"South Korea’s export of babies peaked in the 1980s, with as many as 8,837 children shipped abroad in 1985. Children were 'sent abroad like luggage'..."

"... the commission said, presenting a photo that showed rows of infants and young children strapped to airplane seats​.... Mia Lee Sorensen, a South Korean adoptee who was sent to Denmark in 1987, said the commission’s findings provided the 'validation' that she had been seeking. When she found her birth parents in South Korea in 2022, they couldn’t believe she was alive. They told her that her mother had passed out during labor and that when she woke up, the clinic told her that the baby had died...."

From "World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud/A South Korean truth commission called for the country to apologize to those who were sent abroad 'like luggage' so that adoption agencies could profit" (NYT).

"Evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many adherents are inclined to see I.V.F. positively..."

"... because it creates more children.... But the Alabama decision 'is a very morally honest opinion,' said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct line of reasoning between belief that life begins at conception, and opposition to abortion and I.V.F. 'It’s going to force conservative Christians to reckon with potentially their own complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,' he said. The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes I.V.F. Nearly all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden. The I.V.F. process typically includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There’s masturbation — an 'offense against chastity,' according to the catechism, or teaching — often required to collect sperm. There’s the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body — outside the sacramental 'conjugal act' of sex between a husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted — an 'abortive practice.'..."

From "What Christian Traditions Say About I.V.F. Treatments/While Catholic teaching expressly forbids in vitro fertilization, Protestants tend to be more open" (NYT).

"The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned..."

"Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation... pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria. Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her 'growing-up Mom' had told her that she was adopted and was Native...."

From "Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned/An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts" (NYT).

2 important considerations:

"Amanda L. Baden... called the emotional impact of adoption 'complex.'"

"Baden, who is a psychologist [and a professor at Montclair State University who specializes in transracial adoption, multicultural counseling competence, identity and racial and ethnic issues in adoption], says that adoptees are often told and feel 'their adoptive parents did a wonderful thing and they rescued them.' But some can still have 'really strong traumatic reactions' because of the loss of that relationship with their biological parent, she said. 'Everyone shares this common theme of loss and can feel some of the things that come with that, some of the core issues of adoption, like rejection, guilt, shame, intimacy issues,' she added.... Sarah Meadows, a 40-year-old living in London... was adopted through the Catholic Caring Society when she was about 1-year-old, after living with a foster family for a short period of time. She views adoption as a 'painful' and often corrupt process, even when everyone involved has the best intentions.... 'Many adoptees have their whole identities changed and lives hijacked by adults with their own agendas. I had my name changed — many have this and their whole cultures erased,' said Meadows, who is now a mother of two...."

From "Being adopted has shaped their views on abortion — in different ways" by Olivia McCormack (WaPo). 

"If you think about human biology, our bodies are built to reproduce.... You have to override what your body is saying..."

"... in order to make an adoption plan, and it takes a human being with a certain capacity to be able to do that."

Said Janice Goldwater, who heads an adoption agency,  "Women denied abortion rarely choose adoption. That’s unlikely to change. Experts say there are powerful reasons why the 1 million-plus wait list to adopt a U.S. infant will not shrink much, despite the end of Roe v. Wade" (WaPo).

"The Carmel Clay community is honored that a mother in crisis would entrust her newborn baby to Carmel firefighters."

"Our firefighters believe every baby deserves a home. We are proud to be able to do our part to ensure this baby finds their forever home."

Said Fire Chief David Haboush, quoted in "3rd newborn surrendered to same Safe Haven Baby Box in 5 weeks" (nbc15.com).

"With particularly dystopian flair, the formula shortage came to a head around the same time that a draft opinion leaked from the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade."

"On one hand, women would be forced to birth children. But on the other hand, once those children arrive, there might not be food to feed them. A footnote from Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that gained some traction this week was about adoption. The footnote quoted a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had noted that the 'domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.' The inclusion of the study in an opinion that would overturn Roe seemed to suggest that there was no need to have an abortion as there were plenty of American couples who wanted children but not enough American babies for them to adopt.... [W]hat it tells me is: You have no idea. No idea how hard pregnancy is on a body. No idea that don’t worry, you can give it away does not respond to the reasons that many abortion seekers might be seeking abortions to begin with. The opinion’s biggest problem isn’t that it was cruel, it’s that it was incurious. It did not attempt to understand pregnancy or motherhood. It was the 98-page equivalent of, 'Why don’t you just embrace your womanhood and nurture your children?'"

From "A lot of powerful people seem to have no clue what motherhood means/The formula shortage is a reminder of why being a mom — even when it’s a choice — is hard in ways some powerful people don’t seem to get" by Monica Hesse (WaPo).

"In the name of a level playing field, this is evangelicals finding their way back into the business of converting Native Peoples to the faith of their bronze age deity."

That's the top-rated comment on the Washington Post article, "Supreme Court to review Indian Child Welfare Act, which prioritizes adoptions by Native American parents or tribes."

"The father plays absolutely no part in this. That is part of her rehabilitation. When she renounces her child for its own good, the unwed mother has learned a lot."

"She has learned an important human value. She has learned to pay the price of her misdemeanor, and this alone, if punishment is needed, is punishment enough.... We must go back to a primary set of values and the discipline that starts with the very small child." 

Said Dr. Marion Hilliard of Women's College Hospital in 1956, quoted in the Wikipedia article "Baby Scoop Era," which I was reading because that term, "Baby Scoop Era," came up in a new WaPo article, "Barrett is wrong: Adoption doesn’t ‘take care of’ the burden of motherhood/This view of adoption and abortion has failed American women." 

From that new article, which is by Gretchen Sisson, a research sociologist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science at the University of California, San Francisco:

Because of the social pressures that shaped notions of “appropriate” pregnancy and “respectable” motherhood, the decades between World War II and Roe were dubbed the “baby scoop era.”...

I didn't remember ever seeing that term before and couldn't even understand it. What was "scooped"? 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett connected the right to abortion and the right against mandatory vaccines.

This is interesting — challenging — because most people who believe in at least one of those rights believe in only one. Or so I assume. Is there entitlement to bodily autonomy or not?

Justice Barrett only made a passing reference linking these 2 purported rights. A ban on abortion after 15 weeks is "is, without question, an infringement on bodily autonomy," she said, then added that we have that "in other contexts, like vaccines." Clearly she meant mandatory vaccines.

Here's the whole context, from the transcript of yesterday's oral argument. Barrett — questioning Julie Rikelman, the lawyer for the respondent, the Jackson Women's Health Organization — brings up how easy it is these days to give up a newborn baby for adoption. Legally easy. So maybe Court shouldn't put much if any weight on the burdens of forced parenting. If the analysis is limited to the burdens of pregnancy and childbirth, Barrett says, "it focuses the burden much more narrowly. There is, without question, an infringement on bodily autonomy, you know, which we have in other contexts, like vaccines."

"The refusal of Philadelphia to contract with CSS for the provision of foster care services unless [Catholic Social Services] agrees to certify same-sex couples as foster parents violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment."

 The Supreme Court has just ruled in Fulton v. Philadelphia.

ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. BARRETT, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which KAVANAUGH, J., joined, and in which BREYER, J., joined as to all but the first paragraph. ALITO, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which THOMAS and ALITO, JJ., joined.

I'll have much more about this soon.

UPDATE: This is a unanimous decision. The existing precedent, Smith, applies strict scrutiny to burdens on religion only when there isn't a neutral and generally applicable policy, which there wasn't here. The concurring opinions are about overturning that precedent and giving even more protection from substantial burdens on religion. 

The Barrett opinion is critical of Smith but frets about what doctrine would replace it and finds it unwise to go any further. The paragraph Breyer doesn't join is the one that is critical of Smith.

Alito wants to overturn Smith and views this case as showing why Smith is so dangerous. The majority was able to get to strict scrutiny because there happened to be a provision empowering a city official to give exemptions. But the city hasn't given exemptions and could easily now eliminate that provision and make it's policy neutral and generally applicable. Thus: "This decision might as well be written on the dissolving paper sold in magic shops." 

Alito goes on at great length in an attack on Smith that will feel entirely familiar to anyone who's been paying attention to Free Exercise Clause doctrine. Clearly, he setting up for the next phase, and we can see that there are the 5 votes to overrule Smith, if only Barrett and Kavanaugh can be presented with a practical enough new doctrine.

AND: Here's the NYT article by Adam Liptak, "Supreme Court Backs Catholic Agency in Case on Gay Rights and Foster Care/The unanimous ruling was further evidence that claims of religious liberty almost always prevail in the current court." Key speculation:

The court’s three-member liberal wing — Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — joined the opinion, which was a surprise and may have been part of an effort to avoid a broader ruling that might have allowed religious objections to override all sorts of government policies and programs.

Breyer must have played an important role, since he also teamed up with Barrett and Kavanaugh, who might otherwise have heeded to the powerful call of Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas.

The double exaltation of Bud Powell.

I don't think I knew the name Bud Powell until last week, when I heard Bob Dylan's new song, "Murder Most Foul," which names the brilliant jazz pianist in the second-to-last line:

Play "Love Me Or Leave Me" by the great Bud Powell
Play "The Blood-stained Banner," play "Murder Most Foul"

Last night, I was reading — and getting close to the end of — Woody Allen's autobiography, and I came across this:

I never thought having biological children was doing them any favor, bringing kids into this world. Sophocles said to never have been born may be the greatest boon of all. Of course I’m not sure he would’ve said that if he ever heard Bud Powell play “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” Soon-Yi and I chose adoption to try and make life better for a couple of orphans already marooned on this orbiting psychiatric ward....

And then on the last page of the book, summing up, he says "If I could trade my talent for any other person’s, living or dead, who would it be? No contest—Bud Powell."

Here's "Polka Dots and Moonbeams":



If you're wondering what the lyrics are, Frank Sinatra will sing them for you, here.

A country dance was being held in a garden
I felt a bump and heard an "Oh, beg your pardon"
Suddenly I saw polka dots and moonbeams
All around a pug-nosed dream...

"Yes, dividing the triplets among three families, each carefully chosen by class and other factors (all three boys had older adopted sisters, presumably as controls), was underhanded and imperious."

"But aren’t all adoptions in some way manipulative? Children aren’t assigned by lottery. Agencies look for the right fit and routinely make matches based on a range of subjective criteria. The current practice among adoption agencies is to never split up twins. Was this the standard in 1961? The film should have told us one way or another. The film also cheats a bit on the central issue of the twins study itself: nature vs. nurture..... An ominous montage depicts the boys as anguished children and strongly implies that [SPOILER DELETED] was biologically determined. But the film later shifts gears and seems to place an inordinate amount of blame on Eddy’s adoptive father, a self-described strict disciplinarian who appears haunted by what he might have done differently as a father."

From "DOES ‘THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS’ PLAY FAIR WITH ITS AUDIENCE?/The story of three triplets reunited as teenagers after having been separated at birth" (The Jerusalem Post).

We watched "Three Identical Strangers" last night. Have you seen it? It was very interesting but I have some problems with it!

There was a lot in the movie about the ethics of the adoption agency and the psychiatric researchers, but the movie had its own ethical problems, most notably in the way it used and accused Eddy's father.

"You see, my parents decided that they were going to approach my adoption as if they were completely colorblind..."

"... despite the fact that we are not the same race. My brother was also adopted from Colombia, but we were both told that we were Italian and Portuguese, just like our adoptive parents. Your parents’ word is gold when you’re a child; at least that’s the best explanation I have for how my parents successfully passed me off as a dark-skinned Italian for 19 years of my life. Of course, during those years I asked them time and again. 'Mom, why is my skin darker?' or 'Why wasn’t I born in America?'... As an adopted child, I lost my birth parents, but because of my parents’ actions, I also lost my country, my language and my culture. I didn’t talk to them for a long time. I grieved. I raged. I went to therapy. I harbored a lot of resentment for my parents, who I blamed for depriving me of my culture. When you bring a child of a different race into a home, it’s hard to face certain realities. My white parents decided to teach colorblindness to try to protect themselves and me from racism in the world. But, instead, it taught me that my ethnicity was something to be ashamed of. It was something to be hidden."

From "My Adoptive Parents Hid My Racial Identity From Me For 19 Years" by Melissa Guida-Richards (HuffPo).

"While the white-savior complex and, yes, orientalism of some adoptive parents can be disturbing..."

The Nation's advice columnist concedes, but presents this as the better view:

Harvard professor Randall Kennedy, author of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, declared that trying to pair children with adoptive parents of the same race “buttresses the notion that people of different racial backgrounds really are different in some moral, unbridgeable, permanent sense. It affirms the notion that race should be a cage to which people are assigned at birth…. [It] instructs us that our affections are and should be bounded by the color line regardless of our efforts.” 

"Is It Selfish for a Gay Couple to Have Kids via Surrogacy?"

The NYT "Ethicist" answers a question from David Lat (of Above the Law)("Sometimes when we mention this in conversation, people ask us, in a chiding tone, Why don’t you adopt?")

I noticed this via Facebook, where David Lat says it's the second time The Ethicist has answered a question from him. The first one, back in 2010, was about eating cookies from a minibar and then, before the hotel noticed, replacing them with identical cookies bought much more cheaply from a store. I was more interested in the cookie question, and what I said over there was:

Wow. Congratulations on getting two questions answered by The Ethicist. I haven't read the new one yet, but I enjoyed the cookie one. I had a problem with the analogy, though. It was clearly inapt. He said "You might with similar logic stop by the Staples Center and present vendors with a bottle of the same brand of beer you drank at the Lakers game last night" and ask for a refund, but in that scenario the employees have to do some extra work, interacting with you and processing the refund. In your situation, the minibar looked exactly the same and no one did any extra work. My problem with what you did would be that I wouldn't want to be the occupant of a room with a minibar that is presented as if it were tended to by the hotel's employees but really contains items that have traveled in the possession of some other hotel guest, some stranger. But then every hotel room is full of molecules that have traveled on (or in!) the person of previous guests. It's an ineffable fussiness.

I know the origin of babies is more important than the commerce in cookies, but the particularity of the cookie question intrigued me, and I'm drawn to bad analogies. I feel a sort of ethical duty to expose them. And then there was the underlying current of disgust over the residue of all those unknown guests who have occupied that hotel room that you need to think you can sleep in. As for getting a baby through an egg donor and a surrogate mother... is it selfish? There's so much selfishness in the baby-having business, once you stray away from an absolute spiritual merger between sexual intercourse and open, full acceptance of the occurrence of new life. You ought to think about that, but should you confront other people about what they are doing in that area? It's bad etiquette at least, but it's ethically bad if you're singling out gay people for your lecturing.

"A Utah judge reversed his decision to take a baby away from her lesbian foster parents and place her with a heterosexual couple..."

"... after the ruling led to widespread backlash."

The internet worked.

"April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce of Carbon County said the baby they've loved and raised for the last three months will be removed from their home..."

"... and sent to heterosexual foster parents because a judge said the baby would be better-off."

The women, who are legally married and were approved as foster parents in Utah earlier this year after passing home inspections, background checks and interviews from DCFS, said the judge told them there was a lot of research that indicated children who are raised in same-sex parent homes do not do as well as children who are raised by heterosexual parents.....

Attorney Mandie Torgerson, who represents the baby's biological mother, said Johansen did not cite the research he referenced in court saying only that there are "a myriad" of studies that support his order....

UPDATE: "Utah Judge Reverses Order to Take Baby From Lesbian Couple."

You wouldn't treat an adopted child like that.

"States start to crack down on parents 're-homing' their adopted kids."

"Among pet owners, 're-homing' an unwanted dog or cat is a relatively straightforward process...."