In the Woods

Sometimes, even I wonder if I gripe too much. But once again, recent events demonstrate the need to shout ever louder.

I have been following, with mounting horror, the news about states that aim to “streamline” the process of relinquishing and adopting a child. There is Indiana, poised to pass a bill that, in the interest of “streamlining” abandonment and adoption of newborn infants, would omit any oversight and regulatory safeguards to prevent anonymous trafficking of those infants through the state’s so-called “newborn safety devices,” commonly known as “baby boxes.” Gregory Luce of Adoptee Rights Law clarifies the implications here. See also this from Marley Greiner, who has acted as a campaign of one to raise awareness of the disaster for adoptees’ rights posed by baby boxes.

Legislators in other states, including Alabama and Tennessee, are talking about seeking to “streamline adoption”—“trying to get kids into a permanent home as fast as possible,” in the words of one Alabama lawmaker. A Tennessee legislator states the aim this way: “Our idea is to make it easier, cheaper and faster to adopt or become a foster parent.” The principal change is to speed the timeline for termination of parental rights.

At this point I will repeat a passage to which I often recur in discussions of making relinquishment “easier.” Indeed, I am going to quote an extended version, taken from Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away:

Losing him had such a profound influence on me. You know, my siblings all had fancy degrees and very focused careers, and they drew from that in order to define who they were. This is what I had; this is what influenced most of my life decisions, the development of my family, where I lived—I would never have moved out of this state because this is the last place I saw him. It affected the choice of my husband to someone who was accepting immediately and almost passive about it. It’s affected my drive in terms of politics and I think, most of all, my sense of feminism.

…

It’s hard to convince others about the depth of it. You know, a few years after I was married I became pregnant and had an abortion. It was not a wonderful experience, but every time I hear stories or articles or essays about the recurring trauma of abortion, I want to say, “You don’t have a clue.” I’ve experienced both and I’d have an abortion any day of the week before I would ever have another adoption—or lose a kid in the woods, which is basically what it is. You know your child is out there somewhere, you just don’t know where. It’s bad enough as a mother to know he might need you, but to complicate that they make a law that says even if he does need you we’re not going to tell him where you are.

It overshadows my life. People can’t believe it has had such influence. Or they don’t believe that it is relevant anymore because I know my son now. But that little wet ink across a piece of paper made me not a mother in the eyes of society. That’s all it took was the stroke of a pen. They felt they could erase it, but we just aren’t made that way. It’s unnatural to be separated from your child that way. And if it happens when you’re fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, and it’s your first experience of motherhood, it makes you a little crazy. Sometimes I wonder how any of us survived it and are as successful as we are in our interpersonal relationships. Not that I consider myself to be completely successful. I’ve sequestered myself out here in the woods for most of my life to be away from people.

It’s changed my personality. I feel like I was in a car accident. You know how sometimes when people have a head trauma their personality changes? Well, it changed my personality. I don’t really care if I have the popular view. I suffered this alone for twenty-one years so everyone around me would be comfortable: “Don’t talk about it, because it makes us uncomfortable.” And I didn’t.

“I’d have an abortion any day of the week before I would ever have another adoption—or lose a kid in the woods, which is basically what it is.” Nine years ago I read this sentence, and the book in which it appears, after making first contact with my birth mother, but before meeting her in person. It prompted a kind of conversion experience, and it haunts me still.

We know that pregnant people, even those denied abortion care and who have little resources or recourse, overwhelmingly reject adoption. Given the unpopularity of relinquishment and the resulting mismatch between the domestic demand for infants and the domestic supply, it is no surprise that proposed measures to “streamline” adoption by making it faster and easier to terminate parental rights amount to an even deeper undermining of vulnerable pregnant people’s agency.

We do not ameliorate the injustice of banning abortion by “streamlining” relinquishment and adoption. We compound that injustice. Both for those who seek abortions, and for their offspring.

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But in the midst of all this awful news, something extraordinary happened. A deeply researched long-form article about adoption, centering adopted people and their stories and voices, appeared in a paradigm of mainstream American journalism, The New Yorker magazine. The writer, Larissa MacFarquhar, recounts the stories of three adopted women: Deanna Doss Shrodes, a domestic same-race adoptee born in Virginia in 1966; Joy Lieberthal, born in Korea in 1970 and adopted by a white couple in New York; and Angela Tucker, born to a Black woman in Tennessee in 1985 and adopted by a white couple in Bellingham, Washington. Each is allowed to speak in her own voice. MacFarquhar does not attempt to “balance” their criticisms, their mixed emotions, with pro-adoption viewpoints. And further still, MacFarquhar takes their ideas seriously, and reports them with respect:

• She includes a discussion of “the fog” that adopted people report having emerged from, as they begin to understand adoption’s lasting psychological effects.

• She cites the statistical overrepresentation of adopted people in substance abuse treatment and in suicide attempts.

• She notes Tucker’s realization, while working for various adoption agencies, that “although their mission statements always talked about finding parents for children, in fact the agencies were in the business of finding children for parents.”

I was shocked at these and many other passages. Reporting on adopted people in this way felt like an act of allyship. But far from breaking with norms of journalistic objectivity, the article performs allyship by merely giving adopted people a hearing, in their own words—and by treating their beliefs, and their understandings of adoption and the moral problems it raises, as worthy of being heard.

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This brings me back to my griping. When, caught up in fury over the Indiana bill, I checked the Wikipedia entry on safe-haven laws, I noticed something about the section titled “Controversy:” there is no reference to the core complaints that adoptee-rights advocates have made of the anonymity enshrined by those laws, which cuts off the relinquished children from their original identities. The issues discussed in that section center mostly on “fathers’ rights” issues about notification and consent.

For adopted people to make progress in defending our rights, we need first to be heard. It’s a big forest.