Judging (Some) Parents for Abandonment

Interesting situation in Greece where the financial collapse has made it very hard, if not impossible, for parents to support their children.   A situation that should give adoptive parents pause in the discussion of why children are available for adoption, and the assumptions and beliefs we truly hold about abandonment and first families.

One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.

"I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her," it read. "Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother."

In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city's poor, has found four children on his doorstep - including a baby just days old.

Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.

Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable - and it's not happening in a country ravaged by war or famine, but in their own capital city.

 Why is it any more shocking in Greece than in Vietnam or Ethiopia or Guatemala or any other country where poverty is a precipitating factor in child abandonment?

Do we believe that family ties are less strong in other countries or that other societies sanction the failure to look after children?

Are we so ethnocentric to believe that there are cultures where it is OKAY to not care for children?

That there are cultures that are so "backward" as to ignore the drive to care for babies that is hard wired into our very beings?

What is the difference between the Greeks abandoning children and parents in other countries that makes it shocking. 

In two words- 

Race and Class.

Greece is like "us"- Western, civilized, moral, Christian.  People like us don't abandon their children 

(and the few who do are clearly mentally ill)  

We are the people who go into those other places and "save" those children in poverty because we understand our moral duty and we have the resources to offer to those parents who don't know better.  But the Greeks- they are like us and people like us don't abandon their children.

 
He [Father Antonios] believes that no matter how poor parents may be, the child is always better off with its family.
"These families will be judged for abandoning their children," he says."We can provide a child with food and shelter, but the truth is that the biggest need any child has is to feel the love of its parents."

Funny how we don't believe that a child is always better off with it's family when it comes to poor children of color born into third world countries.  Then there is a line of (white) people who can't wait to get their hands on those poor children (the younger the better) and save them from a life where people care so little and have so few values.  Few adoption agencies run family preservation programs to ensure that poverty is never the reason that a family can't parent their child and few adoptive parents ask if the placement could be prevented. 

The "shocking" act of abandonment is viewed as a routine (and required) part of the process of their children becoming our children and we barely think twice about it. 

Instead we rest atop our moral high horse certain of our racial, economic and cultural superiority.

It also makes you wonder just how many agencies are thinking about how fast they could set up an operation in Greece.