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The genetic details absolutely matter. There’s no one factor that’s determinative, but it’s utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn’t matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.
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The main thing is the child’s welfare, and what’s best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.
Yes, they do, and 99.99% of parents who fuck around and neglect their kids do indeed lose them forever. So do 99.99% of biological parents who did nothing except sign the papers under duress. It’s just that it’s a statistical non-issue that someone is going to even try to steal your baby back, and the 4-5 years of court cases are there specifically to make sure that all parties are heard. Honestly, the only time I’ve really even seen this recently has to do Native American tribes, who have a very different relationship with this process and some pretty strong reasons to distrust the system.
I can tell you feel strongly about this, and I don’t want to imply there’s no room for nuance or that negligent parents deserve an unlimited number of re-tries, or that adoptive parents don’t love their kids. My adoptive parents are/were broken people in many ways, but I never felt unloved or unwanted. I do feel very strongly that infant stranger adoption has an outsized role in family planning options that pushes it to a darker place than it needs to be, and that in foster situations reunification should be the goal if it’s practical. For both, if all parties are acting in good faith and in the interests of children, then the numbers will land where they land. I just don’t think we’re there right now, through a combination of cultural norms and governmental policy.