Duty to What? Need for What?

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.

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:

Imagine that you have decided to become a parent. You learn that the local fire station, a safe haven, has received a newborn in need of a family. You are aware of the research showing that early infant adoptions pose little risk regarding the infant’s psychological health and potential for emotional attachment. The urgent need for placement and the lack of administrative costs allow for the baby’s adoption with few additional hurdles or financial burdens. You can adopt this child, who will otherwise face a life of uncertainty in various institutions or foster homes. Or you can decline and bring a new child into the world instead. What does morality have to say about the choice in this Safe Haven case? Is there a duty to adopt rather than create a child?3

Philosophical writing works like sleight of hand, drawing your attention in favored directions. The newborn is “in need of a family.” Well, it has one, from which it is being extruded. What are we saying it needs when we say it needs a family? The research shows that “early infant adoptions pose little risk regarding the infant’s psychological health and potential for emotional attachment.” What does this research assume to be the ingredients of “psychological health?” What is meant by “emotional attachment?” Is it acknowledged that adult adoptees talk endlessly about having spent their lives adapting to their circumstances and suppressing their uncomfortable thoughts, their private confusions, their anguish at abandonment and their anger at enforced secrecy, so that they can please, pass, be accepted? There are “few additional hurdles or financial burdens” to adopt this infant. Safe-haven relinquishments are on the rise, but they still represent a miniscule number of adoptions in the United States. Do we want relinquishment and adoption to be this free of “hurdles?” Are there reasons why we might not?

Abstraction to a simplified case, then, shuts down, or at least postpones, questions about how things actually go. We are asked whether the Safe Haven case presents you with a “pro tanto duty to adopt.” But how did that baby get into that box? Why is there a box at the fire station? What if the parent repents of the decision to abandon their child—tomorrow, or in a year or two or three? What if it wasn’t the parent who left it there? Why do the local laws permit child abandonment under these circumstances, and how is it consistent with a child’s right to know their identity, as outlined in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child?4 On the philosopher’s Island of Simple Examples, these questions vanish.

Is that a problem? Not if you think that the Safe Haven case abstracts away from only morally irrelevant detail. But the abstraction at work here is also conceptual. We are given the example and then asked: “Is there a duty to adopt rather than create a child?” It’s an act of conceptual reduction. There is one thing: raising a child. And, we are given to understand, there are two ways of kicking that thing off: creating a child, and adopting a child.

Hold on, now: are these actually two distinct ways of starting one and the same thing? Adoptive parents raise other people’s children.5 That isn’t an idle fact. Not, at least, to adopted children. They have something non-adoptive children don’t: histories that predate the point of their adoptive parents’ involvement. Their futures might, in time, come to reincorporate those pasts, through search and reunion. Their social, cultural, economic, and legal circumstances may permit and enable that search, but also disallow and discourage it.

Why does any of that matter? Because it forces us to consider the claim “You have a duty to adopt” and ask, duty to what?

I remarked about the Safe Haven case that we might wonder what it is we are saying a newborn needs when we say it needs a family. It needs a safe, stable, and nurturing environment in which to grow up. Does it need what non-adopted children have: kinship joined with ancestry? Is the adoptive family a replacement for this? What was I feeling when I stared into my bedroom mirror as a child, feeling bewildered by the body I inhabited because it was clearly made not from the people I knew, but from people I didn’t and might never know? Was I feeling a need?

The possibility opens up of a range of needs that are unique to children severed from their origins. Needs to see things, needs to know things that others never perceived, because their needs are amply met. (Of course the need to know one’s family health history.) When we talk about “a duty to adopt,” are we talking about a duty to create a caretaking arrangement, a family structure, in which these needs are met? Even acknowledged? That wasn’t the structure into which I was placed. And even if closed domestic adoptions are a relative rarity, it isn’t typically the structure into which intercountry infant adoptees are placed either.

Do adopted children need altered birth records? Do their originals need to be sealed from view? Do adoptions need to be non-annullable? Do adopted people need to reassure their adoptive parents “You are my parents, and they are not?” And a big question that gets very little scrutiny from the philosophers who scrutinize the needs of adopted children: What needs do adoptive parents bring to the relationship, and can adoption satisfy them?

Philosophers who believe in a “duty to adopt” dismiss the moral relevance of the “genetic tie” as a basis for preferring to make rather than acquire children to raise. But they go further, doubting the moral importance of the tie for offspring, not just for parents.6 This is an extra step. You could think that I, as someone's offspring, have a legitimate interest in knowing who those “someones” are, even if my parents have no legitimate reason to prefer biologically connected offspring. But these philosophers prefer to locate knowledge of my genetic ancestry as one minor resource among a variety of resources for my self-knowledge. Or they allege that giving importance to genetic ancestry carries dangerous eugenicist implications. This latter claim is confused. Staring in the mirror, I wondered what—whose—body it was I inhabited. I wanted my history, not a genome. And not a set of similarities in appearance and behavior, however strong or weak those might turn out to be. I can't reduce this idea of my inheritance, as offspring, from my begetters to any ahistorical set of phenotypical or genotypical resemblances. I don’t know if God made humankind, but my biological parents did make me. And the degree and nature of my genetic inheritance hardly affects its importance for my self-knowledge. It’s important regardless of how “informative” it is. You can’t tell me that I should stop trying to learn my family health history because it might turn out to predict nothing about my medical future. It’s my story, and you don’t get to tell me to forget about it.

With all the simplifying, smoothing, and pruning that goes into the Safe Haven case, with its mysterious baby that might as well have formed inside that box by a miracle or a quantum anomaly, we are only left with more questions, rather than a clear sense of what our duties are. We have a duty to take care of genetically unrelated children in some way (details pending) and to meet their needs (whichever those are). And we are to do this instead of making children, because there is no moral significance, to parent or child, who is someone’s offspring, in the fact that we are all offspring. In a way it reminds me of the classic a priori arguments for the existence of God: OK, if the argument is sound, what is this being we have proved to exist, and is it anything like what any religious believer thinks they are actually worshiping? And what does such an abstract God—or a child abstracted from its history—need of us?