’s child in a car and leaving one’s child at home alone, where the result is in each case the death of the child. How is that we do not have equally despicable negligence in both case?
As the title of this entry suggests, my concern is with adoption. I am troubled by the case where courts order an adopted child return to a biological parent after a bond of attachment has been in place between the child and his or her adopted parents for a sustained period of time—say two or more years.
The most notorious case happened relatively recently when Evan Scott was –ordered in December of 2004 — returned to his biological mother. He was being returned at the age of 4 years, after having lived with the Scott family his entire life. What troubles me even more is that the biological parents should be willing to harm their child in this way.
Every theory of psychology that we know of makes it abundantly clear that Evan Scott would be scarred by the transfer. And what I am unable to fathom is how the biological parents could have insisted upon the transfer given the knowledge that doing so would significantly scar the child.
As one might gather Evan Scott was the victim of a struggle between his two unmarried biological parents. Each was more concerned with acting out of spite to hurt the other than doing what would be in Evan Scott’s best interest. As is so often the case nowadays, children are but pawns in a battle that is not about them at all. Why, often enough there is not even the pretense of doing what is in the best interest of the child.
Evan’s biological father was an abusive man who had recently served prison time, and who had batter the biological mother. And the biological mother had no real interest in the child.
In the end, the judge ordered the Scott family to give Evan Scott to his biological mother. It is arguable that the judge had no choice. But I am not so sure about this. Why? Because the judge had ruled against the biological father in favor of the biological mother. Presumably, he thought the former was unfit. He most certainly could have thought the same about the latter.
Every time, I reflect upon this case I ask myself how exactly did the biological mother take Evan away from his parents when the pain that the “transfer” was causing was visibly evident upon his famous. What does it take to be an unfit parent? Significantly, the answer can be breathtakingly simple: It suffices that the individual is indifferent to the pain that one is knowingly causing one’s child to suffer. This is the point of the story of King Solomon.
To be sure, there is a difference between physical harm and psychological harm. But we know that psychological harm is indeed real and completely devastating. Taking a child from the only parents that he has known for the entire three years of his life is tantamount to inflicting sustained psychological cruelty upon the child. Suppose that a child’s parents made him take all her meals alone in the basement. This would be a form of cruelty—a case of subjecting a child to psychological trauma—that would justify removing the child from the home.
The saying is that blood is thicker than water. But this is just so much nonsense. What turns out to be thicker than water are the bonds of attachment that are forged and sustained. This had better be the case; for what is marriage but two unrelated people forging their lives together forever. Two accept this truth regarding marriage, as indeed we do, while ignoring the reality of the extraordinary bond that had been forged between Evan Scott and the parents who adopted him is sheer hypocrisy. For to accept the truth of the bond of marriage is already to concede that blood all by itself is not thicker than water. And it is that truth that should have stayed the judge’s hand in the case of Evan Scott.
Had Evan been a dog, no doubt the judge would have given more to thought to interest of the animal than to the concern of its original owners. I would that this were obviously a very bad joke. But I am afraid not.
