To those who have adopted or are considering adoption, and who are reading this in a spirit of curiosity: Welcome, and thank you. I do not write to attack adoptive parents, nor do I counsel people not to adopt. I do not condemn the motives to adopt. My hope is that adoption will become ever more rare, because I hope for a just world in which families are not broken and ruined. My hope is that people who choose to participate in adoption will understand that, as much as they might wish to view themselves as helping to heal a damaged world, they also benefit from that damage. Adopting a child is not primarily an act of social beneficence; it is the undertaking of a set of social responsibilities.
My thinking generally centers on the kind of adoption of which I am a product, in which someone relinquishes an infant or very young child from one kin group and into another, unrelated group, legally severing them from their family of origin. I am not thinking primarily of kinship adoptions, or adoptions from foster care, in which the family of origin is known, and in which (in some cases at least) the adopted person may even exercise some degree of agency or consent. I speak from the experience of someone adopted domestically, in a closed proceedings mediated by a religiously affiliated agency, out of one white family and into another. I do not speak for those adopted from outside the United States, or across races. I speak as a person raised in accordance with an idea of infant adoption as childbirth by other means: a resetting of my biography to exclude everything that happened before my adoption, save the date of my birth. The strength of this idea, its cultural power, is revealed in the way even I still flinch at thinking or writing the obvious truth: to be an adoptive parent is to raise someone else’s child.
I do not trust much in my own wisdom, and I am reluctant to give advice. But I do advise actual and prospective adoptive parents, even implore them, to reject this idea of adoption. Infant adoption is not childbirth by other means. The decision to relinquish an infant for adoption is not a reproductive decision; it is a decision to forgo parental rights and duties over one’s child, for whom the reproductive decision was already made. Cultural attitudes about infant adoption in the United States, Canada, and other “receiving” countries obfuscate these facts. The attractiveness of adoption partly depends on obfuscating these facts.
To acknowledge that one’s adoptive child is someone else’s does not by itself entail specific duties to the relinquishing parent. Everything depends on the situation—for instance, whether the adoption is handled privately, or arranged through an agency. The openness of so-called “open” adoptions is subject to different degrees and kinds of legal protections in different states. But the predominant cultural understanding of adoption empowers the parties to the transaction, with little suggestion of moral constraints arising from the rights of the product transacted: the child. Consider this, the opening text from a pamphlet on open adoption published by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services:
Setting aside the degree of power and control actually exercised by pregnant people facing the prospect of relinquishment, consider the way this language represents the interests of the child as objects of choice, lying morally at the relinquishing parent’s disposal. And these are questions a prospective adoptive parent might equally consider. “Do I want my adoptive child to know if he or she looks like someone else in the biological family?”, for instance.
My advice, my plea, to adoptive parents is not to think that whether a child’s contact with their family of origin, or their knowledge of genetic mirroring, or their possession of family health history (not explicitly mentioned here!), are matters to be decided solely or mainly by what “works for everyone,” which plainly means the parties to the transaction, and which in practice primarily means the adoptive parents. I ask adoptive parents to acknowledge that everyone has a moral right to these goods, and to ask how they can protect and promote their child’s access to them. These are among everyone’s identity rights.
If our cultural understanding of adoption fully acknowledged the fact of identity rights, much of what is written to promote adoption, and much law governing adoption in each of the fifty states, would look profoundly different. Adoptive parents should consider their responsibility to critically examine and challenge this body of discourse and law. Because our cultural understanding of adoption valorizes adoptive parenthood, critical voices among adoptive parents can carry great weight. This is part of the “social responsibilities” I said that adoptive parents undertake in choosing to adopt. What can the adoptive parent do, if necessary, to restore their child’s access to these goods? What affirmative duty does the parent have, beyond expressing a willingness to “let my child decide what they want when they are ready?”
And beyond questions of immediate moral responsibility to one’s own child, I believe adoptive parents, who benefit from the individual and societal calamity of family separation (the having of a child directly depending on another’s losing of that child), have an obligation to understand, if not to seek allyship with, efforts to ameliorate and undo the social conditions that result in the separation of families.
I am a parent myself. I cannot fully articulate my motives in choosing parenthood. Nor can I absolve myself of all moral criticism in having children, particularly at a time when the future habitability of our planet is so plainly in doubt. So despite my critique of prevailing cultural attitudes about adoption, and my wish to see the practice eliminated as far as possible, I do not impugn the motives of adoptive parents. I counsel moral clarity, and a rejection of harmful fantasizing.
Thank you for reading.