A thing to keep in mind both with the abortion debate, and the US border crisis: Rich white Christian lawmakers desperately want to increase the supply of adoptable children that don’t have connections to their birth families.
Since the 1960s, the number of babies available for adoption has steadily declined. The model many people prize as “ideal” is to adopt an infant as early as possible, so that it remembers no other parents, has no connections to any other culture or religious heritage, and can be raised, as much as possible, as though the child were a couple’s own biological child. Families will wait years and pay tens of thousands for this kind of child. They want them desperately.
This has been an unspoken factor in a lot of conservative political decisions that don’t make sense on the surface, like restricting birth control and abortion while making raising a child as difficult and expensive as possible, or separating parents from children without even keeping track of which child belongs to which family.
You can see this agenda working in a lot of responses to “crises”, like the Sixties Scoop of Indigenous, Aboriginal, and Native American children, Operation Babylift in Vietnam in 1975, or people swarming Haiti in 2010 looking for orphans.
In all these cases, the “solution” to the “crisis” is to “save” children from unhappy lives in terrible conditions by giving them to, primarily, rich white Christian families, to be raised as conservative middle-class Christians.
It looks altruistic, but don’t assume it actually is; so long as a child has living family members, it’s often better for them to be with their families in a refugee camp in a warzone than to be separated, no matter how nice their new homes and new families are. (And the adoption industry has scrupulously avoided, whenever possible, gathering evidence on what it’s like to give up a child for adoption, much less having your children taken from you.)
That’s one of the things I’m actually really surprised and amazed hasn’t been pushed as a solution more often; it used to be such a huge narrative in the past, but the more we know about childhood trauma, the more resistance there is to babyscoop tactics.
But if this is a fight you’re in on? Watch for this.
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