Blogpost 2

Exploitation in Adoption

Exploitation, one of the five faces of oppression Iris Young expressed in her book Justice and the Politics of Difference in 1990. The ability to influence a person to do something because the influencer has more power or knowledge is the simplest way of expressing this complex meaning. One blatant example of exploitation is child labor in the sweat shops when the children working are being compensated mere pennies a day. The exploiters are the businessmen and CEO’s who are exploiting the children to earn a bigger profit for themselves. It is all about a transfer of powers. Young states “not only are powers transferred from workers to capitalists, but also the powers of workers diminish by more than the amount of transfer, because workers suffer material deprivation and a loss of control, and hence are deprived of important elements of self respect” (49).  In the process of the transfer of powers as a group loses more and more power, then they become more and more oppressed. Young focuses on the exploitation in the workplace and how the people oppressed are usually the minorities. She states “the injustice of exploitation consists in social processes that bring about a transfer of energies from one group to another to produce unequal distribution, and in the way in which social institutions enable a few to accumulate while they constrain many more” (53). It is the energy transfer that leads to the exploitation. 

     Honestly, it was very hard to tie exploitation into adoption especially in today’s society. One extreme example of exploitation in adoption is the “black baby market” where babies are snatched from their parents and “bought” by privileged adoptive families. However this is not a typical, or legal, practice of adoption. A more likely example of exploitation of adoption is the oppression of birthmothers when they are coerced to give up their baby by their parents, the child’s father, the adoptive parents, doctors or other trusted individuals. The birthmothers are losing power in the ability to make decisions about their child’s future. These are a few examples of exploitation in the context of adoption however it is important to remember exploitation is not prevalent in many cases of adoption.