The Victimhood Mentality

Unlike you, I don’t see myself as a victim. My adoption was a good thing. I was raised by loving people who could take care of me. I am sure I am better off today than I would have been if my birth mother had not put me up for adoption.

That is a reconstruction, not a literal transcript, of replies occasionally made to my posts about adoption. It is rhetorically potent because it has intuitive common sense on its side. Pregnant people who decide to relinquish do so, in the overwhelming majority of cases, both because their circumstances constrain them to do so and because they judge that their child will be better off in a different family. (Neither of these conditions strictly entails the other. The constraint can be so severe that the relinquishing parent might not know whether their child will in fact be better off; this was even likelier to be true in the Baby Scoop era of closed adoptions and the stigmatization of unmarried pregnancy. And, conversely, a child might be better off in a different family even if the parent isn’t constrained to choose relinquishment. As I like to point out, if adoptees can be made better off in this way, probably your children could have been too.)

It is by no means true of all adoptees that their placements left them better off, in terms of material and social resources, than they might have been otherwise. And in so many cases, particularly with transracial and intercountry adoptions, the very notion of “being better off” that’s presupposed is often saturated with racist assumptions about the inferiority of the child’s social and cultural context. But it is plausibly true of me, having been adopted out of one white family in the USA and into another. Yet even in my case, it is treacherous to draw firm conclusions. Since my birth mother did in fact relinquish me to a Catholic adoption agency, what would I be imagining when I imagine her having kept me? What would have needed to be different? What about her personal circumstances—family support, economic stability, relationship to my biological father, personality characteristics (defiance, stubbornness)—would have had to be otherwise for her to have kept me? These imponderable questions confound any direct comparison of my actual circumstances with counterfactual circumstances. Moreover, it is impossible to know how my birth mother’s circumstances might have changed as a result of deciding not to relinquish. Life, and history, are built out of unforeseeable contingencies. Maybe her situation would have stabilized in certain ways. Maybe my life would have been less financially secure (though I experienced some financial precarity in my actual life growing up). But then, maybe having been raised by my mother and her (i.e., my) blood relatives, my affinities with whom were so evident from the moment I met them, would have conferred advantages I lacked as an adoptee. On balance, which scenario leaves me better off overall? This is unknowable.

What we can say about plenary adoption is that, by legally erasing a child’s original history and furnishing a new identity for incorporation into the adopters’ family, it imposes finality upon what is often a fluid situation of crisis: a turning point in the birthparent’s life, with an unforeseeable outcome. And so the question is whether the finality imposed by adoption is harmful to the adoptee—a prerequisite for calling an adoptee a victim of adoption.¹

Victimhood is not a morally neutral status. To be a victim, it is not enough to suffer some form of harm. For one thing, the harm should not be self-inflicted. For another, victimhood entails some concept of inequality in rights, status, or power. A victim suffers while a victor acts. The victor inflicts a harm. This may be physical injury or moral injury (like humiliation or disgrace). It might be a violation of the victim’s rights.

Judith Shklar at Harvard in 1966, probably wishing she could get back to thinking about cruelty and victimhood

People generally dislike calling themselves victims, or being thought of as victims, because to be a victim is to have a kind of degraded status. In her classic study Ordinary Vices, Judith Shklar says this about victimhood:

Who indeed knows how best to think about victims? Since anyone can become a victim, they are merely a fair sample of all mankind. Victimhood happens to us: it is not a quality.

And this:

We are often not even sure who the victims are. Are the tormentors who may once have suffered some injustice or deprivation also victims? Are only those whom they torment victims? Are we all victims of our circumstances? Can we all be divided into victims and victimizers at any moment? And may we not all change parts in an eternal drama of mutual cruelty? Every question about responsibility, history, personal independence, and public freedom and every mental disposition haunts us when we begin to think about victims.

When I read adoptees’ autobiographies I find many common threads, and one is this: adoptees are subject to taunts and ridicule for their status (I received the “You’re adopted” playground taunt myself), and adoptive parents care above all to try to empower their adopted children to rise above that typecasting. They tell their children to be proud of who they are, and that being adopted is a blessing for all concerned, and not a curse. In short, to reject a victimhood mentality.

But these empowering messages do not alter the facts about the adoptee’s predicament; instead, they reflect the ambivalence anyone is prone to feel about being seen as a victim. For adoption does look like victimization in many key respects. Adoptees, in the cases that matter here, are passive recipients, not active participants, in their adoptions. Adoption involves displacement of varying degrees and kinds, and these displacements are, or involve, real harms. Mirroring losses—genetic, cultural, racial—are harms. Loss of access to medically relevant family history is an indisputable harm. Loss of connection to our origins, and to those people whose lives connected, entwined, and clashed to create our own, is a harm. The social subordination that comes of viewing adoptees as charity cases—as dependent upon the benevolence of others, and forever bound by a debt of gratitude that cannot be discharged—is a harm. The forms of legal subordination to which too many adoptees are subjected are injustices: sealed birth records, citizenship limbo for intercountry adoptees. I think that even if an adoptee is granted permission to view their birth records, the very practice of amending them without their consent, to falsify the facts of their birth and parentage, counts as an injustice: a form of interference with the right to one’s identity that is unique to adoptees.

And yet we can understand all the kinds of ambivalence about victimhood to which Shklar calls our attention. If adoptees are victims through being adopted, who are the victors? Who inflicts the harms? The adopters? The adoption agencies? The family-law attorneys who facilitate private adoptions? The state? From whom do adoptees demand restitution? And what counts as restitution?

But these questions do not undermine the idea that adoption brings harms. Rather, they limn the predicament of the adoptee who wants change. What kind of change do I want? Understanding this is the aim of every word I write about adoption.

The answer to the “happy, contented” adoptee who refuses to identify as a victim might be the flatfooted remark Wittgenstein made in another context: “Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the facts.”² A more constructive response might be this: To move from shame and ambivalence into clarity about what was done, and about a path forward, is in fact a decisive rejection of the victimhood mentality.

1. I won’t discuss the victimhood of birthparents here, partly because I think the case for calling them victims is much easier to make. Relinquishment is a deeply unpopular choice for pregnant people, and therefore fairly described as a “forced option,” or more cautiously, an option “under constraint.” Sociologist Gretchen Sisson’s forthcoming Relinquished discusses the evidence supporting this point. Oral histories like those collected in Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away underscore how deeply the trauma of relinquishing a child alters the lives of those forced into it. I take it as all but incontestable that relinquishment is a grave harm, and that therefore thousands if not millions of women compelled into doing it meet a key criterion for being called victims.

2. Philosophical Investigations, §79.