New York magazine has a interesting article about the “explosion” in adoptions taking place in the United States and the anxiety it brings up for those who once ago found adoption so taboo. The central question raised is are adopted children loved differently than biological children?
There is a small section that focuses on Angelina’s adoption and the media coverage over her biological daughter Shiloh Jolie-Pitt.
When Angelina Jolie gave birth to her first biological child, Shiloh, after having adopted two children from Cambodia and Ethiopia, the media attention was, as with everything regarding Jolie, Talmudic in its intensity. Was she too thin or too fat? (The only two options.) Would she have a C-section? Breast-feeding: yea or nay? But the greatest attention focused on the fact that the baby was Jolie’s genetic progeny; here, at last, the tabloids implied, was the one true child of Brangelina. Much of this media attention veered, tropistically, toward one central, titillating question: Would Angelina love this baby more? Was Shiloh more genuine, somehow, than those others, the ones with the mohawks and the sad orphan histories? Or, perversely, would she love this baby less—was Angelina unnatural, ideological, focusing her love on her traumatized foreign children, immune to the call of her own blood?
This speculation—a brittle shell of admiration barely concealing a slab of sneer—was only fed by a candid interview in which Jolie, after some prompting by the reporter, referred to her newborn as a “blob.” Though she was merely describing the difference between caring for an older baby versus a wobbly-necked newborn, the remark was interpreted as a slight to Shiloh, especially when considered alongside Jolie’s acknowledgment that the contrast between her adopted children’s difficult backgrounds and Shiloh’s privilege shaded the way she bonded with them. All in all, many observers seemed to conclude, there was something perverse about Jolie’s nature as a mother: the unwieldy mix of children, the family’s caravan style of world travel, that arm tattoo listing the longitude and latitude of her children’s birthplaces.
The article overall is very well done. It doesn’t simply focus on Angelina and her adoptions. The reporter interviews many non famous adoptive families to examine the questions celebrity adoption bring up, which not only effects them but the countless other blended families out there that also want to build families that know no color boundary or nationality.
To read the full article click here
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