The Primal Want

The phrase “domestic supply of infants”1 shocked people when it appeared in a footnote to the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In another post I dwelt on the irony of professing outrage over this phrase, given the widespread and socially accepted demand for infants to adopt. In this post I take a different stance. Instead of denouncing hypocrisy, I want to ask why different ways of describing the reality of adoption appear to evoke different responses from people who devote far less attention to adoption than I do.

Rhetorical differences are important, even where the underlying idea is the same. Compare “The supply of adoptable infants is insufficient to meet demand” with “There are more hopeful adoptive parents than there are children for them to adopt.” The uproar over “domestic supply of infants” suggests that even though these two statements express the same state of affairs, they evoke strongly different, even diametrically opposed, emotional responses. The second is much more likely to prompt sympathy, perhaps even in many of those also inclined toward revulsion at the first.

Another way our choice of language can operate on the emotions is by abstraction versus specificity. Compare “I want a child” with “I want that child,” or “I want someone else’s child.” To describe a person as wanting a child is to locate them in a familiar and generally sympathetic human context. To describe them more specifically as wanting a particular child, or even as wanting some child or other that is someone else’s, will likely elicit a different response.

These more specific descriptions apply in the context of adoption. Someone who seeks to adopt through foster parenting has in mind a particular child they want to make their own. All prospective adoptive parents are in the position of wanting other people’s children. To say these things is not to impute to them the covetousness of Holly Hunter’s character Ed in the Coen Brothers’ film Raising Arizona. However, the sense that some sort of covetousness is implicit in those descriptions might help explain why people who participate in or favor adoption often fight on the linguistic terrain of “whose child it really is,” and what being a “real” parent means (is it begetting or raising?).

I prefer to shift to a different terrain of conflict. For there is a conflict at work in the emotionally explosive language of adoption, and it involves fundamentally conflicting notions of what stranger adoption between two unconnected families is for, and whom it serves. On the one hand, there is the idea of adoption as child welfare: that in extremis, children require adoption into a different family from their biological families, who are unable to raise them safely. On the other hand, there is the idea of adoption as family creation: as a means for people to create families if they cannot conceive, or choose not to conceive, a biological child.

If either can be called the “official” conception of adoption, it is the child-welfare conception. Consider the mission statement of the National Council For Adoption (NCFA), one of the largest adoption advocacy organizations in the United States:

Passionately committed to the belief that every child deserves to thrive in a nurturing, permanent family, National Council For Adoption’s mission is to meet the diverse needs of children, birth parents, adopted individuals, adoptive families, and all those touched by adoption through global advocacy, education, research, legislative action, and collaboration.

NCFA regards its work as “focused” on children:

NCFA will always focus on adoption and the human right to a permanent, loving, family.

(I choose to construe this as meaning a child’s right to be part of such a family, not a prospective parent’s right to create one. It is perhaps deliberate that the phrasing can encompass both ideas.)

Adoption agencies use similar language. Texas’s Gladney Center for Adoption announces its purpose on its website as follows:

Gladney exists to give children loving, caring families here at home and around the world. That's the heart of our mission.

Gladney’s website includes a page titled “Child Advocacy,” which links to two other “advocacy networks:” The NCFA, and an “international adoption advocacy group” Save Adoptions, which calls itself “a coalition of adoptive parents, agencies, professionals, and attorneys who advocate for ethical intercountry adoptions and push back against overreaching and oppressive government policies and regulations which deprive orphans of permanent, safe and loving homes.”2

This the “official” language of child welfare. However, adoption agencies understand the true nature of the demand for their services, which is to create families. For example, consider the Ohio-based Building Blocks Adoption Service (BBAS), a self-described “Christian adoption agency” that urges birth parents to choose adoption “as an alternative to abortion,”3 and offers prospective adoptive parents the opportunity to build families through adoption.

BBAS includes a page on its website listing “The 6 Most Common Reasons People Adopt:”

1. Infertility or Avoiding Pregnancy Complications

2. Concerns about Passing Down Genetic Disorders

3. Single People or Same-Sex Couples Who Want to Start a Family

4. Helping [A] Family Member Who Isn’t Able to Raise their Child

5. Adopting a Child (or Adult) They Have a Long-Standing Relationship With

6. Because They Just Know They Want to…

The elaboration on Reason 6 is instructive:

For many adoptive parents, there are no mitigating circumstances that lead them to make the choice to adopt. They simply know they want to grow their families through adoption. For some of these families, they recognize a need within the community to provide loving homes to children in need. For others, they realize their ultimate goal is to create a family, and they don’t need to become pregnant to achieve that goal. Some of these adoptive parents were themselves adopted and want to provide the same type of loving home they had.

The implication is that, ultimately, one needs no reason to adopt beyond simply wanting to create a family with someone else’s child (“they don’t need to become pregnant to achieve [the] goal [of creating a family]”). All but Reasons 4 and 5 foreground the desire to create a family, taking for granted that doing so benefits not only the prospective parents, by granting their wish, but the child too.

Adoption agencies have no reason to challenge the assumption that adoption harmonizes everyone’s interests: of relinquishing parent, of that parent’s child, and of prospective parent. Since the entire purpose of adoption agencies is to facilitate relinquishments and adoptions, they have every reason to promote the assumption that it harmonizes everyone’s interests.

The main thrust of criticism of the adoption industry is that these two ideas of adoption—child welfare and family creation—do not harmonize. Family separation, and genealogical displacement and severance, are harms. We should seek to eliminate them as far as possible, and not to promote them, or seek to expand them. From this perspective, the posture that adoption agencies and advocacy groups take of protecting child welfare is either confused or fraudulent.

My hope is that people who are uneasy with talk of “the domestic infant supply” will think through the implications of their discomfort. While I do not deny that prospective adoptive parents have a pressing duty to reflect on their motives, and to separate their wishes for themselves from the welfare of children, I believe everyone has a responsibility to consider how their own attitudes about adoption obscure, or conflate, the two very different ideas I have discussed: one “official,” the other far more primal and motivating.