Fourteen Propositions About Adoption
These propositions are grounded in reflection on my experience as someone who was relinquished in a closed, same-race, same-religion domestic adoption in the United States. These propositions suggest, support, and clarify each other. I note many such connections in parentheses. I offer the propositions as empowerment to adoptees, and as advice, corrections, and warnings to kept people.
1. Adoptive parents raise other people’s children.
To be an adoptive parent is to raise, and to have the legal rights of parenthood over, someone else’s child. It might seem odd, or even counterintuitive, to put the point so starkly, but it is a simple statement of fact. The key to understanding it is to remember that an adoptee has a pre-adoption history: a life, however brief, before someone other than the adoptee’s biological parents acquired legal parental rights over them.
Many kept people are accustomed to hearing their birth stories: narratives detailing such incidents as what was happening when their mother went into labor and the adventures or misadventures leading up to their birth, and reminiscences of what impression, as infants, they made upon their parents. Adoptees have birth stories as well, albeit often secret ones. My mother lived in a farmhouse when she was pregnant with me. When I was born, one of her sisters was present, and she was the first person in her family to hold me in her arms. This is the birth story I learned at age 39, shortly after I had identified my birth mother and made contact with her siblings.
The story continues. Not long after I was born, my mother formally relinquished me, severing her legal parental rights, and I entered into the care of an adoption agency, which placed me with a married couple local to the city of my birth. That couple acquired legal rights over, and raised, my mother’s child. This is a simple statement of fact, following naturally from my birth story.
Despite its being a simple statement of fact, adoptees, and society as a whole, are trained not to speak of adoption in this way. Imposed upon, and superseding, this language is the language of ownership: You are our child now. You belong to us. The genitive “X’s child” is reinterpreted so that it denotes the relation between child and adoptive parent, not birth parent. In no filial relation is the idea of possession, with legal connotations, so central as it is in the adoptive filial relationship. Traditionally, this co-option of language complicates an adoptee’s (and others’) efforts to talk and think about the severed family. Traditionally, the adoptee is trained not to say “my parents and my other parents,” but to call the adoptive parents “my parents” exclusively—the severed family requiring qualifiers like “birth parents” or “biological parents.”
Despite all this linguistic discipline, however, it remains true that adoptees, no less than anyone else, have birth stories, and from those birth stories it naturally follows that adoptive parents raise other people’s children.
2. Adoption presupposes loss.
Social media gives prospective adoptive parents a public means of charting their journey toward acquiring a child. A popular phrase among adoptive parents in this contemporary context is “Gotcha Day,” denoting the day that they acquire legal rights over the child they have sought. And it is customary to proclaim Gotcha Day publicly, to a clamor of congratulations from well-wishers.
There is another phrase, used among foster-care reform and abolition activists, to refer to the transfer of parental rights from birth parents to adoptive parents: the “Family Death Penalty.” We conveniently suppress the brutal facts of family separation, whether through dirty-war tactics in “sending” countries for inter-country adoptions, or through the punitive, even brutal operations of child welfare agencies in the United States, by referring to adoptees as “orphans.” We erase what are, often, living families in crisis. (See Proposition 7.)
It is unseemly to ask of an adoptive parent in the throes of celebration why their child was relinquished. It is also unseemly to treat this traumatic moment—for relinquishing families and, as we are increasingly coming to understand, for the children themselves—as a “Gotcha.” (See Proposition 8.)
3. Love is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a family.
“Love is what makes a family,” adoptive parents are fond of saying. Love is the ideal. Love is what children need and deserve. But families are social arrangements. Family relations can, tragically, be loveless. And if adoption creates families, it does so not by the power of love but by the power of law. Law is what severs the adoptee from their original family: a severance that in most places allows adoptive parents, if the adoptee is young enough, to enshroud the birth parents in secrecy. It is yet to be explained why this severance, which is final and not legally reversible by its subject, the adoptee, is required by love.
4. Loss of mirroring is harmful.
A consultant to the U.S. Children’s Bureau wrote in 1946, in support of keeping birth records open to adoptees, “Every person has a right to know who he is and who his people were.” The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes that this is a question of human rights. See Article 8: “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.” (See the English text of the Convention here.)
How does one argue for this right? One way is to note that kept people enjoy it as one of the background conditions of their lives, always taken for granted, never emerging as a question. We can ask a kept person to imagine, contrary to fact, that their parents had decided to give them away to strangers, in an arrangement guaranteeing that the “giving” family and the “receiving” family never knew each others’ identities. Why would one’s own parents do this? Why should neither family ever be able to know the other? Why is this good? Isn’t it more like a curse? A punishment? Why should they be able to get away with this?
Of course, people are adept at supposing they can imagine tolerating what would actually be intolerable. And so, adoptees and the donor-conceived try, perpetually, to explain to the kept why genealogical severance is harmful: a disadvantage, a torment, a trauma, a condition that pervades and shapes one’s life. This is difficult, because living with severance—without “genetic mirroring,” as it is somewhat clinically called—is a distinctive mode of being in the world. It is an existential condition whose various particular forms are connected to the various forms of adoption, such as the distinctive features of transracial and inter-country adoptions.
Here is a kept person, the philosopher J. David Velleman, with an insight: “When adoptees go in search of their biological parents and siblings, there is a literal sense in which they are searching for themselves. They are searching for the closest thing to a mirror in which to catch an external and candid view of what they are like in more than mere appearance. Not knowing any biological relatives must be like wandering in a world without reflective surfaces, permanently self-blind.” (See page 70 of his “Family History” here.)
There is a “literal sense,” he says, in which adoptees, in searching for consanguinity, are searching for themselves. And not just in “mere appearance:” not just the shape of the nose or the pitch of the voice. This is because “if I want to know what a person like this can make of himself, I can look first at what my parents and grandparents made of themselves, or at the self-cultivation under way on the part of my brothers and cousins.” (“Family History,” page 70.)
My own experience illustrates this idea. I am the first person in my adoptive family to earn a Ph.D. and seek an academic career. I was not raised in a household of scholars. When I met my birth mother and her siblings, I discovered that two of the six had earned Ph.D.s. Another one earned a Master’s degree in English. All were, like me, academically talented. And they are creative people. My mother is a gifted artist and graphic designer. Her sister is a poet. I have some musical ability, and I had considered pursuing a musical career. I was the only person in my adoptive family to play a musical instrument. I naturally wonder whether, in the highly counterfactual situation in which my birth mother had kept and raised me, these influences would have shaped my relationship to my own talents in a different way as I was growing up.
That is not to say that I did not receive encouragement and support from the family that raised me. I did, and I am thankful for it, and I am proud of what I accomplished. But I viewed my abilities in a proprietary sense: a secret gift, with a mysterious source, for the development of which I had no model in my family. (Though I did in friends’ families.)
I had an obsessive preoccupation with my looks. Throughout my childhood and into adulthood, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. I bear no physical resemblance to anyone in my adoptive family. What—whose—is this nose? I thought. Why are my ears so big and shaped this way? It was only two weeks ago—literally days ago—that first I saw pictures of people in my biological father’s family who had my nose, exactly my ears with their funny crinkles. I was shocked when I saw my birth mother’s high school yearbook photo. It was my face at that age, framed in longer hair.
When I found my genetic mirrors I stopped fretting over my body. It was no longer a collection of miscellaneous parts; it has lineages, pedigrees. I told my uncle about my love of strenuous cycling and he told me, “Long legs run in the family.” Ah, OK. As I have gotten to know my birth mother’s family I find I don’t feel the same urge to construct a distinct personality for myself. (Am I gentle and mellow, or acerbic and quick-witted?) I observe how they talk, I notice what makes them laugh and how they respond to stressful things. I treat my kin much as Velleman described: as a map for charting my own persona. I think it has changed me for the better.
Loss of mirroring, then, places the adoptee at a disadvantage in the all-important project of discovering who they are and might become. And, for adoptees who are not true orphans, it comes with the bitter awareness that it was deliberately brought about. Someone knows, or can find out, who my parents are. I evidently don’t deserve to know. This knowledge, alone, is a crushing blow to one’s sense of worth.
Loss of mirroring is one of the broader set of harms caused by genealogical severance. Another is the loss of family medical history. And so we come to the next Proposition.
5. Severance carries intergenerational costs.
The most obvious cost, not only to adoptees, but to their biological descendants, is lack of ongoing access to family medical history. In closed adoptions and inter-country adoptions with no link to known birth family, the injustice is stark. These adoptees cannot answer basic questions about family medical history—chronic conditions, susceptibility to various diseases, and the like. An adoptee who brings a biological child for a pediatric visit is unable to supply at least half of the information on that child’s behalf (beyond what they have already learned in their own case). This is medical injustice.
Less obvious perhaps is that adoptees who lack ongoing communicative relationships with their biological families, even if they know their identities, are also disadvantaged relative to kept people. Doctors have asked me to supply, on my child’s behalf, medical information about my birth family that I could obtain only by asking those relatives directly, because it pertains to details of current medical treatment, not the sort of information preserved in a static file of “non-identifying medical information” often imagined to resolve the problem for adoptees.
Of course, all the other disadvantages and harms of severance apply, at one generational remove, to the biological children of adoptees. Anyone who has been struck by revelatory similarities between a grandparent and a grandchild can understand that it means something to lose that connection. All the generations preceding the parent’s are, for the grandchild, a blank. Again, the harm to the grandchild is hardly the equal of that to the parent—but it is real. And finally, children of adoptees grieve that severance, if only for the suffering they see it causes their parents.
6. Adoption, as a contract, binds for life people who were never parties to it.
Opponents of legislation to unseal adoptees’ birth records, including original birth certificates, are prone to refer to the “contract” whereby birth parents are promised lifelong anonymity But to quote Jessica Colin-Greene, “It is unrealistic to expect permanent confidentiality when others’ interests are involved.” (“Identity and Personhood: Advocating for the Abolishment of Closed Adoption Records Laws,” page 1282. ) For more about privacy, see Proposition 10.
Examining the terms of this purported “contract,” we note, first, that the mechanism of secrecy, the sealing of birth records, is activated not when a birth parent relinquishes the child, but upon the child’s adoption. Thus the second point to note: if a closed adoption is a contractual arrangement, then birth parents have no knowledge of the counter-party, if that is understood to be the adoptive parent or parents. Birth parents relinquish; a decree of adoption awards the adopters parental rights over the child; a new birth certificate is issued; and all the paperwork is placed in files, in adoption agencies and state records departments, that none in the adoption triad is permitted to view.
It will be said that in any event, relinquishment is voluntary. Birth parents surrender their legal rights. Even a cursory study of the history of adoption in the United States since the 1940s will show that relinquishment is rarely a purely “free choice” of the sort depicted in the 2007 film Juno. Ann Fessler’s collection of oral histories, The Girls Who Went Away, wrenchingly chronicles the misery and lifelong trauma of unmarried pregnant white women in middle- and working-class families coerced into relinquishing their children. More shocking still are the histories of forced severance in indigenous and Black communities, a campaign of terror accompanying cultural images of indigenous and Black women and their communities as morally and financially unfit to raise their own children. (See Laura Briggs’s Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption.) News stories still routinely appear about women’s struggles to reclaim their children from foster care—stories that pit them against the foster families hoping, indeed expecting, to end up as adoptive families. When the choice is to lose one’s child, how fully “voluntary” can we generally expect the decision to be?
Perhaps the central outrage of the idea of severance as a contract is that it binds, for life, a person who was never party to it. If adoption is a contract, then it has terms that bind everyone in the triad, with one member’s agreement typically secured under some form of extreme duress, and another member—the adoptee—whose agreement is entirely immaterial. With infant adoptions, the idea of “securing agreement” is of course absurd. And yet the lifelong permanence of severance—and, with closed adoptions, the lifelong permanence of secrecy—affects not only the infant but the child, the adolescent, the adult. And, as we saw with Proposition 5, the descendants. Morally, this is an absurd state of affairs if we view adoption as a contract. It is for this reason that some adoptees compare themselves to chattel. If adoption is a contract, it is a contract over the disposition of an object, a possession.
It is perhaps more accurate to view adoption as less of a contract among equals than an unequal relationship involving those with resources (adopters) and those without (relinquishers). And so we come to the next Proposition.
7. Adoption services transfer social wealth from those who lack resources and support to those who have them.
The evidence is unequivocal: Affluent people do not relinquish. Affluent people who become unintentionally pregnant overwhelmingly choose abortion over giving birth and relinquishing their children. And adoption requires money, typically in the tens of thousands of dollars. Domestic adoptions in the US can cost between $20,000 and $40,000. International adoptions cost as much or more, depending on the “sending” country. You need wealth to adopt.
These patterns are reproduced at large, in the relations between “sending” and “receiving” countries. Affluent nations in North America and western Europe are the major receiving countries of international adoptees. China, Ukraine, Colombia, India, South Korea, Bulgaria, Haiti, and Nigeria are among the major recent sending countries. The sending countries generally offer comparatively weak social-welfare protections for those who are pregnant and without social and financial resources. The receiving countries vary in the degree of public commitment to social welfare, but what they have in abundance are affluent people who desire to create families with others’ children. (See Proposition 1.)
From this global perspective we can see the contours of adoption as a privatized alternative to public social welfare. In lieu of a social commitment to preserving families and safeguarding reproductive autonomy, adoption offers a way out of a myriad of individual pregnancy crises. There are, in addition, incentives for gray- and black-market trafficking of babies. All of these are adjacent to, or forms of, human exploitation: the exploitation of the poorer by the richer. For the affluent and childless, babies are social wealth. International adoption functions to transfer that wealth from the resource-poor to the resource-rich.
8. Adoption is constructive erasure, designed for adoptive parents’ wishes first, children’s and birth parents’ needs second, and children’s rights scarcely at all.
Documentary evidence from the so-called “Baby Scoop Era” in the United States—the period from 1945 to 1973, the year of the Roe v. Wade decision—demonstrates that a coherent doctrine of adoption took shape during those years. It is a doctrine enforced by theories in psychology, medicine, and social work current at the time, scaffolded by strict laws, passed in state after state, sealing adoptees’ birth records. It is the doctrine that adoption is constructive erasure: obliterate, with almost no trace, the adoptee’s pre-adoption history and identity, to create the empty ground to build a new family in perfect emulation of a “natural,” biological family.
The rationale is simple and almost seductive. Adoption-as-constructive-erasure purports to be a socially optimal solution to two problems at once: the stigma of unmarried motherhood, which carried genuine social costs for women in the aggressively natalist and heteronormative culture of the post-WWII US, and the stigma of childlessness, again a feature of that natalist culture. That many unmarried pregnant women were willing to endure that stigma often proved insufficient, since the stigma also operated on their immediate families, who, aware of the availability of relinquishment, were often unwilling (when not unable) to provide assistance. (See Proposition 6 for discussion of the putative “freedom of choice” to relinquish.)
Severance, combined with the secrecy of sealing birth records, gave unmarried women a “fresh start” while providing adoptive parents with a simulacrum of “natural” parenthood. The amended birth certificate comfortingly, if falsely, certified the child as born to their adoptive parents. The fact that many adoptees of the Baby Scoop Era are “late-discovery adoptees,” learning only later in life of their having been adopted, often through accidental disclosures, testifies to the perfection of the pretense, in point of law and documentation.
The trauma of late discovery of adoption illustrates that adoption-as-constructive-erasure is tailored to gratify adoptive parents’ wishes for a socially legitimate solution to the stigma of childlessness, at the cost of the child’s well-being. The ample testimony collected in Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away challenges the belief that unmarried women sought relinquishment to secure a perfect, permanent erasure of their past. Many birth mothers deny seeking, or wanting, relinquishment on such terms. Many hoped—often vainly, as it turned out—that they could find their lost children at some future date, with the assistance of the agencies who arranged their relinquishments.
At most only one part of the adoption triad, then, has interests not profoundly compromised by adoption-as-constructive-erasure: the adoptive parents. This doctrine of adoption justified a large-scale social experiment in the post-WWII United States: one of reengineering families in response to social and economic pressures favoring the construction of affluent, nuclear, heteronormative, and patriarchal families. Missing from this was any semblance of respect of the rights of adoptees to remain connected to their genealogical roots, despite the pleas of the consultant to the U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1946. (See Proposition 4.)
9. Relinquishment is not a reproductive decision.
Adoptees who seek to overturn laws sealing their birth records are regularly told that it is necessary to protect birth mothers’ privacy, and that this right to privacy is grounded in the same considerations of reproductive autonomy that underpin the right to abortion. This argument is popular enough to have commanded the assent of prominent civil liberties organizations, such as (at one time) the Oregon Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. (See the compelling rejoinder by Marley Greiner, Founding Foundling and Ubergoddess of Bastard Nation.)
However, the decision to relinquish an infant is not a reproductive decision at all, any more than is the decision to terminate parental rights over an older child or adolescent. That a person may make a reproductive decision—namely, to carry a pregnancy to term—for the purpose of relinquishing the infant, does not show that relinquishment is itself a reproductive decision. Reproductive autonomy is a form of bodily autonomy, but relinquishment is not a bodily event or process. Indeed, it is the disposition of the legal and moral status of another person, another body. If there is a right to birth parent privacy consequent upon relinquishing a child, it would have to derive from some other source. And so we come to the next Proposition.
10. Privacy entitles you to withhold from me something about you, not something about me.
This is true even if the fact is an intimate fact about your life, as long as it is also an intimate fact about mine. And the fact that I am my mother’s child, or equivalently, that you are my mother, is an intimate fact about my mother and also about me. Certain other facts follow from this that my mother might not have wanted anyone else to know: that she got pregnant, that she had a baby, that she relinquished that baby. And so she may have reason for wanting to withhold this fact from people in her life. There is one person, however, from whom she is not entitled to withhold this fact: me. For it is equally an intimate fact about my life. Not only is it an intimate fact; it is a core fact about my identity. (See Proposition 4.)
And yet various forms of adoption result in its being withheld from adoptees. Closed adoption entails that the identities of birth parents, and of adoptee and adoptive parents, are withheld from each other. With many inter-country adoptions, various bureaucratic, linguistic, and other barriers prevent adoptees from identifying their birth parents. Also to be mentioned here are forms of commercial surrogacy and donor conception, in which the explicit goal is to conceal the identities of the donors of the gametes from which the child developed.
The problem with invoking a right to privacy in these cases is that it is a taking of a form of property without consent. In a moral sense, the truth of my parentage belongs to me; it is mine. It is not exclusively my (birth) parents’ property. To take it without just compensation is morally wrong. And there is no just compensation short of knowledge of my parentage. (See Proposition 4.)
11. Adoptees’ lived experience is a source of insight.
I understand lived experience to be positional experience, which only those who live within a particular social position can possess. We can try to describe our positional experiences to others, but we cannot confer that experience upon them.
At various times growing up I thought of myself, in relation to my adoptive family, as a unicorn, blessed with magical properties, and as an ogre, disfavored by nature. I stared at my reflection in the mirror and saw only a puzzle. I seemed to myself to be a collection of spare or discarded parts. My adoptive family did not disavow my differences in my looks and behavior and talents; they made them into family lore. My precociously fluent speech and mysterious lack of a southern accent were the stuff of endless reminiscences. My musical aptitudes, my decision to commit to an academic career in Philosophy: these they supported, despite their symbolizing my utter unlikeness to my family. I recall the looks of surprise, and the jokes, when I met family friends for the first time. (Already as a pre-teenager I was substantially taller than everyone in my father’s family.) Because I lacked a sense of intuitive kinship with my family, and because I had no siblings, I spent much of my childhood in solitary worlds of my imagination. I now think it is unsurprising that my favorite Star Wars character was Luke Skywalker: the child with a great destiny, hidden from his father at birth, bound to him by blood (or midichlorians).
Kept people do not share these experiences, no matter how different or estranged they feel from their kin. For I did not merely imagine myself to have a different origin; I knew I did have a different origin, and I was not allowed to find it. The question Who am I really? was for me not figurative but painfully literal. I knew my birth certificate was a lie, even if I did not dare call it that until decades later.
Adoptees occupy various distinctive social positions: we are products of closed domestic adoptions, “open” adoptions, transracial adoptions, transnational adoptions, and adoptions from foster care. These give rise to different forms of positional experience. I as a domestic adoptee from a white family and into a white family can understand, at least partially, aspects of the experience of adoptees of transracial or inter-country adoptions. Our identity losses, for instance, share broad commonalities. But the differences are equally important. When we think of the positional factors of race and gender as giving rise to distinctive standpoints that cannot be conferred upon people not in those positions, we should allow that adoption, in its various forms, does too. Only when adoption is respected as a distinctive social position, and a mode of experience, will kept people be able to check their impulse to congratulate us on our “good fortune” to be raised in supportive adoptive families (where this is true; often it is not). Only then will kept people understand that we live things they cannot see.
12. The adoptee has the freedom, and the burden, of deciding whom to call family.
Language is badly designed to give adoptees natural expression of their place within the two webs of kinship relationships they occupy. “Birth mother” implies the lack of any postnatal connection between mother and child. “Biological mother” implies that only genes are shared, when in fact mother and child share a story—even if incomplete, even if tragic. Even if the story is fully known to neither of them.
Worse is the normative edge implicit in “real family.” Anyone in the adoption triad might use this term to mark out boundaries or to demand allegiances. “You aren’t my real father.” “Go to them if you wish, but don’t forget who your real family is.” And those outside the triad might use the term to express their view of what is owed to whom inside the triad. “The ones who raised you, who gave you a roof over your head, who stayed up all night when you were sick, who helped you with your homework, are your real parents; don’t forget that.”
But adoptees are in an existential predicament: caught in two families, they may also feel caught between them, and fully part of neither. Not only do adoptees need to juggle different terms to disambiguate their two families when the context demands it, but the very factitiousness and contingency of their kinship thrusts upon them the need to decide: Who is my family? And this question is prior to the legal or, indeed, biological relationships they bear. It is a question of story and identity. It is a matter of reclaiming themselves from the various identities given to them and shaped by others’ expectations, hopes, and demands. (See the reflections on pre-adoption identity in Proposition 1.)
13. Adoptees owe no one gratitude for the lives they were given.
To frame it otherwise is to invert the relation of obligation. Parents owe their children duties of care, but children do not owe their parents duties of gratitude. Among the duties of care that adoptive parents owe their children is to ensure their children have the resources for identity formation. (See Proposition 4.) It is a strange inversion of the direction of obligation to say that adoptees should, out of a duty of gratitude to their adoptive parents, refrain from taking actions that would upset those parents, such as acknowledging birth family as family, or requesting or demanding acceptance of their need to search.
Another way people express the expectation of gratitude is to ask adoptees critical of adoption if they would prefer never to have been born. This question presupposes what might, in some cases, actually be true: that the choice the birth mother faced was between relinquishing their child and having an abortion. It is in a way easy to dispense with this: if an adoptee should feel grateful to their parent for not aborting them, so should any kept person too. If a kept person can be glad both that they are alive and that their parents had the freedom to decide to abort them, so can an adoptee. Or, if the birth parent lacked that freedom, the adoptee can coherently think it would have been better if they had had it.
What if the choice is between the birth parent keeping their child, under adverse private and social and economic circumstances, or relinquishing the child to a better-resourced family? Should the adoptee be grateful for having been relinquished? It is difficult, once again, to see why this is a question that specifically affects adoptees. Many kept people at some point in their lives fantasize about being raised in richer or more glamorous or happier families than their actual families. Does it follow that they should wish for a family different in any of those ways, and be grateful to be placed with one? Kept people do not live severance, genealogical loss, from the inside. (See Proposition 11.) Even where an adoptee feels grateful to their adoptive family—as I do!—that feeling is compatible with a relentless commitment to scrutinizing, and even seeking to abolish, the paradigm of adoption as constructive erasure. (See Proposition 8.)