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.)
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?
If this is the right way to assess adoption, then to persist in criticizing adoption can look like sheer stubbornness, if not irrationality. And it may help to explain why so many people find the very idea of criticizing adoption bizarre. The gains seem not only to outweigh the losses, but extremely lopsidedly so.
To counter this impression, I try to show that the losses of adoption are deeper than is commonly understood. In fact, I describe being adopted as an existential predicament, which, in its most radical form—total loss of contact with and knowledge of one’s original through infancy to adulthood—creates a distinct way of being in the world, a distinct identity. There is a lopsidedness to adoption that runs, counterintuitively, in the opposite direction: to satisfy an adoptive parent’s wish to have the same thing that non-adoptive families have, the child must take on an adoptive identity shaped by a set of experiences radically unlike those of a non-adopted child.
The only way to make this case is to write experientially: to write so as to help non-adopted people understand, from their necessarily outside perspective, how being adopted shapes the way an adoptee experiences the world and the self. In what follows I hope to give an illuminating example of how experiential writing can clarify and sharpen a critical analysis of the ethics of anonymizing parentage.
I write often about the importance of the historical knowledge cut off from adoptees: their place in their original families and communities and cultures, and the essential role of this knowledge in forming a person’s identity. I have claimed that the basic historical fact that I am my birth mother’s offspring is part of who I am. To have cut me off from her identity was to cut me off from my own. But I also often emphasize that only adoptees are entitled to decide what counts as their families, their histories. And to maintain both might seem to require thinking about family in two contrasting ways: an “objective” way (biological parentage is part of one’s identity), and a “subjective” way (only I, as an adoptee, get to decide who counts as my parents).
From the standpoint of rights, there is a way to make sense of these different ways of talking about parentage. To lack knowledge of one’s biological parentage is to be deprived of the ability to construct a complete picture of oneself, part of which is deciding whom to call family. Without that knowledge, adoptees lack the materials for making sense of who they are. Another adoptee need not identify with their relationship to their biological families in the same the way I do with mine. But all deserve the opportunity to know who those people are with whom they may or may not choose to identify.
But I recently came to see that saying this is not enough. I saw that even the idea that a historical or genealogical relationship exists between a person and their biological offspring is not universally accepted. I became aware of this in the context of a conversation about anonymous gamete donation. I refer to my biological father as my (biological) father, although it is possible to see his relationship to me as largely analogous to that of a sperm donor to the offspring produced with his gametes. And sperm donors have been known to bristle at the notion that any real historical/genealogical relationship exists between themselves and the multiplicity of children produced with their germ cells. They might reject the very word “parent,” no matter how adjectivally modified; they might see themselves as merely providing medically useful material to anonymous recipients, like a blood or organ donor. It would seem, then, that “the right to know one’s biological parentage” is a prejudicial, or loaded, or question-begging way to describe what donor-conceived people are demanding when they criticize the fertility industry’s reliance on anonymity.
This is where my own critique of closed adoption overlaps with the critique of anonymous donor conception. It is on experiential grounds. For me, the deepest and most formative consequences of being cut off from my family history were that I was cut off from myself, in a phenomenologically distinctive way. Though raised by white parents, I could not pass as one of their own. I looked comically unlike anyone in my adoptive father’s family, with my olive complexion, gangly limbs and my large, straight nose. In my mannerisms, my sensibility, and my aptitudes, I differed. I bonded more readily with people not biologically related to my father’s family, such as in-laws and family friends. Most strikingly, I felt a peculiar unease about my own body. I would stare like a narcissist in the mirror, studying my features, never quite articulating the question that dogged me: “why is any part of me like this?” My body felt borrowed, like a humanoid suit given to an alien sent on a mission with a mysterious purpose.
I now think that this sense of alienation from my nature, reinforced by the way my parents had nothing to offer pediatricians who asked about family health history, was a deep source of my confusion and unhappiness. It fueled an identity crisis that persisted from early childhood and long into my adulthood, generating my ambivalence about relationships that caused me, paradoxically, both to cling desperately to others for validation and to abandon those relationships in the belief that I was rootless, a nonentity traveling through a world I didn’t belong in.
“Rootlessness” is a metaphor for a lack of historical grounding. But for me this sense of disconnection arose not from any yearning for the parents I lost. I did not fantasize about them in the “Ghost Kingdom” that Betty Jean Lifton and other adoptees have written so powerfully about. It arose instead from growing up in a contextless body. Though closed domestic adoptions are now much rarer, comparatively, than at the time of my birth, the anonymization of the genetic relationship that produces contextless bodies remains common in intercountry adoption and donor conception. Anonymization is also the defining characteristic of legalized infant abandonment in so-called safe haven boxes.
It is sometimes noted that anonymous gamete donation embodies a kind of cruel irony: it is designed to enable the very connection to one’s offspring that is denied between that offspring and the other source of their genes. That we do not more easily perceive the irony owes partly, I believe, to our general unawareness that having a contextless body—even partially so, as with donor-conceived offspring—is harmful in its own right.
Almost no one outside the small circles of adoptee- and donor-conceived rights advocacy discusses or acknowledges the idea of a contextless body. (But psychologists and philosophers have noted it: see here and here.) It has as many senses as there are senses of “mirroring:” racial mirroring, cultural mirroring, genetic mirroring. From the more broadly social senses—a body connected to other bodies by shared history, culture, language, ethnicity, race—to the more narrowly individual sense of genetic inheritance and blood connection. All of them are forms of the price adoptees and the donor-conceived pay for embodying the fulfillment of others’ wishes for family. The familiar refrain “Listen to adoptees” means: listen to us, and not only them. But it also means: listen to what only we experience. Be open to hearing about what it is to inhabit a contextless body.