I watched a video by an adoptee who advocates against the adoption industry, claiming it is akin to human trafficking, and generally arguing that adoption is immoral.
This surprised me as something that I’ve never thought much about. Are there hexbears with thoughts or feelings on this view of adoption? Preferably people with direct experience? Any reading from a left/Marxist perspective would also be appreciated.
I recently went over the adotption statistics for Germany and it's actually pretty rare nowadays, partially thanks to advances in reproductive medicine. We had 3600 adoptions here last year - a third of that was from women in a lesbian relationship who adopted the child of their partner (lesbian co-mothers are openly discriminated by law, they have to adopt the child of their wife in a highly buerocratic and often humiliating procedure, whereas the husband of the mother in a straight relationship is automatically considered the father, even when the child was conceived through a sperm donation). Most of the rest were stepchild adoptions in straight relationships, and the children were usually not newborns, this typically happens when the new partner of a mother wants to become a legal guardian of the child. So the vast majority of adoptions happen in families that already exist, but where one partner does not have legal guardianship in spite of being the live-in partner of the mother. Adoptions from orphanages and of newborns from anonymous births who are directly given up for adoption only make up about 3% and 2% of all cases. International adoptions are slightly more common, but only make up another 7%. The only ethical problem i see here is with these about 250 kids who got adopted from abroad, because there can be situations that are hands-down human trafficking. I don't know how many of these 7% are actually orphans from a developing country finding a new home and how many are impoverished parents selling one of their children - the latter is obviously unacceptable, and i'm sure it does happen, but i have no idea how common that is. What i can safely say is that it's not representative of adoption as a whole.
I can also safely say that anybody who claims that adoption is a viable alternative to abortion is full of shit (even if we somehow discard the monstrosity of demanding of people to carry an unwanted child to term and giving it away). We had 106,000 abortions last year, compared to less than 500 adoptions that weren't a form of stepchild adoption. As usual, forced birth advocates do not give a fuck about what happens to children once they're born.