A bizarre adoption case in Indiana has taken a strange turn recently, begging questions about race and adoption policies.
A 58-year-old single male New Jersey school teacher wanted to have kids. Through a surrogate birth adoption agency in Indiana, he arranged to adopt twin girls, born prematurely (in Indiana) to a surrogate mother from South Carolina. Problems arose at the hospital when nurses became nervous about the adoptive father?s seeming lack of child rearing skills for the medically fragile preemies and alerted authorities.
What came out of an ongoing investigation is that the father, Stephen Melinger, apparently went to Indiana to adopt because New Jersey law renders surrogacy contracts illegal, while Indiana law is ambiguous on this point. The surrogate mother gave birth in a different county from the agency that arranged the adoption, apparently because the agency had had problems before. Also, the home study required by law before adoption was never performed in Melinger?s home (which is in New Jersey.) Further, it is illegal, according to Indiana law, for someone from out of state to adopt an Indiana-born child unless the child is ?hard to place?. No one would have caught any of this if the nurses at the hospital hadn?t become suspicious of Melinger himself.
The twins were originally reported in the legal papers to be the biological children of the adopting father, Melinger, and of the surrogate mother, Zaria Nkoya Huffman. However, Huffman is black (and was incorrectly reported in the papers as being white) and the children appear to be white, not biracial. The most recent twist, reported in the Indianapolis Star, is that Melinger now appears not to be the twins? biological father after all. All this should, in hindsight, be obvious, since why would a biological parent need to apply for adoption of his child?
The report in the Indianapolis Star does not state for a fact that Huffman is not the biological mother. The speculation around the identity of the mother appears to be based solely upon the appearance of the babies, which is white, compared to the appearance of the mother, which is black. And now it seems that if Huffman is not the biological mother, if, in fact, the biological mother was a white egg donor, then the monoracial children will no longer be the ?hard to place? adoptees that biracial children would be, and therefore will no longer be permitted to be adopted by someone out of state. This raises the question then of why Melinger chose a black surrogate mother. Was he playing the laws the whole time? Was this a strategy to get the kids born and then get them out of the state under the rules governing ?hard to place? adoptees?
Simply the reporting on this story raises a whole host of issues, aside from the issues of the story itself. Is there really a medical question as to Huffman?s biological motherhood or is it entirely based upon appearance? Is it the reporter questioning her relation to the babies or is it the investigators? And if there?s really a question as to the provenance of the girls? DNA, then why don?t they just do a damn test already?
As everyone should know, but most people don?t seem to, the background of multiracials ? especially newborn babies ? cannot easily be determined by appearance, especially when the interpretation of appearance is so subjective. It?s rare to find a child whose appearance is an exact 50/50 meld of its two parents?, or whose hue is exactly midway between that of its ethnically varied parents. Babies? complexions ? ALL babies? complexions ? are lighter than their complexions as older children, which is lighter than their complexions as adults. Furthermore, the way this story is reported underlines the one-drop rule: Huffman (the surrogate mother) is black, period. There?s no room in this ?assessment? for a description of her actual appearance, which could range from dark-skinned and African-featured to light-skinned and European-featured. African America is a very multiracial community to begin with. As we?ve all seen time and time again, but have not seemed to recognize, there?s nothing to prevent a ?black? mother from having very white-looking children.
That aside, adoption policy needs desperately to be cleaned up, if multiracial children can be blithely assigned to a ?hard to place? category based upon the racial categorization of those who contributed their DNA. These rules originate in the practice of not placing adoptees interracially; i.e. not placing black children in white homes and vice versa. This is a serious problem for multiracial children, for whom almost ANY adoption would be interracial, unless it were by an already multiracial family of their exact mix. Add to this the fact that, in essence, all adoptees are interracially adopted, since there are infinite significant variations in ethnicity and family culture within the monolithic structures of single races in this country. I?m not suggesting that the rule against interracial adoption should be entirely dropped. But this case shows to what a ridiculous extreme it can be, and is, taken.
