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:
adoptees of transracial adoption;
adoptees of intercountry adoption;
adoptees of kinship and stepparent adoption;
adoptees who have experienced a “second rejection” after reunion;
adoptees who lack identifying information about their biological parents;
late-discovery adoptees;
parents who have relinquished infants in closed and open adoptions;
parents who have lost children to the foster care system;
former foster youth;
people born through such reproductive technologies as gamete donation and surrogacy.
My dialogues with people in these groups carry such striking overlapping similarities that I recall Wittgenstein’s idea of a “family resemblance” concept, the central concept being that of severance. What all of us in these various groups share is the experience of severance: of the legal, social, and even technological disconnection of parent from offspring. We have experienced the cutting of the genetic tie.
But people who have experienced severance obviously do not all experience the same form of severance, or experience it in the same way. When I voice the demand that states unseal adoptees’ original birth records, I am not speaking to the experience of intercountry adoptees, or of people conceived through gamete donation. When I speak of the genealogical bewilderment had by those adopted in infancy, I am not speaking to the experience of those adopted from foster care, or adopted within their biological families. When I speak of the connection between my genealogy and my identity, I am speaking to the experiences of the severed offspring, not that of the severed parents. And there are obvious limits on how I as a white man can speak to the experience of those adopted transracially.
Add to this the positional differences of race and class and gender and sexual orientation and physical ability, and it is clear that it’s not easy to track how anything I might say as an adoptee who is socially positioned as I am might resonate, or not, with adoptees differently positioned.
Even what I say about the importance of the genetic tie between parent and offspring is open to scrutiny on intersectional grounds. Dorothy Roberts has argued that “blood ties are less significant to the definition of family in the Black community than they traditionally have been for white America:”
… [T]he genetic tie has a different meaning for most Black people than for most whites. Of course, both Black and white individuals desire to produce and raise their own genetically related children. In both groups, this biological bond often forms the basis of a cherished relationship. Nevertheless, shared genetic material seems to be less significant to Black people's identity. This observation does not presume an essential or authentic Black identity. It does presume that Black people in America share a common culture that shapes Black individuals’ view of themselves; they “have a sense of shared past and similar origins” and “believe themselves to be distinctive from others in some significant way.” Black cultural definitions of group and self center less on the genetic tie than white cultural definitions do.
Not only are the statements I make about adoption likely to land differently with people differently situated in relation to severance, but so are the terms I use. Above I referred to the adoptee’s right to share in what every “kept” person takes for granted. But what is implied by calling someone kept? Who is included, and who is not? What do parents who have experienced severance feel about this? What is the implied contrast? Keeping versus abandoning? We know that relinquishment is in overwhelmingly many cases a desperate act, a coerced act. Do those who were fostered, whose parents lost their legal rights through state intervention, count as kept? Or is the term not designed to fit people whose severance took such a different form from mine?
Even what I say in criticism of adoption can imply a restriction of concerns that I don’t actually intend. I have tried to make clear that I oppose adoption under its hegemonic conception as a way to create and augment families for strangers. I have emphasized, along with many other adoptees, that protecting families from severance is much more morally urgent than using severance to build them. But this is by no means preeminently, or even predominantly, an adoption issue at all. Severance is a state tool of disciplining and punishing marginalized communities, employed on a staggering scale against parents of the “kept,” as Dorothy Roberts notes in her recently published Torn Apart:
Termination of parental rights … ends a parent’s physical custody as well as the right to ever communicate with or regain custody of the child. It is the death penalty of the family policing system—the ultimate punishment the family court can impose. The United States extinguishes the legal rights of more parents than any other nation on Earth. As with every aspect of the child welfare system, Black and Native children suffer the most—they are more than twice as likely as white children to experience the termination of both parents’ rights. … Child welfare authorities wield these powers to supervise, reassemble, and destroy families with stunningly little judicial constraint or public scrutiny. Such extreme state intrusion in homes violates well-established principles of US constitutional law that protect us from tyrannical government rule. Such traumatic assaults on people’s most cherished relationships, targeted against vulnerable populations, constitutes torture under international declarations.1
Because the problem of severance takes so many related forms, I am regularly surprised to find that my reflections resonate with people of such different backgrounds, and that their insights enrich my understanding of my own predicament.
I now see my own experience with severance as a small window on a far wider world. I see the analogy between Dorothy Roberts’ description of “the family death penalty” of CPS’s termination of parental rights, and how adoptees like myself are cut from our original family trees and “engrafted” upon new ones. I understand how my genealogical bewilderment mirrors that of someone conceived through gamete donation. I perceive these affinities despite there being little necessarily in common with the woman who loses her child to CPS and the man who learns he has at least three dozen half-siblings by an anonymous biological father. There is no single banner under which all of us affected by severance will rally.
Still, any of us can find strength, possibly even solidarity, both in seeking the commonalities in our experiences and in respecting the differences among them. I think of myself has having been twice defogged: first when I came to understand how the reality of my adoption belied the rosy picture I was taught to embrace, and second when, applying that newfound understanding, I started seeing the varieties of severance as a constellation of societal injustices—a many-headed hydra. It has been the most surprising moral and intellectual awakening of my life.
Torn Apart, p.23