The Reason of Transracial Adoption - Term Paper Example

Adoptees should be conscious of the fact that if one set of parents chose to parent a child, another set of parents has omitted this choice. As Solinger writes:            Most often in the United States, relinquishment is presented as the act of  biological mothers who have altruistic reasons for making the choice of giving up their babies (they know that they are too young or too poor or  too alone, for example, to be good mothers of their precious babies), or of bad women who have heartless, selfish reasons (they don’t want to be tied down or they don’t/can’t feel any love for the infant).

It has been very rare in this country to think about relinquishment as a coerced act, forced on a     mother who wanted to keep her child (Solinger, 2001, p.73-74).  The majority of the public has yet to tackle the ideology of “choice”. The legend of adoption being described as a munificent institution that serves “the best interest of children” has become nearly sacred in the domain of public stories. “Choice” has prearranged the feminist dialogues on reproductive rights, but framing these issues around choice depends on the idea that all women are given an equal chance to get into varying opportunities of the same range.

The role of social structure which limits the range of opportunities available to which women is neglected (Patton, 2000). Dorothy Roberts, a critical legal scholar, presents an argument on the reproductive freedom, the way it functions in the United States, “protects all citizens’ choices from the most direct and egregious abuses of government power, but it does nothing to dismantle social arrangements that make it impossible for some people to make a choice in the first place” (Roberts 1997, p. 294). The women’s relationships to the state and its social institutions, regulating the distribution of resources, is thereby mediated by race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality as cited by the work of multiracial feminist scholars (Baca Zinn & Dill, 1994).