The Children Money Can Buy: Stories from the frontlines of foster care and adoption by Anne Moody.
Ms. Moody is a social worker who got her first job working as a case worker for foster children in Michigan. The job eventually become to mentally and emotionally taxing and when her family moved to Seattle, she began working for an adoption agency. She writes about her experiences with foster care and adoption, mostly focusing on adoption. Ms. Moody writes with a clearly positive slant toward adoption while at the same acknowledging its problems and advocating for best practices with realism that comes from experience.
Her view on foster care is bleak. She acknowledges her experience dates from decades ago, but I suspect things haven’t gotten much better. Ms. Moody believes there is too much emphasis on reuniting the family, particularly when it seems clear that the parents are not making good faith efforts to correct their deficiencies and their children bear the burdens of the dysfunctional foster care system.
On the other hand, she has a very positive view of adoption, and certainly comes at it more from the perspective of the parents. It was interesting to read this book in conjunction with “You Should Be Grateful” by Angela Tucker. They both discuss the fact that a percentage of adoptions “fail.” Ms. Moody emphasizes this is a small number, while Ms. Tucker feels the number is too large to be acceptable.
Both are advocates for open adoptions. Ms. Moody believes this benefits everyone, birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. She also feels very strongly that birth mothers must receive counseling on all the available options for them, including parenting. She acknowledges and strongly condemns coercive tactics by adoption agencies and consultants that pressure and guilt people into relinquishing their babies, and also discusses the ethical dilemma of couples essentially paying a woman for her baby. (Apparently in some states, like Washington, laws make the blatant exchange of money for baby less likely.)
While Ms. Moody has worked with birth mothers (and fathers) at her adoption agency, her insight into their perspectives is limited. Her book also lacks the adoptee perspective. She and her husband adopted a daughter named Jocelyn from Korea, and while she talks about her and even includes one of her other daughter’s perspectives, we don’t hear directly from Jocelyn, or other adoptees. While acknowledging unique challenges that adoptees may face, Ms. Moody feels that overall problems are exaggerated, and it’s hard for me to know what to think about that.
Overall, I felt this was a helpful book to read. I read it after “You Should Be Grateful“ and initially it came off as perhaps a bit too optimistic about adoption, but as I continued through it it felt more balanced.
Of note, Ms. Moody has a positive view toward adoptions by gay couples, although I can’t say much about it as I skipped that chapter.
SGD