A Better Tomorrow, with Other People's Children

Questions about the morality of adoption cross my mind at least as frequently as men are said to think about sex. I’m certain that I think about the morality of adoption far more than 19 times a day. Less often do I confront the question of a duty to adopt—or if not a duty outright, then a duty to prefer adopting a child to raise over begetting a child to raise. And then an online friend shared with me an article in the flagship mainstream journal of overblown techno-futurist ideas: it’s Leo Kim’s “Preferring Biological Children Is Immoral.”

Kim’s tactic is familiar in pro-adoption circles: accuse critics of adoption of trafficking in dangerous “bioessentialist” prejudices about the sacredness of shared DNA. I confronted one particularly odious specimen of this tactic, meeting its vituperation with venom of my own, here:

One common feature of these polemics is that the interests of adoptees themselves are always secondary: to the extent that they figure at all, they appear only within all-things-considered judgments about the welfare of adopted children, and never about what adoptees can claim a right to. Unsurprisingly, they never consider the implications of the language of Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the United States has not ratified:

1. States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference.

2. Where a child is illegally deprived of some or all of the elements of his or her identity, States Parties shall provide appropriate assistance and protection, with a view to re-establishing speedily his or her identity.

While one can argue that plenary adoption as practiced in the United States does not violate the letter of the language here, since the erasure and reassignment of an adoptee’s “identity, nationality, name and family relations” is entirely legal, I mention it here to underscore the fact that pro-adoption argument rarely acknowledges any kind of right, legal or moral, to one’s original identity. And this is true of Kim’s piece too. Nowhere does it acknowledge that plenary adoption in the United States is designed to take something from adoptees that those not severed from their original families enjoy: a connection to their pre-adoptive histories.

As most readers surely know, plenary adoption is designed to achieve total severance and erasure. In the most typical case by far, a finalized adoption results in the issuance of a new, “amended” birth certificate which identifies the adopters as the adoptee’s parents. This new birth certificate is not marked as amended, and in the vast majority of states, the original is placed under seal and made inaccessible to everyone, including the adoptee until the age of majority (and only in a portion of those states can the adoptee regain access without others’ consent). As an instrument of total erasure, the amended birth certificate is so effective that some people discover only much later in life that they are adopted.

Kim’s piece, like pro-adoption argument generally, centers on parents’ interests and entitlements. This is evident in each of the three main moves he makes:

• First, that the genetic connection between a parent and child is not morally important enough to justify preferring begetting a child over adopting one;

• Second, that valuing a genetic connection in parenting conflates biological and social concepts of parenthood and paves the way for a host of moral evils headed under the phrase “biologism;”

• Third, that prioritizing adoption over childbirth will help encourage the development of “nontraditional, nonnuclear family structures.”

In the background is an idea I am not going to discuss: that given the state of the planet and its possible or likely trajectory, it is wrong, all things considered, to produce offspring to inherit it. I have no interest in natalist claims to the effect that people—or certain favored types of people—ought to reproduce. I reject those claims myself. But if there is no duty to produce offspring, even less is there a duty to participate in plenary adoption.

Let me say something about each of Kim’s three moves.

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Move 1: Genetic connection is not an important contributor to a child’s welfare.

Kim asks whether a child’s having a genetic connection to their parents “prevents suffering”: a bioethical criterion for deciding whether a genetic consideration is morally legitimate in making reproductive decisions. (Compare screenings for certain genetic mutations that give rise to debilitating or fatal diseases.) The only argument he cites in favor of regarding genetic connectedness as important for the prevention of suffering is that offered by the philosopher J. David Velleman (not an adoptee), who regards knowledge of one’s biologically rooted affinities as a crucial ingredient for forming a full picture of oneself—a sense of who one is and might become.

I have approvingly cited Velleman’s work elsewhere:

Did I suffer by not knowing, for the first forty years of my life, anything about my parents and their (my) family trees? Before I offer the obvious answer, I will repeat what I have said many times before: I found the experience of living in a body made by phantoms deeply alienating. There was no way anyone could mistake me for a biological relative of my parents. Constant awareness of that difference—of unrelatedness to everyone in my world—bred a sense of isolation and exceptionality that was both oppressive and liberating. (This is the “Ugly Duckling” predicament.)

But I am more willing now—more than I was when I wrote about Velleman—to acknowledge that there is no unambiguous Yes to “Does mirroring loss produce suffering?” For some adoptees, it does. It did for me. But it can also be a source of strength. As it was for me.

The obvious answer to whether loss of a genetic connection produces suffering is this: Yes, because lack of knowledge of one’s family health history is profoundly harmful. It can result in all the forms of suffering that hereditary disease brings. To my astonishment, Kim nowhere mentions this obvious and undeniable harm. But its absence foregrounds a bigger point. Kim, like other critics of the “biologism” or genetic “fetishism” they attribute to critics of plenary adoption, ignores that what adoptees are searching for is not a set of chromosomes but their own history. The chromosomal link is, for many of us, the only key we have to that history. Kim’s argument ignores this because he is not viewing the question of the genetic link from the offspring’s perspective. And this makes the question of rights all the easier to dismiss. Because even if no one has a right to raise a genetically connected child, the child has a right to their own history—their origin and place in the web of humankind—that the genetic link signifies but does not exhaust.

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Move 2: Preferring genetic offspring conflates biological and social notions of parenthood.

Kim writes:

Eliding the social phenomenon of parenthood with the biological phenomenon only sets us up to reinforce a dated conception of the family at odds with our hopes for a more inclusive ethics.

The preference for genetic offspring shades into a host of moral evils:

• Racism (the preference for sharing “racialized traits”);

• Homophobia (“it’s precisely this argument that has been used for decades to discredit same-sex couples as unfit to be parents”);

• Parochialism (the Na in the Himalayas lack a social category of the biological father, so even the concept of the biological parent is a social construct that isn’t universally normative).

To me, there is an air of unreality surrounding this entire line of argument. Are two people who love each other and seek to produce a child together to be criticized for being driven by a “rudimentary, mechanistic desire to pass on [their] genes?” It’s never a good sign for an argument when pop evolutionary psychology makes an entrance. But even if we grant that the extremely widespread desire to beget offspring is morally arbitrary at best, and allied to pathological attitudes like racism and homophobia at worst, this does not even tend to show that the existing genetic connection the offspring seeks to know is morally equivalent to the prospective genetic connection a potential parent seeks to create.

In fact, Velleman acknowledges that the desire for this genetic connection can be dangerously selfish. The primary target in his writing about genetically based resemblance is the ethics of anonymous donor conception, where he has this to say about the person who seeks a gamete “donor” to conceive a biologically related child:

The reason for resorting to donated gametes in many cases, of course, is the desire of an adult to have a biologically related child despite lacking a partner with whom he or she can conceive. And my arguments imply that having a biologically related child is of genuine value, as a potential source of self-knowledge for the parent. Yet whereas the parent will be just as fully related to the child as any mother or father, the child will know only half of its biological parentage. Surely, we don’t believe that parents are entitled to make themselves slightly better off in some fundamental dimension by impoverishing their children in the same dimension. Why, then, should they be entitled to enlarge their own circle of consanguinity by creating children whose circle will be broken in half?

What Kim misses by ignoring the value of genetic connection to the offspring is that it has nothing to do with what the parent would prefer and everything to do with what and who the child is: where they came from and what they might have lost through disconnection from that history. Because Kim doesn’t talk about that history, we can only assume that he regards it as disposable.

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Move 3: Prioritizing adoption over childbirth will help encourage the development of “nontraditional, nonnuclear family structures.”

The Na of the Himalayas, Kim tells us, “do not have a social category for biological fathers.” Yes, human concepts of family are not “biological givens” but social categories. Ask any adoptee! We are free, but also compelled, to decide how to use kinship language, which is not built for the kinds of social rearrangements plenary adoption legally codifies.

But Kim wants to see a liberating thought here. He waxes futuristic:

In the longer term, we should hope to witness the broader acceptance of nontraditional, nonnuclear family structures—ones that stem less from a default view of “natural” biological relations and more from active, self-conscious construction.

Again,

Over time, we will finally come to realize that our relations with each other are not defined by our rudimentary, mechanistic desire to pass on our genes, but rather our capacity for love and care— the expansiveness of our attachments and the depths of our devotion to one another. In short, in all that makes us humane.

By deprioritizing the biological tie, we free ourselves to imagine “nontraditional, nonnuclear family structures” and move past the patriarchal, heteronormative, classist, and ableist paradigm of the nuclear family unit.

When we shift our focus away from the parent and to the child, we once again see things Kim misses. There is an almost comical irony in the idea of promoting plenary adoption as part of a liberatory project of dismantling traditional, nuclear family structures. For adoption is designed precisely to reproduce traditional, nuclear family structures.

My experience is typical of adoptees of my age—and remains common in our current era of so-called “open” adoptions. I had no contact with my original family. I was taught to use kinship language for my adoptive family in exactly the way my non-adopted peers were taught to use that language. The legal structure of plenary adoption is designed to remanufacture a child for assimilation into a new nuclear family, not to expand or challenge the idea of a nuclear family. Not even the urgent importance of family health history—ongoing, regular communicative contact for sharing evolving knowledge of family health history—is enough to convince adoptive parents to allow their child’s original family into their lives.

Kim ignores the adoptee’s perspective. He ignores adoptees’ rights. Here, in an almost poetic emblem of everything that is wrong with his argument, he attributes to plenary adoption the very thing critics of plenary adoption note that it forecloses: a conception of family that rejects the exclusivity of the model of the nuclear family.

Kim believes he is seeing the future. Certainly, history—and our right to our own—does not interest him.