Genesis

The need to know and the right to know

So much of the debate over adoptees’ right to knowledge of their genealogies appears to turn on the question: What good is it to have that knowledge? Is it essential to a complete life? Is its absence a disadvantage? And what data can we gather about adoptees, as a demographic group, to help decide such questions?

Adoptees frequently cite the published finding that “the odds of a reported suicide attempt were ∼4 times greater in adoptees compared with nonadoptees (odds ratio: 4.23).” Other findings suggest that adolescent adoptees are overrepresented among both those who come into contact with mental health professionals and, more specifically, those who are diagnosed with a “disruptive behavior disorder,” the odds for adoptees being roughly double that of their non-adopted counterparts. These findings suggest that being adopted carries adverse consequences for mental well-being, but it would be too quick to conclude that lack of genealogical knowledge is an important factor. Social stigma, for example, is a separate factor that plausibly contributes to adoptees’ difficulties with living among the kept.

One kind of evidence critics of adoption cite, in arguing that lack of genealogical knowledge is harmful, are personal reflections from interviews with adoptees.¹ Adoptees have movingly testified to the power of gaining this information. But studies that cite personal testimony are open to the criticism that they are self-selected, hence not necessarily representative of broad commonalities among adoptees as a whole.

Indeed, if we keep our ears open, we will hear adoptees who feel alienated from what can seem like a chorus of voices chanting the many blessings of search and reunion. In fact, not all adoptees desire to search. Not all adoptees who criticize plenary adoption, or advocate its abolition, desire to search. Not all adoptees who feel no affection for their adoptive parents desire to search. To insist that searching meets a deeply rooted need can sound, to some adoptees, like an accusation: if you do not feel that need, you are likely “fogged” and self-deceived.

I started my search from a feeling of duty to my children. I wanted to learn as much as I could about our family health history. I think too, to a certain extent, I believed they deserved an opportunity to know their lineage—that every person should be free to decide for themselves whether genealogical knowledge matters, and that consequently I needed to give them access, to use or not use as they pleased. (Shareen Pine wrote exquisitely about the idea of genealogical erasure as an intergenerational loss, referring to conversations with her daughter, who said she had been “taken away from [her] brown grandma.”)

When I had my original birth certificate in my hands, I was unprepared for the ferocious urges it unleashed. Seeing my birth mother’s name in her handwriting, finding school yearbook photos and being thunderstruck at our resemblance: these experiences sent me into a reckless scramble to find her. I became obsessed with learning my family history. When we reunited I was determined to prove myself the lost child come home. I built bonds with her family that have proved enduring after eight years. My commitment to that project even threatened at times to eclipse, in the eyes of people close to me, my attention to my pre-existing relationships.

I see this frenzy of action as having arisen out of needs so primal that I cannot fully rationalize them. Primal but not universal. There are so many different ways for an adoptee to feel about the people who relinquished them. There are so many reasons why even simple curiosity might not prevail over other feelings that militate against action. If we invoke our need to know when defending our right to know, we must take care not to oversimplify the deeply complicated psychologies of people thrown into an extraordinary human predicament.

I do not rest my case for unsealing records on claims about the psychological harms to adoptees of genealogical erasure. We are in an ongoing project to unearth the effects of adoption, and our tools are those of empirical study, dialogue, and narrative. The heart of my case for unsealing records is my conviction that my parentage is my property. It cannot be alienated from me. Arrangements that deprive me of it are morally illegitimate. We tell our stories, and we relate our experiences, to communicate that conviction, not to legitimize it.

Anyone who promises rainbows from restoring access to our parentage is doing adoptees a disservice. Reunions can be beautiful. They are often ugly. Some adoptees regret making the attempt. When adoptees ask me for advice about whether to reach out to birth family, I can do no better than to assure them that whatever they choose, it’s right. I have reunited with my birth mother’s family, but I remain stuck, like Hamlet, over what to do about my father. This is dangerous terrain.

The problem with closed adoption is not that it deprives adoptees of goods that improve our lives, although for many of us it does this. The problem is not that it deprives us of the materials necessary to complete our identities. Adoptees who do not know their parentage are not wrong if they say they have all the materials they need to complete their identities. The problem is that closed adoption constrains our freedom to build our identities as we choose—to allow, or not to allow, our genesis a part in defining ourselves. Closed adoption legally codifies an idea of identity that does not constrain the non-adoptee: it is the idea that care and nurturance are all, and genesis is nothing. It deprives us of the ability to say “Because I have two families, there is more to me than only one of them” and act on it.

Genealogical erasure disrespects the existential condition of being adopted. That condition permits all kinds of elaborations. There are adoptees who embrace their biological families and repudiate their adoptive families. There are adoptees who do the very opposite. There are adoptees who embrace both, or repudiate both. And then there are adoptees who feel forever caught in a liminal space between the two, incapable of something that feels either like acceptance or rejection. I am such an adoptee. I feel like a guest in my adoptive family and a latecomer to my biological family. I’ve grown up with stories about the ancestors in the first. That means something to me. Now I’m taking notes, like a reporter, about the ancestors in the second. That means something too. But I don’t know how to conjoin these into a single story. I don’t know if I can claim any of the ancestors as mine.

Heredity is not destiny. Neither is upbringing. But kept people enjoy the freedom to make of each of these what they will. I believe adoptees deserve that freedom also.

1. Locus classicus: The Adoption Triangle, by Sorosky, Baran, and Pannor (1978).