Why adopt a severely disabled child?: Reasonable People by Ralph Savarese

Why, indeed?

Ralph Savarese explains why he and his wife, Emily, chose to adopt DJ, a non-verbal “badly abused, autistic 6-year-old from foster care” in an op-ed in today’s LA Times—-for the full story, see his book Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, which is due out tomorrow from Other Press. Savarese’s LA Times piece raises many questions and not only in regard to adoption, or in regard to the adoption of disabled children. Assumptions and prejudices are threaded throughout the comments people make to him and his wife regarding their adoption of DJ.

For example, “Why don’t you have your own children?” a wealthy relative inquired, as if natural family-making were a kind of gated community it was best never to abandon. “You two have such good genes,” she added. “Why waste them?”

A colleague at work confronted me in the mailroom with this memorable gem: “Have you tried in-vitro?”………

To this day, I can’t believe how callous people were; the strange anxiety that adopting a child with a disability provoked. And the anxiety just kept coming. “Healthy white infants must be tough to get,” a neighbor commented. No paragons of racial sensitivity, we were nevertheless appalled by the idea that we’d do anything to avoid adopting, say, a black child or a Latino one.

As offensive was the assumption that we must be devout Christians: hyperbolic, designated do-gooders with a joint eye firmly on some final prize. “God’s reserving a special place for you,” we heard on more than one occasion, as if our son deserved pity and we were allowed neither our flaws nor a different understanding of social commitment.

Without saying as much, it is more than suggested that DJ is damaged goods—that DJ is not worth it—that the Savareses ought to spare themselves of so much trouble.

And DJ more than certainly is more than “worth it” as Savarese’s portrait of his son in Reasonable People more than makes clear. When, as Saverese notes at the end of his LA Times piece, he comes home from the hospital with crutches following hip replacement surgery, DJ—who says via typing, “”You know how I like to be just like you’”—wants to know where his crutches are. The son is taking on his father’s “impairment, limping with me”—and limping, and typing together (the final chapter of the book is by DJ), they produce a book that has a lot to say about what a family is, and what it means to be “disabled.”