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.”
Devji is writing about the emergence of child (or teenage) activists, like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, who raise their voices to fill a void in politics. Thunberg’s message is tinged with anger that she should need to enter the public forum at all. She sees it as “a failure beyond all imagination” that “the responsibility to communicate [the science about climate change] falls on me and other children.” She is a visible reminder that the future our present political failures are destroying is not merely notional: it lives here and now, embodied in the children who will inherit those failures. Children, who are formally voiceless, are therefore compelled to speak out—to inhabit a paradoxical place of being within and outside the political, bearing the consequences of a future they have no formal part in creating.
A friend online sent me Devji’s essay, knowing my preoccupation with how adopted children are caught in something like this predicament. The adoptee has no say in the future that is created for her through relinquishment, severance, and reassignment to a new family. The adopted child has no say—there is no place for granting or withholding consent. Opponents of unsealing adoptees’ birth records typically speak in quasi-contractual terms about a “promise” of anonymity (wrongly termed “confidentiality”) made to the birthparent. However one conceives this contractual agreement—whether its parties include adoptive parents, birthparents, adoption agencies, or the state—the one whose future is affected at the deepest level is in no sense a participant. In the most extreme cases of total severance, like mine, the adoptee inherits an idea of the future they had no part in creating and are to have no part in undoing.
I don’t mean to be flippant in comparing an adoptee like me to Greta Thunberg. The potency of her message owes to her having embodied, as a teenager, the future she was formally powerless to affect politically. I am not a teenager. I am not politically voiceless. I speak from the future that was created for me when I was an infant—from a future that went off script because I decided to change it. Despite this, I still inhabit something like the child’s position, but in an inverse form from the teenage Thunberg’s.
On the one hand, adoptees who speak out against the human rights violations intrinsic to plenary adoption in the United States—where in most states we still face obstacles in gaining access to our own histories and identities—are routinely infantilized. Where Thunberg was told to get off her soapbox and get back to her studies, adoptees are told to be grateful for the life adoption afforded us. We are told that we are incapable of appreciating how profoundly we benefited from our adoptions—in short, that we cannot properly gauge our own interests.
On the other hand, our predicament as adoptees lies not in seeing what is coming and being too young to affect it, but in looking back on what happened from a vantage point we could not have had when young. In Devji’s telling, children enter the political realm as specters of the future. I am saying that adoptees enter as specters of the past.
Infantilization in the political realm is the denial of a say in shaping one’s own future on the basis of claimed immaturities: cultural or intellectual defects, physical “weakness,” racial subordination. To call adoptees politically infantilized is not to place adoptees’ “oppression” on the same scale as these other forms of true oppression. It is to say, rather, that a pattern is shared: adoptees are not seen as having a rights-based claim to different or better treatment because we are viewed paternalistically, as objects of a set of arrangements made by others with our best interests at heart, benefiting in ways we are unable to appreciate. (“Would you have preferred to be raised by a crack whore? Languish in an orphanage? Tossed in a dumpster? Aborted?” People “ask” us these outrageous questions because they regard us as too dim to see how much better off we ended up.)
Political change in the direction of justice for adoptees is maddeningly slow. The reasons, again, have to do with the way adoptees’ political infantilization is the inverse of that of a child activist like Greta Thunberg. Powerful interests, mainly religious groups and the adoption industry, are opposed to justice for adoptees, because justice for adoptees is perceived to clash with their goals of providing clean-slate babies with minimal baggage from as large an infant supply pool as possible. But adoptees who advocate for justice are mainly adults, formal participants in the making of their future. These advocates are demonized as specters of a past better left buried: the Angry Adoptee at the Door, the One who Rocks the Boat. Many of us seek our own redress: to recover our birth records, and hence to be treated with the same respect accorded to the non-adopted. But many of us advocate on behalf of the adopted children of today: to change the legal and social landscape for them, to open the opportunity for a future that is better than our own—though the demand for children to adopt is and will surely continue to be enormous, crossing all political lines.
All children are political orphans. We pay lip service to their needs, but we often balk at speaking of their rights. We prefer to reserve talk of rights for those with a formal say in politics. Adoptees are political orphans too. Not even the country’s foremost civil liberties organization, the ACLU, recognizes adoptees’ rights to their original identities and genealogical histories. In politics, to paraphrase a wise old Ent, “I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side.” How revolutionary if, when we looked an infant, utterly vulnerable and dependent on our care, we asked not “What does she need from me?” but instead “What do I owe to her?”