Infertility, Adoption, and Family Formation in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

When combined, primary and secondary infertility affects up to 21 percent of Indonesian couples. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with married heterosexual couples, I explore how intra-family adoption represents a culturally and religiously acceptable pathway to family formation for couples without access to assisted reproductive technologies. I examine how kinship is central to the negotiation of adoption, and to maintaining ethnic and religious continuity within adoptive families. I reveal how adoption can enable infertile women and birth mothers to achieve or escape the dominant expectations of heteronormativity, and discuss intra-family adoption by infertile couples in relation to reproductive stratification and leveling.

KEYWORDS:

• Indonesia
• adoption
• heteronormativity
• infertility
• kinship
• reproductive stratification

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank all the couples and their families who generously shared their time to participate in this research. I am grateful to my co-editor for this special issue Bregje de Kok for her patience and insights over the prolonged writing and editing process. This research was made possible by a Future Fellowship for which I wish to thank the Australian Research Council. The initial draft of this article was produced during a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, at The National University of Singapore.

Notes

1. Over two decades of living and working in Indonesia I have witnessed widespread societal acceptance of adoption and child circulation. I have encountered numerous motivations for adoption (aside for infertility), including: the desire of companionship and care; the adoption of children born as a result of rape; adoption by religious teachers seeking devout students; adoption of children whose parents are unable to care for them; adoption as a strategy of socioeconomic mobility; and adoption by a relative who has forged an extremely close bond with a particular child and wishes to become their permanent guardian.

2. Indonesian Adoption Law No 23 (ROI 2002, Article 39) states that Indonesian children may only be adopted by non-Indonesian citizens as “as last resort” when all other options for placing a child with an Indonesian family have been exhausted. Noncitizens can only adopt Indonesian children who have been placed in a registered institution, and cannot adopt a child who is in foster care or is living with a parent, or who still has one living parent. To apply for adoption, noncitizens must be a married heterosexual couple of the same religion as the child they seek to adopt, and numerous other stipulations apply. These requirements result in Indonesia having a considerably lower inter-country adoption rate than other lower-income countries in Asia. The most recent inter-country adoption statistics reported by the United Nations (2009) estimated that Indonesia adopted out 10 children annually, while India adopted out 1098 annually, and Vietnam adopted out 1419 children annually.

3. Also, see Bharadwaj (2003) for an explication of the sociocultural barriers that underpin what she describes as a “deep seated reluctance toward adoption” in Indian society.

4. I collected an additional adoption case study that is not included here because it differed considerably from the other cases. In this outlier case study, the wife became pregnant and delivered a healthy girl soon after their adoption of another infant girl. This couple also divorced while the girls were toddlers, partly due to the husband’s belief that his wife had become pregnant by another man.

5. Indonesian orphanages did not feature in this study, but limited research has been conducted on the welfare of Indonesian children in orphanages, for details see Sandika and Yuwono (2014) and Mulyadi, Soedjatmiko, and Pusponegoro (2009).

6. Two important exceptions are studies by Pien (2007) in India, and Hogbacka (2016) in South Africa and Finland, which both provide insight into the experiences and de-kinning of birth mothers.

7. This interpretation is consistent with an approach that places Islamic ethics at the center of legal analysis allowing for a reading of adoption as promoting both the common good and social justice (ASMA 2011).

8. These findings echo those of De Graeve (2014), in her analysis of transnational adoption by a Belgium lesbian couple, in which she critiques the normalizing discourses embedded in these women’s construction of family.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a Future Fellowship grant from the Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Linda Rae Bennett

Linda Rae Bennett is senior research fellow at The Nossal Institute for Global Health, The University of Melbourne and author of Women, Islam and Modernity: Single Women, Sexuality and Reproductive Health in Contemporary Indonesia (Routledge 2005) and co-editor of Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations (Routledge 2015).