Why Is That Controversial?
Adoptees have a stake in the fight to protect abortion rights.
Politico published on May 2 a leaked draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing constitutional protection of the right to abortion. I was among the adoptees to voice my horror at the news, inevitable though we knew it was. But, since my bodily autonomy is not at risk, what is my stake in this? What does my perspective add to those of the millions of people who may soon find that it is a crime in their states to take care of their own bodies?
In early December, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wondered aloud in oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health whether the availability of relinquishing one’s offspring for adoption might obviate the need to seek an abortion:
So petitioner points out that in all 50 states, you can terminate parental rights by relinquishing a child after [birth], and I think the shortest period might be 48 hours if I’m remembering the data correctly. It seems to me, seen in that light, both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting. And insofar as you and many of your amici focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood would hinder women’s access to the workplace, and to equal opportunities, it’s also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy—why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem? It seems to me that it focuses the burden much more narrowly. There is without question an infringement on bodily autonomy, for which we have another context like vaccines. However, it doesn’t seem to me to follow that pregnancy and then parenthood are all part of the same burden, and so it seems to me that the choice, more focused, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks, or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more, and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion. Why didn’t you address the safe haven laws, and why don’t they matter?
I talked in my Fourteen Propositions about the way adoption services in the United States and other industrialized countries commodify children, treating them as social wealth that is transferred from the less resourced to the more resourced. Adoption agencies deal with what is widely seen as a supply problem: demand from hopeful adoptive parents vastly outstrips the “domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life,” which by 2002 had become “virtually nonexistent.”1 Amy Coney Barrett’s remarks exemplify a common way of thinking among conservatives and liberals, which is that adoption serves as a “safety valve,” reducing the demand for abortion services.
Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas distills it to its essence.
I am a product of a closed domestic adoption, for which the reigning justification remains, even now, the idea, developed during the “Baby Scoop Era” (1945-1973), that relinquishing an infant under circumstances of secrecy solves several problems at once: a child gets a loving home; hopeful parents get a child to raise; and a “mistake” is “erased,” allowing the birth parent another start at making a better life.
There is an enormous moral difference, however, between relinquishment and adoption as intervening in a crisis situation for which there is no better alternative, versus instituting a de facto social system in which people are coerced into producing children for transferral into other, unrelated families. The first sort of circumstance includes such social catastrophes as the death of the child’s parents, or parental incapacity owing to drug addiction. The latter looks much more like a regime of forced birth and child trafficking, as I angrily said on Twitter.
We have the testimony of so many of those who have relinquished children at a time when abortion was out of reach. We know the lifetime of anguish they carry. One of the women Ann Fessler interviewed for The Girls Who Went Away said this about comparing the experience of abortion to that of relinquishing a child:
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.2
Those calling for “less abortion, more adoption” are not calling for new forms of custodial partnership between birth parents and adoptive parents. They are presupposing what I term the Regime of Secrecy, incorporating several forms of amputation: legal amputation, whereby a person legally surrenders all rights over their offspring; and social amputation, whereby the mutual anonymity of birth and adoptive parents is designed to prevent all contact between the former and their offspring.
Here, then, is one respect in which adoptees have the authority to speak out about the right to abortion. We are the relinquished. Many of us know our birth parents’ stories. Not only have we heard the stories, we live the aftermath of our birth parents’ trauma. So many of my fellow adoptees have been rejected a second time by birth parents who could not or would not welcome them back into their lives. We know, from that intimate position, what relinquishment has done to our parents.
But it is not only our birth parents’ experience that counts in this moment. Add to the foregoing everything adult adoptees say about the harms of severance and secrecy, of estrangement and concealment from one’s biological family, and we simply cannot accept Amy Coney Barrett’s proposition that relinquishment reduces “the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy.” It shifts the consequences, transforms them. To invoke the desires of hopeful adoptive parents, to say that forced birth-plus-relinquishment meets an unmet demand for the opportunity to parent, is to say that pregnant people, and the offspring they create, are to be pressed into a social experiment of incubating and transferring the raw materials for making families. It’s a vision more characteristic of a totalitarian despotism than of a society of free and equal people.
This is why adoptees so often feel like political orphans. Barack Obama called for making adoption “more available.” Hillary Clinton has done the same, while also articulating a vision of abortion as “safe, legal, and rare.”3 This is crass political triangulation, motivated not by a serious reflection on the rights and needs of the pregnant and of children, but by a desire to compromise with the enemies of bodily autonomy, as well as to elevate the desires of hopeful, affluent adoptive parents—a powerful political constituency.
Our interventions are needed at this moment because people unacquainted with the stories and experiences of adoptees view adoption as an escape hatch. The very idea of adoption as an “alternative” to abortion betrays the conceptual confusion. Pregnant people abort, but adopters adopt. They are acts with different agents. The pregnant person’s choice, if there is one, is between abortion, which is a medical act, and relinquishment, which is a legal one. It is a pernicious confusion, because adoption is “happy:” adopters acquire the baby they longed for. Relinquishment is catastrophic. It is a failure to preserve the very bond between parent and child that proponents of adoption prize so dearly. And, of course, relinquishment is too often a “choice” in name only. The 2007 film Juno’s vision of relinquishment as an empowering act is, in reality, mostly an insulting fantasy.
Adoptees speak out not to wrest the megaphone away from those who stand to lose so much by the imminent victory of anti-abortion zealotry in the United States. We speak out in solidarity with those who face the prospect of repeating the miseries our own parents suffered. And we speak out because we are made poster children by those who misrepresent and devalue our experience. We have no choice but to tell both the zealots and the liberals: Keep our names out of your mouths.
This language occurs in a report published by the Centers for Disease Control in 2008. Alito cites it in footnote 46 of the leaked draft opinion.
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Penguin Books, 2006).
Rickie Solinger discusses Clinton’s statements in Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (Hill and Wang, 2002).
All .of.this.
Well said Tony!