First-Person Truth

“Speak your truth” is good advice. Tell your story. Show due respect, of course, for others’ feelings, and for their privacy. But claim ownership over your story. People whose lives begin with severance and secrecy especially need to hear this advice, because what secrecy in adoption does is to make one’s story into contested property, where truthseeking, not to mention truth speaking, can be received as betrayal.

But what value does speaking truth have, beyond the personal value of empowering the speaker of that truth? Not that this is trivial; not at all. The nearly universal expectation is that adopted people are grateful for their adoption—grateful to their adoptive families, grateful for a system that rescues infants and children from perilous circumstances, from abusive homes, from orphanhood. That expectation imputes a form of dependence to adopted people: that of being beholden to their adopters, and to the system that placed them in their adopters’ families. It rings odd in many ears to say that people should be grateful to their parents for begetting them. But the expectation that adoptees are—should be—grateful to their adopters for adopting them is part of the common conception of adoption. Given this, speaking one’s truth about one’s life as an adopted person is an act of self-emancipation.

There is a risk in framing one’s convictions through first-person narrative, which is that everything one attempts to convey becomes tagged with the qualifier “This is (just) my experience.” If this is my truth, then what do we do if your truth is altogether different? If I give testimony to the costs of adoption for me, then what if your testimony is, “My adoption did not cost me any of those things?” Consider this exchange, and notice how the Red Circle is attempting to rebut the others:

say something, then

Blue Circle objects to the way talk of adoption objectifies human beings and places them in a relation of moral dependence upon others. Orange circle invokes adoption trauma, and the way it informs their experience as an adopted person. Red Circle seizes on this invocation of traumatic experience, denying or at least downplaying its relevance in their own life. As if weighing these forms of experience in a balance, Red Circle claims that adoption is not all bad (experience), but good (experience) as well. Green Circle denies that adoption is positive, claiming that severing a child from their original family is never necessary to provide them with care. Red Circle reduces this claim about the warrant for severance to a “story” about a “poor adoption experience,” implying that questioning the justification for severance is incomprehensible unless the questioner is coping with the aftermath of traumatic experience.

“I accept your story as true and valid. Why can’t you accept mine?”

The disagreement concerns not whether adoption allows “good” experiences along with bad. The disagreement is about what the range of experiences allowed by adoption tells us about the social institution of adoption itself: why we need it (if we do), and what justifies it.

Storytelling is essential to moral argument. It breathes life into what otherwise may seem like arid, abstract concerns. Nowhere is this more evident than with ethics of sex, reproduction, and the family. We can enunciate a position about the right to abortion, but it is the stories about what happens to people when their access to abortion is curtailed that lend true urgency to the question. We are not weighing different stories against each other. A story about a fatally botched illegal abortion, or of a woman’s life in danger in an operating room when doctors refuse to act out of fear of legal liability, is not counterbalanced by a woman’s tale of abortion regret, or by a mother reflecting on how glad she was, eventually, to have been dissuaded or prevented from having an abortion. When the question is one of rights, of the justification for denying people control over their bodies, it is hardly to the point to note that some women are willing, even glad to cede that control. We tell stories of the disasters that ensue when abortion rights are denied because we aim to make vivid the costs of losing those rights. We do not aggregate all the varieties of “abortion experience” to make a sum-total judgment about whether abortion is a net positive or negative.

And exactly this is true of adopted people who recount their experiences with adoption. I do not know whether to call my own adoption experience “positive” or “negative” overall. I was taken from my mother and given to people who did and do love and care for me. That’s a “positive,” surely. But for a variety of reasons, involving both legal prohibitions barring access and cultural attitudes that discourage speaking and thinking about search, I did not find my birth parents until the fifth decade of my life. I have reflected on all those factors—the barriers adopted people face in trying to reclaim their original identities, their sense of their place in the world, their cultural and ethnic roots, their family health histories—and I see no compelling moral justification for those barriers’ existence. Certainly no justification for the lack of support for adopted people who wish to overcome those barriers.

The reason why individual trauma and harm matter in the stories we tell—why they count for more than “just one person’s experience”—is that they force us to ask whether it had to be that way. Acknowledgment of this fact is evident in how adopted people who speak out about the costs of adoption are so often met with the reply: Then you want kids to languish in orphanages and foster care. That is, adoption may have downsides, but it is a necessary evil because the alternatives are worse. This reply has the virtue of conceding, implicitly, that stories of the harms of severance raise a question of moral justification. Once we move to that ground, we can critically examine the presuppositions: for example, that plenary adoption, with its legally sanctioned erasure of the child’s original identity, is the only practicable alternative model of custodial care to “orphanages” (true orphans are less common than generally believed), or to spending an entire childhood and adolescence in a series of foster homes.

Still, there is a kind of aggregate effect in speaking one’s truth about adoption. When we speak, we may reach other adopted people who find resonances in our stories, and who may decide to add their own. We tell our stories because we believe that we have insights about adoption that non-adopted people will at least find intelligible, even if—as I believe—it is impossible for people who have not lived severed lives to understand that form of life “from the inside.” But as voices join, it becomes harder to deny that the struggle with severance owes to aspects of the system itself, and not just to individual psychologies.

It isn’t all in my head. It isn’t mere subjectivity. It isn’t my story versus theirs. I am offering you evidence of things you may not have seen.