When NBC decided to air a new version of the classic musical “Annie” last week, the executives probably didn’t expect that adoption would be one of the hottest topics in the news or that the country’s elites would be producing articles about how the trauma of adoption may actually be worse than abortion. And they probably missed the memo that transracial adoption — the lead role is played by Celina Smith, who is Black, and Daddy Warbucks is played by Harry Connick Jr. — is now being treated by some as the moral equivalent of colonialism.
As Ibram X. Kendi tweeted after Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court, “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage” children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”
Little surprise then that when Barrett had the audacity to mention “safe-haven” laws during the oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — laws that allow new mothers to drop off their babies at a firehouse or hospital, for instance, without being charged with child abandonment — the critics of adoption were off to the races.