Birth Lies, Kinship Ties

“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.

The fantasy need not be total. My adoptive family celebrated my birthday, a pre-adoptive event. I was not told I was literally born to my adoptive parents. That would have been a lie. Although it is a lie many adopted people are told, as they come to discover later in life, often traumatically. Infant adoption effects, in law, just the erasure of genealogical fact that abets this lie.

My official birth certificate lies about my birth. I have never been deceived by it, because my adoptive parents told me at a very early age that I was adopted. Yet by listing my adoptive parents on my “Certificate of Live Birth,” it falsely represents them as standing in the “birth parent” relation to me. It has always been difficult for me to accept that my birth certificate so brazenly lies to me about this primal fact about myself.

But people who say to critics of plenary infant adoption, “A child’s parents are those who raise them,” aren’t repeating the birth lie. They are making a claim about kinship. They are saying that true parenthood consists in parenting—in doing the work of raising the child, with “love” and “devotion.” This language sometimes looks like special pleading for adoptive parents, painting a flattering picture of people who unselfishly raise a child birthed by someone else as their own, giving them the same love and devotion other parents might not bestow on any but their own flesh and blood. That is why some adopted people will scoff, knowing that adoptive parents don’t always live up to this depiction—particularly those with both adopted and biological children, and those raising a child of a different race from their own.

Sometimes, then, the claim that “a child’s parents are those who raise them” reduces to the legal fact that people not biologically related to the child have parental rights, and attendant parental responsibilities, over that child. So much, then, for any thought that it’s simple to pin down what “true” parenthood really is. Add to this the complex and difficult experiences of difference had by many adopted people. With people adopted transracially, these differences can be impossible to conceal, much less deny. Even with same-race adoptions, the sense of difference is almost inevitable for any adoptee who isn’t abjectly deceived about their parentage. Knowing that I wasn’t their flesh and blood, I was unable to imagine anything about myself as “inherited” from my adoptive family. That bred a sense of alienness that attended—bedeviled—my every imagining about my identity, my abilities, my flaws, and my future.

I was not “one of them”—my adoptive family—in the rich genealogical sense enjoyed by people raised in the families that birthed them, a sense that includes both natural inheritance and ongoing interpersonal contact, including the “love” and “devotion” of nurturance. People who say that “a child’s parents are those who raise them,” and say this as a rebuke to people who insist that genealogy matters, are therefore denying that it matters. These people have likely never studied themselves in a mirror and asked, if only inchoately, “Who gave me this body (and brain)?” and wondered why they aren’t supposed to know.

Am I claiming, then, that it is false to say that “a child’s parents are those who raise them,” in the same way that my birth certificate states a falsehood when it names my adoptive parents? To make that claim is to contradict a principle that I invoke time and again against people who try to invalidate the importance of natural inheritance to our sense of our genealogy and, therefore, of ourselves. That principle is: No one is entitled to dictate to an adopted person how they should use kinship language.

The point can get lost in the endless dialectic between proponents of adoption as a means of creating families and those who criticize that idea of adoption. The debate can seem to polarize people over the question “Who are the adoptee’s real parents?”, with proponents on one side and critics on the other. But part of the reason to affirm the principle that no one but the adoptee gets to decide how to talk about their kinship relations is that many adoptees do, in fact, speak and think of their adoptive parents as their “real” or “true” parents—even when they also affirm the idea that to be an adoptive parent is to raise other people’s children.

Not to get lost in a linguistic thicket, but we should note that part of the problem is that possessive (i.e. genitive) constructions are context-sensitive. When I speak of “my” children, I am speaking of the children I begat and am also raising. When my adoptive mother spoke of her son, she spoke of me, the child she adopted and was raising. When my birth mother speaks of her son, she is speaking of me, the child she bore and relinquished. Thus, although it carries an air of zeugma,1 I can call myself the son of two mothers (the genitive again).

There is no “basic” or “genuine” sense in which one of these is “my” mother and the other is not. This isn’t to be decided by semantic rules. If I choose to call one of them my “real” or “true” or “actual” mother, I am making a judgment about what the kinship term “mother” signifies—for me and me alone. For my part, I don’t make such a judgment, and I use the term “mother” for both. I prefix “birth” or “adoptive” where necessary, to disambiguate.

Still other adopted people choose to withhold kinship terms from both their adoptive and biological families, for reasons that grow out of their specific experiences. This may seem counterintuitive to people who were raised in their biological families and therefore never experienced the fracturing of their biological relationships from their lived family relationships. But I can understand it more easily, because that very fracturing gives rise to the predicament of having to decide whom to call kin, and there are moments when I acutely feel disconnected from both families, part of neither.

Once again, however, not all adopted people feel the same way. Some adoptees feel sufficiently secure in their identification either with their birth families or their adoptive families that they do not share this experience of dislocation. Their sense of security, I think, can sometimes impede their understanding of other adoptees’ unwillingness to make the same firm kind of familial identification.

However different adoptees’ experiences of the fracture may be, the fracture itself—the split between the family of origin and the adoptive family—is a fact. The birth lie is a lie precisely because it fraudulently denies the existence of the fracture. And from the fact of that fracture there arises the predicament: Who will I choose to call my kin? What do my kinship identifications mean to me? Language itself cannot decide it. Other people cannot legislate it. The adoptee exercises sovereign rule. But only over themselves.