“I imagine that you and your wife are looking for a good little boy… the best thing is to adopt an older boy, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble, you know, hospitals, diapers, vaccines and the best thing is that you’ll know what he’s like, you won’t have any kind of surprise…”, in this dialogue from the film The Other Family by Gustavo Loza, the adoptive father is given some “good” reasons to adopt a child.

However, it seems that the adoptive father’s wife is not so convinced, as she responds: “And who told you that I want to adopt a child? … Do you think that’s how I’m going to forget my baby? “

The husband insists that the child can serve as an antidote to forgetting the baby they just lost: “I just think a child could help us get over this; we’d have a reason to fight…”  Although he also sees it as something that gives meaning to their marriage and helps resolve some problems. Reasons that his father expresses when he states that “if what you want is to have a child… find another old woman; you’re still too young to rebuild your life…”

In the same film, a same-sex couple considers the possibility of adopting the child: “… but it’s not our responsibility, that’s all there was to it… what happens if the mother ignores it… I thought that issue was closed?” Chema tells Jean Paul. However, after spending time with the child, they become attached to him and want to be with him. The child came into the lives of these people unexpectedly, as Gallego (2009) [1]  explains when he talks about how the possibility of exercising parenthood in homoparental couples often occurs when they receive into their home “children who are given to them or given to them” by close relatives.

In another film, the protagonist begins by saying the following: “Almost all babies are accidents… not me… I was designed… I was born to save my sister’s life.” These first words of the film My Sister’s Keeper, directed by Nick Cassavetes, bring us back to the question: What is a child? What is a child for?

What do the conceptions of children we’ve just glimpsed in the two films have in common? It seems that the child is seen as a means to an end: forgetting the baby, solving a relationship problem, having affection, being an organ donor… in all these cases, the focus is on the parents’ needs, not those of the child.

In addition to the family form and internal dynamics, children can acquire various meanings, for example, “in pre-industrial society, children were needed primarily for economic reasons: as a workforce in the home and on the farm, as old-age security for parents, as heirs to property and the name. For the well-to-do, children had a clearly economic meaning, predetermined by intestate succession and dowry rules.” [2]

Now, Beck & Beck-Gernsheim (2001) explain that children have a  psychological benefit function, around the emotional needs of parents, such as the hope of saving the marriage, of seeing the dreams they could not achieve come true in their children or as the reason for happiness and a reason to live… in Bauman’s words, “children are above all and fundamentally, an object of emotional consumption” [3]  (Bauman, 2008, p. 63).

In turn, Tubert (2004) expresses it this way: it seems that “the search for a child at any price is usually justified based on the child’s desire, a magic slogan that seems to legitimize everything” [4], then doing anything for an individual desire of a couple, a man or a woman would be justified.

[1]  Gallego Montes, Gabriel. Sexual Diversity and Domestic Arrangements in Mexico. In: Latin American Journal of Family Studies. Vol. 1, January–December 2009. P. 91.

[2]  Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E.  The Normal Chaos of Love. New Forms of Love Relationships.  Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica, 2001. P. 147.

[3]  Bauman, Z.  Liquid Love. Buenos Aires: Economic Culture Fund. P. 63, 2004

[4] Tubert, S.  Motherhood in the discourse of new reproductive technologies.  P. 126 In: De la Concha, Angeles & Osborne, Raquel.  Women and children first. Barcelona: Icaria, 2004.