This morning I left my bed, walked down to the kitchen, and brewed a pot of Blue Bottle coffee. The beans were a Father’s Day gift from my sixteen-year-old child. It was a beautiful morning—breezy, sunny, and dry, likely the last such day before a punishing heat wave sets in—and I sat on my porch, solving my array of daily puzzles, thinking about the two men I designate “father,” though only one gets the casual honorific “Dad.” That is my adoptive father. I saw him last week. It was the first time since my wedding a year and a half ago, which ended in a glimpse of him with his arm around my birth mother’s brother’s shoulder: a moment of two timelines meeting in violation of taboo, the social contract, the spirit of the law, and all that is holy.
On the second Sunday in June I was in a plane landing at the Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport in northwest Florida. I grew up in Fort Walton Beach. Dad moved Mom and me there when I wasn’t quite nine years old. It’s where I grew up; it’s where Mom died, while I was off at college; it’s where Dad remarried and then, two years ago, became a widower again. That’s when his mind began fading. His sisters live in Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born and adopted. They are his caretakers now. They moved him to an assisted-living community after he was discharged from the hospital for treatment for gastric bleeding. He has been there for a little over a month. “I think now is a good time to come see him,” one of his sisters told me.
I left the plane; I fetched my tiny carryon I was required to check; I walked to the rental-car counter. I had requested a compact car, and they gave me a Toyota pickup truck. The weather was beautiful: hot, but fanned by an ocean breeze. I drove over the Mid-Bay Bridge and to a Publix supermarket in Destin. I grabbed a deli sandwich and some snacks. I drove to Henderson Beach State Park on the Gulf of Mexico and joined the long line of cars, crawling smoothly. I entered the bath house, changed into my bathing suit, trudged through the sand to the beach-rental booth, and reserved two chairs and an umbrella. You can never predict how the water will be. Sometimes it will be choked with stinking sargassum. Sometimes a red tide will turn the ocean to poison. This day it was clear and bottle-glass green. It was bathtub warm—maybe worryingly warm, but I decided not to think about it. I waded out and floated under the sun, a speck beneath the bowl of a once again startlingly huge sky. For about three hours I alternated between basking and reading. I had brought fellow adoptee Sandra Steingraber’s memoir, Living Downstream. I was alone, plunging into the comforting atavism of reenacting my early years in Florida when I would spend whole days on the beach by myself, hunting for sand dollars or coquinas or augers or blue crabs, or pretending I was storming Omaha Beach, or teaching myself how to skimboard. Meanwhile, my dad was in his room about ten miles west, wrapped in a tangle of blankets, with a box of uneaten lunch at his bedside. To use a word Sandra suggested to describe my state of mind, I was deep in dissociation.
So many people out there are NOT bitter adoptees, but happy, grateful, well adjusted adults. I’m just sad that you will always make yourself a victim. Such a sad way to waste your time. —X/Twitter user RCTroutman8
Every adoptee who says “I have come out of the fog” means something different by it. What I mean is that I have left behind a conceptual universe of concepts, linkages of concepts, and readymade scripts defining, in a loose sense, the “meaning” of adoption. Having abandoned it so completely I sometimes fail to appreciate how bafflingly foreign my ideas about adoption must seem to many people who have lacked the means, motive, and opportunity to escape that universe.
RCTroutman8 enacts the core Gratitude Script of adoption:
I have about six books on adoption—memoirs and monographs—in various states of unreadness. That is entirely typical. I would like to add a seventh: Florence Fisher’s The Search for Anna Fisher, about her quest to find her birth mother. Florence Fisher died last year: October 1, 2023. Marley Greiner, a cofounder of Bastard Nation, eulogized her, while offering some characteristically sharp observations, here.
Fisher was one of the foremost pioneers in adoptee-rights activism. Before almost anyone else, she identified adoption as a rights crisis for adoptees. For instance, she wrote:
Sealing our records is a violation of the Constitution. We are told the law is protecting the privacy of our natural parents. My mother has the right to privacy from you, but not from me, her baby. She has no right to privacy at the expense of my anonymity.
I echo this regularly when I say that privacy entitles you to withhold from me facts about you, not facts about me. My identity is not something anyone else can claim as theirs.
This post is dedicated to my Aunt Marianne, the only person I know of in my family who has read Derrida.
Last week, from April 4 to 6, I attended the conference of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC), held this time at Brown University, a train ride away (well, two train rides away) from my home near Boston. I left academia thirteen years ago, but I was thrilled to be among scholars and writers and artists, ages spanning at least five decades, who are creating knowledge and art about adoption. And I was delighted to be free of the pressures of "performance," not being a presenter, but only an attendee, there to learn from others and to make friends. I did a lot of both.
Word had gotten out that the 5th was my birthday. My 50th, in fact: right on time, my "Hello, we are the AARP" letter was delivered just a few days earlier. I bonded with the adoptee author, social worker, and activist Susan Harris O'Connor over our shared birthdate. Other participants approached me with gifts. I got a tiny journal, two jars of flavored salt, chocolate and cheese--and books. Brilliant books by adoptee scholars and writers.
It was bittersweet to have no institutional affiliation. I don't often look back regretfully on having ended my long and tortured romance with academic life, but this was a moment when I felt the loss. As much as I admired the scholars presenting their work, I also felt the gentle sting of envy.
On March 15, 2014, I assembled a lasagna. For once, I scarcely thought about the drudgery. I'd bought fresh noodles from Russo's in Watertown, now closed and gone. I'd dirtied most of my pots, bowls, and saucepans from parboiling the noodles, cooking the bechamel, mixing the ricotta, mozzarella, and Parmesan. When I had assembled it, I wrapped it tightly in tinfoil and put it in the refrigerator.
The next morning, exactly ten years ago as I write, I packed a duffel. I took a short walk to a car rental office. I drove back home, fetched my duffel and the lasagna, and began a 380-mile drive due west on Interstate 90: the Mass Turnpike out past Worcester and Springfield and the Berkshires; the state-line crossing and the towering Castleton-on-Hudson Bridge; the northward bend around Albany and onto the westbound New York Thruway past post-industrial cities, woven together by the Mohawk River and the towpath of the Erie Canal; past the Finger Lakes--Otisco, Skaneateles, Owasco, Cayuga, Seneca, Keuka, Canadaigua. All of this was new to me. On the front passenger seat were directions I'd scrawled on a scrap of paper torn from a yellow steno pad. I almost missed the exit. The name of the town I was looking for wasn't on it.
Twenty minutes later I knocked on the apartment door of the woman who had given birth to me thirty-nine years before, whose face I had not seen, whose voice I had not heard, whose hands I had not touched, since I was a newborn baby. Whose identity was an official secret I did not unlock until six months before this moment, right now, when she stood in the doorway, her face smiling in the way I've since become accustomed to seeing as she said, "Hi!"
March 16, 2024 is the tenth anniversary of my face-to-face reunion with my birth mother.
Last week I attended a bookstore event at which Gretchen Sisson discussed her new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Sisson is a qualitative sociologist at Advancing New Standards In Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), part of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Relinquished, like Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away and Rickie Solinger's Beggars and Choosers, directly confronts the effects of adoption, as a set of legal, economic, and social practices, upon pregnant people who lack the resources and support they need for parenthood. Whereas Fessler's book compiles oral histories of birth mothers from the Baby Scoop period (1945-1974), Sisson foregrounds birth mothers from the first two decades of the 21st century, combining their stories, in their own words, with analysis of the social context in which they relinquished their children for adoption--or as I often prefer to say, lost their children to adoption.
I met Gretchen over coffee in San Francisco in August of 2023, as the galleys were being prepared for publication. (Note: when I refer to her as a personal acquaintance, I will use "Gretchen." When I refer to her as a scholar and researcher, I will use "Sisson.") She shared a PDF of the galleys with me, but as I sheepishly explained to her last week, I had not read them. Oddly (and irrationally), I felt it was an illicit privilege to read the book in advance of publication, even though I had preordered a copy months earlier. I believe I was a bit overawed. Both then and at the book talk, I felt some shock that this person, who had begun to take an interest in adoption policy, practice, and politics while working with teenage mothers during her years as a graduate student in metropolitan Boston, had, without any direct experience of adoption as part of the so-called "triad" (adoptee, birth parent, adoptive parent), recognized the inequity and exploitation on which the private adoption industry rests and had decided to study it systematically.
I mentioned to Gretchen that Relinquished is an excellent title, but that it also pricked my ears as an adoptee. Because as a verbal adjective, the word describes not the women whose stories she relates, but people like me: adoptees. We are the relinquished. In another sense, relinquishing parents are themselves relinquished: relegated, marginalized, generally voiceless in the joyful clamor that attends every new adoption. Gretchen acknowledged all this, but she noted (as she does in the book) that it is adopted and displaced people who have led movements for abolishing adoption as it is currently practiced, and whose voices have helped to guide her work. The book's aim is to present the authentic voices of parents who have lost their children to adoption. In that sense it is not "about" adoptees. But because it illuminates their experiences--the experiences of adopted people's parents, parents like my own birth mother--and because its arguments are a crucial part of the case for reform and abolition of adoption, I regard this book as a landmark in the history of research on adoption, and one of the most valuable scholarly contributions to the struggle for adoptee justice in the entire history of that struggle.
I will shortly be deleting my Substack account altogether. Some of you have been receiving notices from Substack about your subscriptions having lapsed. But since I will not be posting through Substack anymore, you aren't missing anything!
But paid subscribers should know that since I have disconnected Substack from my Stripe account (which handles paid subscriptions), you cannot create, renew, or change paid subscriptions there. Here are some links if you are interested in creating, renewing, or changing a paid subscription:
I am resharing this post for two reasons: I have figured out what was preventing me from sending emails directly from my web domain www.notalegalrecord.net; and I am including the link to Judge Richard Doman's judgment, which you can copy and paste. My newsletter platform inserts so-called "query parameters" (into the links I embed in my posts. Usually they cause no trouble; but with the UK Family Court webpage, the addition of those parameters breaks the link. Technical note: you can always copy the first part of the link, which comes before the question mark, and paste it into a browser window. But my goal is to figure out how to eliminate the query parameters so you don't need to bother. Thank you!
People who come across my posts on adoption often ask me what the alternative should be. There is the constructive version of this question: If the sociolegal practice of adoption were somehow abolished, what should replace it? And there is the hostile version: Would you have infants tossed in dumpsters, or languish in orphanages, or suffer some other horrific fate?
When the hostility is not tactical—misrepresenting my position to cast me in a morally ugly light—it might rest on a misunderstanding. When I talk about adoption, I am talking about a historically specific set of legal, social, and economic practices, pioneered in the United States and widely emulated in other European and Anglophone countries. When I criticize adoption, when I imagine abolishing adoption, I mean this set of practices. I do not mean all forms of long-term custodial care for a child outside their immediate family. "Adoption will always be with us"—yes, in this latter, broad sense. Of course it will. But adoption in the specific form I am concerned with did not exist before the early decades of the 20th century; to say that this will "always be with us" is to ignore the contingency of history. I think of Ursula K. Le Guin's remark about resisting the despair of thinking historical forces are immutable:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
Our official understanding of the purpose of separating families is that, regrettable though it may be, it is sometimes necessary for protecting children in parlous circumstances. Indeed, on the official understanding, the best interests of the child are paramount, taking priority over all else. This is codified in the UK Adoption and Children Act 2002:
I just encountered another rocky patch on the journey to independence from Substack. Some of you who pay for your subscriptions might have noticed a payment going out to "corsent.substack.com".
This is not a payment to Substack.
You are seeing this because I set up my Stripe account when I enabled paid subscriptions on Substack, and Stripe gave my account the name "corsent.substack.com" by default. It's purely an identifier, and I can change it. I should have changed it weeks ago! And now I have. Future payments will appear on your statements as "This Is Not A Legal Record."
Adoption has begun to exert a gravitational force in my thinking, bending my mind toward it at surprising moments. I have been thinking lately about our uncritical tendency to accept the idea that ChatGPT, and other chatbots powered by Large Language Models, embody an artificial form of reason, however imperfectly. It's now commonplace to observe that chatbots "hallucinate" facts, events, and things in their answers to the prompts we give them. Earlier this year I asked ChatGPT to tell me about the route that the Middlesex Canal took through the town of Winchester, Massachusetts, where I work. This canal, which ran from Lowell southeast to Boston, predated the Erie, and in some ways served as its more famous successor's model. ChatGPT told a story about the canal that incorporated truths and wild falsehoods in roughly equal measure. My favorite fabulist touch was its mention of a very particular style of truss bridge, which it alleged had been built over a particular river in town and is now listed in the Register of Historic Places. But there was never any such bridge over the river, and there was never any such river in Winchester.
I heard a linguist on public radio remark that some AI researchers object to describing these fabrications as "hallucinations," because to do so is already to grant a kind of sentience to the models that generate them. But these models are obviously not sentient. They are extremely computationally intensive text-prediction machines. Yet we love to be dazzled and fooled. The early pronouncements from software engineers and tech journalists that LLMs are "alive" already look as naive as the screams of terror from early cinemagoers at the looming locomotive seemingly about to barrel out of the screen.
Not only are LLMs not sentient; they handle language in as unmindlike a manner as one can imagine. To produce languagelike strings, ChatGPT was trained on nearly 600 gigabytes of text data--orders of magnitude larger than the corpus to which any human language learner is exposed. We master language on a much slimmer diet of words, and we do something no machine-learning model can do, now (or, I believe, ever): use language creatively. We produce language that is appropriate to never-before-encountered contexts and independent from direct stimulus control. Noam Chomsky called this "the creative aspect of language use" over 60 years ago, and it remains out of reach of what we call Artificial Intelligence.
Chomsky is making the same point still. In an op-ed published in March 2023 he noted that human minds, unlike LLMs, can, "by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make 'infinite use of finite means,' creating ideas and theories with universal reach." The key to understanding human language, Chomsky believed 70 years ago and still believes today, is identifying and describing the "finite means" by which we produce and understand language in its boundless uses--what he once called Universal Grammar. And Chomsky credits Humboldt, a German polymath and explorer who died in 1846, with the germ of this idea.
Substack’s leadership has made clear that they are happy to allow Nazis to use the Substack platform to coordinate and monetize their hate campaigns. Here is Hamish McKenzie’s justification. Here is Chris Best’s justification. They rest their position on the view that to deplatform Nazis from Substack is to practice censorship. This is simply a confusion.
Substack censors no one by refusing to provide a platform for hate speech. Governments censor speech. Substack is not a government branch, agency, or tribunal; it does not wield the power of the state to suppress speech. Its decisions do not carry the force of law; in banning hate speech it violates no law. The First Amendment prohibits government abridgment of speech. By invoking the notion of censorship, Substack’s leaders show a grossly inflated sense of their own importance. They are feckless, cowardly, and greedy. At best.
I have struggled for a while with remaining on Substack. I have felt duty-bound to honor your commitments to me with a commitment to you. But the situation is now untenable: we see clearly what this platform’s leadership believes, and because I can continue my work elsewhere, I will.
Kim’s tactic is familiar in pro-adoption circles: accuse critics of adoption of trafficking in dangerous “bioessentialist” prejudices about the sacredness of shared DNA. I confronted one particularly odious specimen of this tactic, meeting its vituperation with venom of my own, here:
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I’m breaking from my newsletter’s normal focus to share an open letter to the leadership of Substack about its Nazi problem.
Early this year, a reader pledged to pay a subscription to my newsletter if I would authorize payments. I decided to do so, although I will never limit any of my content to paying subscribers. I am grateful to all those who have decided to support my work in this way. I have always intended this newsletter to be a place where I can work out my jumbled overabundance of thoughts about my adoption, and about adoption generally, and (I hope) thereby provide something of use or comfort to other adoptees who, like me, see something deeply morally rotten at the core of this practice everyone is conditioned to celebrate.
For me, the core of adoptee rights and justice is the right to oneself—to one’s identity. I construe this broadly enough to include one’s history: knowledge of one’s familial connections, original culture and community, and (literally life-or-death for many of us), health history. And in recent posts I have explored the connections between the struggle for adoptees’ identities and the struggles of marginalized groups including children and gender nonconforming people.
Therefore, like many other Substack writers, I am alarmed at the popularity of extreme right-wing content on this platform. (Richard Spencer is a Substacker.) I am dismayed at the fact that those of you who are paid subscribers are, in effect, subsidizing the efforts of those who use Substack to coordinate campaigns of hatred. I do not want to pull up stakes—at least, not quite yet. And so I am a signatory to an open letter to the leadership of Substack, demanding an answer to the question: Should Nazis have a home on Substack? If Substack employs any content moderation policies at all, how are they deployed against Nazis? Why is the platform itself willing to promote writers with a documented history of hate speech?
In 2021 the Oxford historian Faisal Devji published an essay, “The Childhood of Politics,” which opens this way:
Children, along with the mentally ill and prisoners in countries like the United States, are the only category of citizens disallowed from having a say in their own futures. That is to say, they are denied access to politics as a practice devoted by definition to making the future.
We keep children out of political life for the same reasons that so-called democracies have kept women and enslaved people and formerly enslaved people and prisoners out of political life. These reasons include “their congenital immaturity, ignorance, dependence on others, vulnerability to outside influence, and inability to own or control property.” But children pose a special problem for politics (and, I would say, the idea of democracy), if politics is about directing our collective effort towards making the future. That is because children “cannot consent to making the very future they are meant to represent.”
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New York Times opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen recently wrote about the backlash against the growing acceptance of diverse gender identities, and about abetting children’s wishes to transition away from the gender assigned them at birth. (Here is a gift link.) At the center of these conflicts is the question of what is real and what we know about our own gender identities. How can a child justify their claim that their real or true gender identity does not conform to that assigned to them? Indeed, how can anyone?
Polgreen generalizes the question, and it is her answer that I want to dwell on.
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How do we know who we are? This may seem like a profound, philosophical question. The exhortation to know yourself is, after all, one of the most famous and ancient utterances in Western civilization. But it is also an interesting question to ask yourself in a more literal sense. Because what we discover, if we are really honest with ourselves, is that most of the time we know who we are because someone told us.
Our family forms outpace our language.—Judy Osborne, Wisdom for Separated Parents1
When I was preparing for a career teaching and studying philosophy, I was preoccupied with meaning. I wanted to understand how the meanings of words are related to their use. I was guided by the conviction that words do not contain instructions for their application in new circumstances. All sorts of factors mediate the connection between a word’s meaning and the ways we apply it: history, social expectations, our conversation partner’s background knowledge. And meanings are not neutral. When we are debating things that matter deeply to us, and we seem to disagree about what should be said, it isn’t always enough to point out that you and I are using a given word in different senses—even if we are. That meaning is both unstable and contested is familiar to any adoptee who has been told who counts as “real family.”
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Adoptees hear that their “real” family consists of the people who chose them, who love them, who raised them. The first time I spoke with my adoptive father about my reunion with my birth mother—years before he met anyone in her family—I casually referred to her as “my mom,” which evoked a shocked reply: “I never thought I’d hear you use that word for anyone but [adoptive mother].” If it were simply a matter of disambiguation, I might have assured him that I was only using “mom” in the sense of “birth mom.” But this would not have helped. Kin words like “mother” and “father” carry emotionally freighted associations that outstrip their meaning in a more narrowly referential sense—even if those words have multiple distinct referential senses, as “mom” clearly does. When the context calls for it, I disambiguate with the phrases “adoptive mom” and “birth mom.” But with adoptive parents like mine, the word “mom” functions as a trophy, or at least an honorific. My adoptive father saw it as a word my adoptive mother was entitled to. Maybe it was by divine dispensation, maybe by dint of her having spent so many years raising me. Probably both.
Betty Jean Lifton, one of our most psychologically penetrating writers on adoption, believed in ghosts. Not “respectable” ghosts, perhaps, who are “unambiguously dead,” but the ghosts that haunt everyone in the so-called “adoption triad:”
These ghosts spring from the depths of the unresolved grief, loss, and trauma that everyone has experienced. They represent the lost babies, the parents who lost them, and the parents who found them. Too dangerous to be allowed into consciousness, they are consigned to a spectral place I call the Ghost Kingdom. Search and reunion is an attempt by adoptees to reconnect with the ghost mother and father, and live the alternate life.1
When I first read Lifton’s writing on the Ghost Kingdom, I wanted to embrace the concept, but I was wary. In childhood and adolescence I did not wish for my biological parents’ return. I did not want—or permit myself to want—to know them. Being raised in a Catholic family that embraced petitionary prayer to Jesus, Mary, and the saints, I was not above praying for things I thought my heart yearned for. I prayed for a particular girl to like me, for example. (She never did.) I did not pray to make the Ghost Kingdom real.
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I write about adoption because, having lived the first half of my life without the language to describe it, I now seek adequate words for it. That is my project. But the project is by its nature incompletable, because being adopted is the first fact, the primal fact, about who I am, and self-understanding is never final. And because adoption is, by its nature, absurd.
I write often about those aspects of adoption that are deprivations—loss of original family, loss of original culture and language, loss of history. But there is a pitfall. Whenever adoptees write about what they have lost through adoption, the common reaction is to remind them of what they have gained. This is natural, given that in Western countries people are acculturated into regarding adoption as an act of beneficence—of rescue from circumstances objectively worse. Hence “It’s better than growing up in an orphanage,” among other typical rejoinders. I wrote recently about how difficult it can be make confident comparisons between an adoptee’s actual circumstances and counterfactual circumstances. But since parents who have relinquished their infant children typically did so under constraint of severe hardship, I do not generally challenge the assumption that adoption has historically left many adoptees better off. (I am here leaving aside the question whether it is possible to help pregnant people in crisis overcome those often temporary hardships.)
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My writing is primarily about the problems adoption creates for adoptees, the problems that are intrinsic to adoption when practiced as a nonbiological means of creating nuclear families, as it has been since its creation in its modern form 90 years ago. Hence my interest in loss of original family, culture, language, history. And hence the pitfall. Surely the losses are far smaller than the gains of being adopted! Don’t a loving family and a safe household (assuming that the adoptee has these) greatly outweigh the losses?
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.)
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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.
I write this the night before my annual hike to the summit of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, reputed to be the world’s most climbed mountain after Mount Fuji. There are a few posts I wish to write: one a set of reflections on my recent meeting with cousins on my biological father’s side (my first face-to-face contact with anyone in his line); and another on how, when adoption makes news, the automatic empathy extended to adoptive parents overwhelms all else, silencing adoptees and birthparents.
I was expecting to tackle at least one of these projects this weekend, but a convergence of circumstances favored something else: a trip to the top of my favorite mountain in New England, alone with my binoculars, my portable shortwave radio, my notebook, and my thoughts.
There is a hanging file folder in my desk drawer that holds both my birth certificates.
I file them together because together they embody the upside-down pairing of two contrasts: the one that records the actual facts is legally null, and the one that ordains fictitious facts is legally binding.
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I learned my biological father’s name from my birth mother. She mentioned it in the first words I’d ever received from her, an email she sent shortly after her brother and sisters told her, during a Christmastime dinner, that I had found her. I had received a copy of my original birth certificate two months earlier. Her name appears, typewritten, in the blank labeled “mother;” there is also her signature in a lovely, loopy cursive. That signature was the stone that shattered the 40-year-old glass house that was my family as everyone had defined it for me.
Nothing appears in the blank labeled “father.”
I had his name, and for eight years I did almost nothing with it. I found his Facebook page. I compared a few recent photos—in a golf shirt and baseball cap with his wife, in a tux at my half-brother’s wedding—with the ones of his teenage self that I had scraped from his high school yearbooks. In none of them did I easily see either of us in the other.
Last night I started putting questions about the ethics of adoption to ChatGPT. I want to use my next few posts to talk about what we can learn from this.
First, a word about my interlocutor. ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), a neural net trained on a staggeringly huge corpus of text (570 gigabytes, or 300 billion words) to carry out string prediction, that is, to predict the likelihood of the occurrence of the next linguistic expression given the preceding linguistic context. Think of autocomplete with godlike powers. After all, 300 billion is a reasonable estimate of the number of stars in the Milky Way. The human brain contains a mere 86 billion neurons, give or take. One estimate of the number of word tokens (particular occurrences of words, in speech or writing) that an adult hears or reads in a year is roughly 12 million. This is an utterly miniscule fraction of the size of ChatGPT’s corpus. Whatever the sense in which ChatGPT “knows English,” it knows it in a humanly impossible way.
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I don’t believe ChatGPT knows English, because I don’t believe knowing a language consists in, or is reducible to, or even capable of perfect (undetectable) simulation as, statistical prediction of syntactic tokens on the basis of the patterning of syntactic tokens previously encountered. Knowledge of word patterns is not knowledge of meaning. (The linguist Emily Bender has ably defended this view here and elsewhere.)
About a month ago, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) entered into the politics of kinship language when at a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, she questioned the credentials of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who had advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on school closures and other public-safety efforts.
At the hearing, Weingarten described herself as a “mother by marriage” (having married a woman with children from a prior marriage), thereby failing Greene’s test of motherhood, which requires being a biological parent.
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If things go as I intend, my birth mother will receive a lavish bouquet from her local florist this afternoon. If instead things had gone as everyone else had intended, my birth mother would have gotten nothing, because I would not have known her name, or her home address, or whether she was alive or dead.
Mother’s Day is an occasion for breakfast in bed, a vase of flowers, brunch with mimosas. It is also an occasion to teach and reinforce a doctrine. It celebrates mothers who mother.
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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.
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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.
An uncompromising statement: I am opposed to adoption because adoption is opposed to the truth.
I need to qualify this. I am opposed to the dominant idea of adoption in our society, and in other Western societies, which is that adoption is a nonbiological means of building families with children who have been severed from their parentage. It is the idea I oppose. I do not oppose all adoptions, or even all adoptions carried out under this dominant idea. I do not oppose my own adoption—which is to say that I believe neither that I should not have been born, nor that my mother should not have relinquished me, nor that the people who subsequently called themselves, with legal sanction, “my parents,” should not have been able to do so. Opposition to the dominant idea of adoption is consistent with all of this. Different adopted people who, like me, oppose the dominant idea of adoption hold different views about their own adoptions. Some believe they should have not been born, i.e., that their parents should have had the option to terminate their pregnancies or, if they had the option, should have taken it. Others believe that their parents should not have relinquished them—either that they should have had the support necessary to keep their child, or that (assuming they actually did have the necessary support) they should have used it. Still others believe that the people who ultimately, by legal sanction, started calling themselves their parents should never have done so. These are all reasonable views to take, and every adopted person’s life is different. I oppose the dominant idea of adoption without opposing my own adoption.
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But I do regret and criticize the way my adoptive parents—which is to say, the way they and the panoply1 of social workers, physicians, legislators, lawyers, priests, and admiring civilian onlookers—understood what happened when the decree of adoption lowered the veil of mutual secrecy between my birth mother and my adoptive parents—and between her and me. Despite my Catholic upbringing, I do not believe in miracles of transubstantiation. No intoning of words or signing of papers or, indeed, a lifetime of attentive and loving care, has the power to make or unmake kinship relations.
I have said that adopted people owe no one gratitude for their adoptions. I’m going to explain this thought by linking it to the idea in my previous post that adoption creates an absurd reality that resists our efforts to make sense of it.
Jonathan Lear, whose work I cited in that post, is interested in the place of gratitude in ethical and social life. In “Gratitude and Meaning” he discusses Aristotle’s analysis of gratitude, which goes roughly like this. When you are grateful, you recognize that someone has performed a no-strings-attached act of kindness, with nothing further required from you in return. It is a genuine act of kindness (kharis in Greek), and not something done with the expectation of repayment or reciprocation. It is not transactional: a favor bestowed is not part of an exchange in a “gift economy,” although actions like it, and the feelings of gratitude they elicit, are important elements of a functioning social order, as Aristotle understands it. And yet we sometimes use the phrase “debt of gratitude.” Why?
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I want to state this as plainly and neutrally as possible, with no polemical intention: Adoption is absurd.
When I call adoption absurd, I am not calling it wrong. Nor am I calling every form or instance of adoption absurd. My core case of adoption—the example that all of my writing on adoption assumes by default, unless I specify otherwise—is the plenary adoption of an infant or small child, where “plenary” means the total legal severance of that child from their biological parents and the transfer of legal custody to other adults, newly deemed their parents. This case encompasses both intercountry and domestic adoptions, and, given that the subject of the adoption is assumed to be very young at the time of severance, it assumes that that person exercises no agency over their severance or adoption.
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Adoption, described to that extent, does not sound absurd. For if “parent of” and “child of,” as described, are legal statuses, then plenary adoption is the splitting of the biological or “natural” statuses of parent and child from their legal or “conventional” counterparts—a splitting that typically does not happen to “kept children,” but could “in principle” happen to them, as often happens not only to babies but to older children whose parents’ legal rights are terminated through the operations of what I join with others in calling the United States’ Family Policing System.1 Severance may be necessary in some cases, cruel in (many) others; but in what sense is adoption, which presupposes severance, absurd?
I picture my relationship to my childhood memories as something like the view, from an airplane at 30,000 feet, of cloud cover far below. Most of the landscape is hidden behind a gray blankness, save what I can glimpse through the occasional hole. Last night I caught such a glimpse when I suddenly remembered that Greg Louganis, decorated Olympic diver and household name in 1980s USA, was adopted as an infant, and that my adoptive parents extolled him as a role model for me. I Googled his name and found a 2017 article on People.com, from which I learned the story of his reunion with his biological father and, in time, with more of his original family.
Greg Louganis and his biological father, Fouvale Lutu, in 2017
This set off a rush of memories I hadn’t revisited in forty years, and with them, a tumble of startlingly intense emotions. I realized I had resented Greg Louganis as a child. I remembered that I felt mild, malicious satisfaction at the news that he had sustained a concussion at the 1988 Seoul Games. As a child and then adolescent I did not theorize these feelings, and I now know why. To theorize them—to understand that my resentment was grounded not in Greg Louganis the person but in my parents’ tokenizing of him as what adoptees can achieve—I would have needed to be able to theorize my own resentment of my parents. And to do that, I would have needed to be able to theorize my adoption in terms that separated myself, and my questions and needs as an adoptee, from my parents, and their motives and needs as adopters. Like other people adopted in my time and circumstances, I had nothing in my emotional and social lifeworld to nurture that ability, and plenty to suppress it.
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Why, though, is it “remarkably obnoxious?” Or rather, what did I mean in calling it that? It isn’t unanswerable. Every adopted person who searches for their biological parents could answer it. Here is my answer: I decided I needed to learn the identities of my biological parents because, after being diagnosed with cancer and, soon thereafter, becoming the father of two children, I realized that I was no longer content with telling doctors that I knew nothing about my medical history. Moreover, having studied and taught philosophy for two decades, I had the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics rolling about in my head: “All men by nature desire to know.” (The second sentence, “But cats are better off without curiosity,” is regarded by most scholars as spurious.) I still attached the tag forbidden to this particular piece of knowledge, but I decided, somewhat in the manner of Huckleberry Finn, that if I was courting damnation to do this thing, then so be it, let me be damned.
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“Speak your truth” is good advice. Tell your story. Show due respect, of course, for others’ feelings, and for their privacy. But claim ownership over your story. People whose lives begin with severance and secrecy especially need to hear this advice, because what secrecy in adoption does is to make one’s story into contested property, where truthseeking, not to mention truth speaking, can be received as betrayal.
But what value does speaking truth have, beyond the personal value of empowering the speaker of that truth? Not that this is trivial; not at all. The nearly universal expectation is that adopted people are grateful for their adoption—grateful to their adoptive families, grateful for a system that rescues infants and children from perilous circumstances, from abusive homes, from orphanhood. That expectation imputes a form of dependence to adopted people: that of being beholden to their adopters, and to the system that placed them in their adopters’ families. It rings odd in many ears to say that people should be grateful to their parents for begetting them. But the expectation that adoptees are—should be—grateful to their adopters for adopting them is part of the common conception of adoption. Given this, speaking one’s truth about one’s life as an adopted person is an act of self-emancipation.
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There is a risk in framing one’s convictions through first-person narrative, which is that everything one attempts to convey becomes tagged with the qualifier “This is (just) my experience.” If this is my truth, then what do we do if your truth is altogether different? If I give testimony to the costs of adoption for me, then what if your testimony is, “My adoption did not cost me any of those things?” Consider this exchange, and notice how the Red Circle is attempting to rebut the others:
I joke that when I brought my adoptive father and two of my birth mother’s siblings together at my wedding last week, I was the evil mastermind bending them to my will. There is truth in this. But now, nearly one week on, I’m trying to understand how much, or little, I have achieved.
I invited my adoptive father, my birth mother, her brother, and two of her sisters to my wedding. Two of the siblings, including my birth mother, were unable to attend. I told the other two that they would likely be meeting my adoptive father. I dithered over telling—warning?—my father about the presence of my biological relatives. I waited until the day he flew into town. After dinner with my fiancée and our children, as I was driving him to his hotel, I said that he would be meeting many new people, including two of my biological relatives. He repeated the phrase quizzically. “Biological relatives?” It was as if he didn’t understand the words. I briefly recapitulated the story of my search and reunion, although I didn’t say that I “reunited with” my birth mother; I said I “met” her. My father is approaching eighty years. I am approaching fifty. Talking with him, I still shrink from suiting my words to my thoughts.
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He took a beat, then said, “I’m glad they chose to stay in your life, son.”
Some philosophers believe there is a duty to adopt.1 They believe that people have a duty to adopt “children in need of parents” rather than to create children. They believe that there are many such children in the world, and that it should be easier to adopt them than it currently is; and they believe that the reasons people have for wanting to produce their own offspring rather than raise others’ offspring are, from a moral standpoint, shallow.2 There are no reasons, they believe, for preferring to raise offspring one has produced that can outweigh the moral reasons for adopting and raising existing children “in need of parents.”
No longer a philosophy professor, I feel free to write about these writings from a different posture, one more authentic if less “detached.” I write not as someone who finds the issues interesting, but as someone who experienced what is being theorized about. I find these writings upsetting to read. I believe many others who, like me, were relinquished and adopted in infancy would find them upsetting too. Abstraction is the philosopher’s tool. Let’s idealize away from the endless complexity of life as it is lived so that we can get a clearer view of the central issues.
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And so we ask, for example, what we can learn about the ethics of doing vs. allowing by looking at Trolley Problems (wait, who tied these people up? why? how did it come to such a desperate pass?). Or this:
“A child’s parents are those who raise them.” That will sound like basic wisdom to some people, but it sets me off.
The reason it sets me off is the context in which I typically see it stated: as a rebuttal to people who criticize the extreme nature of plenary infant adoption, which involves the legal erasure and concealment of the child’s original genealogical identity—as through the practice of issuing an “amended” birth certificate naming the child’s adoptive parents. Those of us who, like me, question the need for so drastic a measure in the transferral of parental rights, often point to the way it serves a particular idea of adoption: the creation or augmentation of a family by legal and nonbiological means. Genealogical erasure and concealment aid in inflating this idea into a fantasy, in which the child’s pre-adoption history itself is excised from biographical reality, and the child is “as if born” to their adoptive parents.
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To those who have adopted or are considering adoption, and who are reading this in a spirit of curiosity: Welcome, and thank you. I do not write to attack adoptive parents, nor do I counsel people not to adopt. I do not condemn the motives to adopt. My hope is that adoption will become ever more rare, because I hope for a just world in which families are not broken and ruined. My hope is that people who choose to participate in adoption will understand that, as much as they might wish to view themselves as helping to heal a damaged world, they also benefit from that damage. Adopting a child is not primarily an act of social beneficence; it is the undertaking of a set of social responsibilities.
My thinking generally centers on the kind of adoption of which I am a product, in which someone relinquishes an infant or very young child from one kin group and into another, unrelated group, legally severing them from their family of origin. I am not thinking primarily of kinship adoptions, or adoptions from foster care, in which the family of origin is known, and in which (in some cases at least) the adopted person may even exercise some degree of agency or consent. I speak from the experience of someone adopted domestically, in a closed proceedings mediated by a religiously affiliated agency, out of one white family and into another. I do not speak for those adopted from outside the United States, or across races. I speak as a person raised in accordance with an idea of infant adoption as childbirth by other means: a resetting of my biography to exclude everything that happened before my adoption, save the date of my birth. The strength of this idea, its cultural power, is revealed in the way even I still flinch at thinking or writing the obvious truth: to be an adoptive parent is to raise someone else’s child.
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I do not trust much in my own wisdom, and I am reluctant to give advice. But I do advise actual and prospective adoptive parents, even implore them, to reject this idea of adoption. Infant adoption is not childbirth by other means. The decision to relinquish an infant for adoption is not a reproductive decision; it is a decision to forgo parental rights and duties over one’s child, for whom the reproductive decision was already made. Cultural attitudes about infant adoption in the United States, Canada, and other “receiving” countries obfuscate these facts. The attractiveness of adoption partly depends on obfuscating these facts.
Today, eight years and five months after I met my birth mother and her siblings in person, I am filling out a registration form with the International Soundex Reunion Registry, or ISRR. It is an almost purely symbolic performance. I am formally announcing my desire, which I may or may not already have consummated, to find and be found.
My adoptive mother died in February of 1995, two months before my twenty-first birthday. She missed my wedding a year and three months later, but she met the woman I married. She also missed my acceptance to graduate school, and my move to New England three months after my wedding. She missed my move to New York City, and my cancer diagnosis, and the birth of my first child, and my return to New England, and the birth of my second child, and my divorce, and my meeting my new partner, whom I will marry two months from now. When she died I was a college junior, immersed in scholarship, learning about the philosophy of language and Plato and modal logic and epistemology, formally enrolling in graduate seminars and studying Latin and Attic Greek. One month after she died I traveled to Boston and I presented a paper at the New England Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at Tufts University. At the age of twenty and ten months I was cocksure, almost wholly neglectful of my friendships, and rightly convinced I was bound for a Ph.D. at a prestigious school, and equally but wrongly convinced I was bound thereafter for a career as a professor.
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My adoptive mother died eighteen years and eleven months before I saw my birth mother in person for the first time since I was a days-old infant. When I began to think, for the second time, about searching for my biological parents, I was no longer cocksure. My last adjunct academic appointment, at Boston University, had ended two years earlier. Friends in academia put in a good word for me when I applied for a miscellany of jobs in department administration and academic advising. None went anywhere. I spent most of my days looking after my children, preparing meals, brewing beer, and wondering how I seemed to have so fully squandered my talents and my opportunities and allowed my youthful friendships to wither. I was no longer cocksure. Self-pity was my new enemy.
The phrase “domestic supply of infants”1 shocked people when it appeared in a footnote to the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In another post I dwelt on the irony of professing outrage over this phrase, given the widespread and socially accepted demand for infants to adopt. In this post I take a different stance. Instead of denouncing hypocrisy, I want to ask why different ways of describing the reality of adoption appear to evoke different responses from people who devote far less attention to adoption than I do.
Rhetorical differences are important, even where the underlying idea is the same. Compare “The supply of adoptable infants is insufficient to meet demand” with “There are more hopeful adoptive parents than there are children for them to adopt.” The uproar over “domestic supply of infants” suggests that even though these two statements express the same state of affairs, they evoke strongly different, even diametrically opposed, emotional responses. The second is much more likely to prompt sympathy, perhaps even in many of those also inclined toward revulsion at the first.
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Another way our choice of language can operate on the emotions is by abstraction versus specificity. Compare “I want a child” with “I want that child,” or “I want someone else’s child.” To describe a person as wanting a child is to locate them in a familiar and generally sympathetic human context. To describe them more specifically as wanting a particular child, or even as wanting some child or other that is someone else’s, will likely elicit a different response.
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.”
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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.)
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion has been completely overturned by justices who, when asked about Roe in their confirmation hearings, professed deep respect for the principle of stare decisis (stand by things decided). Unlike prior reversals of Court precedent, this one eliminates individual rights rather than expanding them.1
The result is a catastrophe for women, for anyone who might seek the medical care abortion provides. It fetters them. It will upend their lives, make them deeply unfree. They will be bound against their will into enacting the state’s conception of an individual life. Thus, many will be forced into radically different lives from the lives they wanted to live. Because abortion, as a medical procedure conducted by professionals, saves lives, many people will die. Some will be murdered (because men will kill partners carrying their offspring). And children will be born against their parents’ will.
I was not born against my mother’s will. (I do not know, and may never know, what was my father’s will.) I can’t speculate what my mother’s will was in relinquishing me to a Catholic adoption agency. I do know that she lacked the resources and support necessary to raise me. In consequence of an event for which she cannot be held to blame—she was impregnated; she did not impregnate herself2—she handed away to that agency her first and only child, whom she never for a single day failed to think of, whom she searched for with no success, who found her and learned her story and that of thousands of others who relinquished their children because they had no other choice, enduring a lifelong anguish that religious conservatives in the United States are, right now, jubilant about seeing inflicted, again, nearly fifty years after the United States Supreme Court said this is not consistent with our ideals and it is not consistent with our grounding law.
To realize God’s Heaven on Earth we must force births. To realize God’s Heaven we must think of the millions of childless couples who will have a chance to call their own the babies so forced into existence. And to realize God’s Heaven we must mount “a massive national marketing campaign to elevate the sacrificial love and benefit for heroic women and girls who choose adoption.”
In October 2021 Real Life, an online magazine about “living with technology,” published “The Parent Trap: How DNA Testing Complicates the Queer Family,” which begins by noting the appearance, within LGBTQ+ parenting groups, of Severance Magazine. Severancecalls itself “a magazine and community for people who’ve been separated from their biological family,” a broad category that includes those who have been adopted, fostered, trafficked, conceived through reproductive technologies like surrogacy and gamete donation, and born through misattributed paternity. There is great diversity of experience both within the broad category of the biologically (or genealogically) severed, and within each of those subcategories. Nevertheless, Severance is devoted to the idea that within this diversity there is sufficient commonality of shared experience to warrant creating a safe and inclusive space for reflection, discussion, community building, and advocacy.
Alexandra Kimball and Tamara Lea Spira, authors of “The Parent Trap,” will have none of it:
The fact that Severance could try to group“people who have been separated from biological family” all together, as if the experience of being raised apart from a genetic relative trumped all the other circumstances, speaks to the rising power of genetic discourse in our culture and the idea that the “genetic family,” measured by DNA, is the norm against which all forms of family should be judged.
Severance’s mission statement, in fact, nowhere commits itself to the proposition that biological severance “trump[s] all the other circumstances,” nor does it employ the phrase “genetic family,” allegedly “the norm against which all forms of family should be judged.” Indeed, Kimball and Spira’s enclosure of “genetic family” in quotation marks disingenuously implies that Severance does use this phrase.
In talking about adoption online, I am repeatedly reminded that many people find it unintuitive to criticize infant adoption by strangers simply because it creates genealogical bewilderment. Or, to qualify a bit, people can understand what is bad about what we might call “medical bewilderment:” the loss of family health history, which can inform everything from life habit formation to the decision to undergo early screening for cancers and chronic health conditions. Family health histories can inform the decision to bear children. And of course, those offspring inherit medical bewilderment from their medically bewildered parents. But many people believe that even the disadvantages of medical bewilderment are offset by the boons of removing children from their original families, beset by whatever crises, and placing them in “loving” and materially better circumstanced households. (Never mind that this type of accounting presumes that the advantages of the latter must come at the cost of genealogical bewilderment.)
Beyond medical bewilderment, however, the idea of genealogical bewilderment spawns—well, bewilderment. Countering this is a large task I keep returning to in these posts. This time I want to look at one way skepticism about the harm of genealogical bewilderment finds expression: in the idea that one’s biological parents—mere contributors of the germplasm for one’s formation—aren’t “true” parents at all. I am critical of this attitude, but in a curious way, I find that I agree with an idea that underlies it: the idea that parenthood morally demands some degree of social connection to one’s offspring.
I have listened to advocates of ending secrecy in the fertility industry: those who argue that anonymity in gamete “donation” (typically, the selling of gametes to cryobanks) is unethical. And I am especially interested in the critiques made by donor-conceived people, many of whom have known since early childhood that they were conceived that way, while others came to the knowledge much later, either through an announcement from their families or through the use of genetic genealogy companies like Ancestry and 23andMe. The industry they are criticizing eschews calling gamete donors “parents,” preferring to frame donation as selfless, and maybe a little heroic—playing up a comparison with donating blood or bone marrow or organs. The problem with these comparisons is that assisted reproduction with donated gametes is not a curative intervention. And assisted reproduction with anonymously donated gametes has the unique feature, relative to the other types of cell, tissue, and organ donation, of producing a human being. And that human being is genealogically bewildered.
To be genealogically bewildered is not to know who one’s parents are. This is not sentimentalism; it is how we talk about the continuity of biological life. Think of how biology classes standardly describe Mendel’s experiments with cross-breeding pea plants.
A lesbian couple in Oklahoma married and decided to have a child. One of them conceived with sperm from a “known,” i.e. non-anonymous, donor. Two years later their marriage began to break up. During the divorce proceedings, the judge struck the name of the “non-gestational” parent from the child’s birth certificate, on the grounds that she had never formally adopted the child. In place of her name, the judge said, would go that of the donor. The non-gestational parent is attempting to appeal the case, with likely assistance from the Oklahoma ACLU. Her argument is that the courts have already recognized the right of non-gestational parents in LGBTQ+ families to have their names listed on their children's birth certificates, and to do otherwise is to fail to grant LGBTQ+ couples the same marriage protections granted to straight couples.
Like the child at the center of this battle, I had my parentage legally rewritten. I see that although the child is at the heart of the fight, he is not at the heart of the story, which is told as one about LGBTQ+ marriage and parental rights. My genealogical origin was hidden by a legal decree that redefined my legal family identity. I therefore pause over a fact about battles like the one in Oklahoma that standard accounts generally ignore: that given the birth certificate’s combination of of roles, to determine parental rights over a person entails a determination, or redetermination, of that person’s family identity.
I pause because, as one whose parentage was legally rewritten, I am obsessed with the fact that the legally binding document of my parentage is titled a “Certificate of Live Birth,” despite listing the names of two people with no involvement in my birth. Like others barred access to the original versions of their birth certificates, I see the altered version as a legal fiction and a genealogical lie. To call it a lie is to say that it misrepresents the facts. The fact that it misrepresents is my genealogical origin. But my birth certificate truthfully states a different fact: my adoptive parents’ legally binding parentage. In my case—and in that of the child in Oklahoma—the birth certificate cannot truthfully represent both sets of facts.
What should a birth certificate truthfully record?
I began speaking openly about adoption roughly five years ago. I used Twitter to make connections with others who were also relinquished in infancy and adopted, in closed proceedings, into strangers’ families. I learned of the work of activists devoted to the goal I cared about above all: repealing laws, state by state, that bar adoptees from access to their own birth records. Through dialogue with others who share my history and who also criticize what I call the Regime of Secrecy that has been the paradigm of adoption in the US since the 1940s, I have claimed my adoption as a core part of my identity. And through ongoing dialogue with these adoptees and activists, I have begun to broaden my critique. For example, I have come to the belief that it is not enough to demand the end of secrecy in adoption, but we must challenge, and ultimately abolish, the conception of adoption that is hegemonic in the United States and other industrial nations: that it is a mechanism for creating and augmenting families. People who adopt from a desire to “have a child” will, in general, be motivated to deemphasize the importance of the adoptee’s pre-adoption history, if not erase it entirely. And existing institutional arrangements in most states are explicitly designed for lifetime erasure, as stated by the Indiana Court of Appeals in the case of Bryant v. Kurtz (1963):
What moved me five years ago lives in me still: an intense anger at the total disregard, embodied in the idea of stranger adoption as family creation and lifetime erasure, for the adoptee’s right to share in what every kept person takes for granted: their genealogy, and their knowledge of the people within that genealogy who may be dead “for all legal and practical purposes,” but are in fact not dead at all.
In the years since, my online presence as a critic of adoption in the US has connected me to a much broader range of people, with life histories very different from my own, including:
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.
It appears that liberals and progressives are beginning to perceive a connection between abortion politics and adoption politics. The leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade contains a footnote including the now-notorious phrase: “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted.” Here is a sampling of responses from liberal and progressive Twitter:
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.
I was born in one of the relatively few states in the U.S. that allows adult adoptees born in them to obtain copies of their original birth certificates, with no restrictions or conditions.1 I petitioned that state’s department of vital records for my original birth certificate, and I received it a few weeks later. I could not at the time explain to myself what drove me to do this, beyond my consciousness of an obligation to my two (biological) children to learn whatever I could about my family health history. I had survived testicular cancer six years earlier. Though not a disease that typically recurs in families, it reminded me of the omnipresent possibility of medical surprises. The fact that even today, proponents of adoption and of reproductive technologies like anonymous gamete donation will argue that knowledge of family health history is, all things considered, secondary in moral importance to the value of safeguarding genetic anonymity in creating families through those means, should be amply sufficient to stir outrage even in people who have their family health histories. It should be, but it is not. But that is not my topic in this post.
I opened the envelope, pulled out my original birth certificate, stamped “THIS IS NOT A LEGAL RECORD,” and saw my mother’s name for the first time. My file also contained a few documents pertaining to my subsequent adoption, but there were no records about my family health history. I knew that to learn more, I would need to find her family. But when I saw her signature in her youthful, loopy cursive—a beautiful script, betokening what I later learned about her impressive artistic talent—I knew that I needed more than heath history. I needed to see her, if only in photographs.
Her name, as far as I can tell, is unique. I had a rich set of identifying facts about her after a few minutes of online search. Because her father had died a few months before, I found an obituary, with a full list of kin that comprised her parents, her siblings, and her nieces and nephews. It enabled me to infer the likely place of her upbringing, which made it easy to authenticate the photos I quickly found at Classmates.com.
In 1952 the Journal of Mental Health published a letter from the psychiatrist E. Wellisch under the title “Children without Genealogy—A Problem of Adoption.” It subsequently became known as the first warning, in print, of the danger that “genealogical bewilderment” (not Wellisch’s phrase) poses to the psychological well-being of adoptees. Here is the letter; text reproduced below.
