Reproductive Emancipation
Why I favor intersectional adoptee-rights advocacy
It can seem that adoptees who demand champion adoptees’ civil and human rights have few allies. We can sympathize with Treebeard the Ent, who, when the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask if he will join the side that opposes Mordor, replies:
“I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me.”
The American Civil Liberties Union takes no official stand on the rights of adoptees to their birth records, still under seal in nearly four of every five states. The citizenship rights of intercountry adoptees are still not secure. A bill granting automatic citizenship to all intercountry adoptees whose adoptions were made final before their eighteenth birthday has passed in the House of Representatives, but its fate remains unclear as differing versions of a larger bill including it await resolution. (The House version contains it, the Senate’s does not.)
These two issues—unsealing birth records for all domestic adoptees, state by state, and citizenship for intercountry adoptees—are the two foci of legislative activism for adoptee rights. What else, if anything, should adoptee-rights activism include?1 Each adoptee must ask what they choose to fight for, and thus where alliances might be built.
My thought about this question begins with my consciousness of disempowerment. Through the erasure of our pasts and the enforcement of a normative ideal of the nuclear family that excludes our biological kinships, adoptees experience varying degrees of disempowerment. People of transracial and intercountry adoptions experience profound forms of displacement, far deeper than my own, having been adopted domestically, out of one white Catholic family into another. Birthparents are deeply disempowered. Infant relinquishment has rarely been popular in the United States; the rise in cases during the 1950s and 1960s has historically specific causes.2 People overwhelmingly wish to keep their infants. This sounds like a truism, but it implies the nontrivial truth that relinquishment is rarely a fully and authentically voluntary choice.
Thus have I enlarged my awareness of my own disempowerment to encompass related and connected forms of it. All adoptees are legally severed from their birth parents and displaced from their families of origin.3 This displacement ranges from the kind I experienced, within the same class, race, and religion, to the far more radical displacements from race, ethnicity, class, culture, nationality, and language experienced by adoptees of transracial and intercountry adoption. Fostered people experience all these forms of displacement, along with traumatic experiences of separation, state violence, and domestic chaos that I, in my privilege, can scarcely comprehend. Adoptees of closed domestic adoptions and intercountry adoptions experience genealogical severance and loss of mirroring. So do people born through anonymous donor conception. The traumatic disempowerment birth parents experience is intimately bound up with that of the children they relinquish. These parents and children alike are subject to demeaning and contradictory social messages that include praise for the purportedly “selfless” act of giving up a child into a loving new home; condemnation for the irresponsibility of becoming pregnant and being unwilling or unable to raise a child; the expectation that adoptees will be “grateful” to all parties for acting in their best interests; and the denial that relinquishment and adoption, even in infancy, leaves a lifelong traumatic legacy for adoptees.
Advocates for single mothers, the adopted, the fostered, and the trafficked have long understood that classism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia saturate the politics of reproduction and family in the United States, much of it in the guise of “rescuing” children from penury and perdition. We are expected to share in this valorization of rescue, which in fact consists in processes of systematic severance and displacement over which we have neither control nor say, and which serve other ends that garner less attention: the desires of childless people to create and augment families; messianic visions of adoption-as-missionary work; violent state control of women, brown and Black bodies, the impoverished, and other marginalized populations. Call all of this by a broad phrase: reproductive disempowerment.
As I have started to think through the meaning of my own experiences with reproductive disempowerment, I understand that I’ve grabbed only a small piece of the whole. I cannot think my way into an understanding of what birthparents experience, or former foster youth, or donor-conceived people, or adoptees from other countries or ethnic, racial, or linguistic groups. To make progress, I must embrace intersectionality. All who experience reproductive disempowerment experience it differently, many of us radically differently, from others. My experience allows me to understand the importance of others’, but it gives me authority over none but my own. But it makes me feel that I have a stake in everyone’s emancipation.
Emancipation is as complex a concept as is the problem of reproductive disempowerment. Legal activism on birth records and intercountry adoptee citizenships are part of it. Activism against forced family separation, such as that practiced by the gargantuan systems of family policing in the United States, is a core part of it. And then there are abortion rights. Far from being peripheral to the cause of adoptee rights or family preservation, I believe abortion rights are central. Women of color, the targets of family policing, seek proportionally more abortions and will bear proportionally more of the consequences of eliminating abortion care.4 And while it is false to regard relinquishment for adoption as an alternative to abortion, or to assume that people with unintended pregnancies usually weigh them as alternatives,5 it’s reasonable to expect that eliminating access to abortion will exacerbate the social conditions that lead, via loss of parental rights, to family separation.
This is why I, as an adoptee, am unembarrassed to take a position that some people, perhaps typically opponents of abortion, regard as puzzling: that adoptee rights and adoptee emancipation demand abortion rights. I take a critical eye toward all the cultural, political, and economic forces that increase the pressure toward family separation. It is also why I criticize the dominant conception of adoption in the US and other industrialized countries since the inception of the Baby Scoop Era 75 years ago: that it is to be valued, and chosen, as a non-biological means to create and augment families.
Because I believe that the work of reproductive emancipation is intersectional, I reject the narrowly focused and non-intersectional approach to adoptee rights activism evidently taken by some advocacy groups.6
Against this attitude, which separates adoptee rights from abortion rights, and even suggests that advocacy for the latter is “extremist,”7 compare Dorothy Roberts:
Opponents of openly intersectional advocacy worry that only a narrowly focused message will succeed in hostile political environments:
Evidently, the advice is for those doing the actual work of political advocacy for adoptees to remain officially neutral about other aspects of reproductive emancipation, lest their attitudes on those other issues poison the well in their local environments.
This advice underestimates the political wisdom of the people doing the work of legislative advocacy. They can be trusted to understand how to operate in their local spaces. But there is another issue. Adoptee advocacy, as I noted earlier, is lonely; there are few partners. The current moment invites the effort to form relationships with reproductive rights advocates, because anti-abortion forces are promoting adoption as an alternative to abortion. And, as even the anti-intersectional advocates acknowledge, adoption is no such thing.
It’s at least plausible that adoptee-rights advocacy has more to gain than it has to lose by seeking solidarity with advocates working on other aspects of reproductive emancipation. There is a place for groups that want to distance themselves from this, dedicating their messaging and their efforts to a very narrowly focused group of adoptees on a specific issue (as is the case with unsealing birth records). But the gain in specificity comes at the price of exclusion. I choose to support those with a larger vision.
The right of adult adoptees to annul their adoptions is another issue, but it has claimed little to no public attention.
Historian Laura Briggs discusses these issues in her published work. This Twitter thread summarizes some of the main points.
Kinship adoption involves displacement within a family.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/14/1098306203/abortion-is-also-about-racial-justice-experts-and-advocates-say
See this article, which uses evidence from the Turnaway Study to argue that people with unintended pregnancies structure their decisions through two sets of options: abortion versus carrying to term, and relinquishment versus keeping the child. This makes sense of the fact that of those denied sought-after abortions, only 9% chose to relinquish their infants.
The Twitter account of the Adoption Search Resource Connection (asrconline.org) exemplifies this non-intersectional attitude, chastising adoptees who ground their own beliefs in broader concerns about reproductive disempowerment that affect non-adoptees.
Nor is it clear what is meant by calling abortion an “antidote to adoption.” I have seen no adoptee-rights advocates call for anyone to seek an abortion. The tweet looks like an attempt at antimetabole gone awry.
I learned a new word today: Antimetabole - fantastic!
Thank you for clearly articulating these thoughts, Tony.
I’ve been thinking recently how, as a group, adoptees are still fighting even to be recognized as a marginalized group! The dominant cultural narrative only sees us as lucky…