I took to Twitter in what might have looked like a fit of pique, though for once I wasn’t piqued. I posted this:
Why, though, is it “remarkably obnoxious?” Or rather, what did I mean in calling it that? It isn’t unanswerable. Every adopted person who searches for their biological parents could answer it. Here is my answer: I decided I needed to learn the identities of my biological parents because, after being diagnosed with cancer and, soon thereafter, becoming the father of two children, I realized that I was no longer content with telling doctors that I knew nothing about my medical history. Moreover, having studied and taught philosophy for two decades, I had the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics rolling about in my head: “All men by nature desire to know.” (The second sentence, “But cats are better off without curiosity,” is regarded by most scholars as spurious.) I still attached the tag forbidden to this particular piece of knowledge, but I decided, somewhat in the manner of Huckleberry Finn, that if I was courting damnation to do this thing, then so be it, let me be damned.
Questions are not obnoxious or offensive in content, but as asked in particular contexts. Imagine being asked if you cheat on your partner, or why you don’t have children. If you and I are more or less strangers and I put those questions to you out of the blue, you would of course be right to protest that it is none of my bloody business. If am a close friend or a therapist, with a concern for your well-being, the context is altogether different. And indeed, it was a therapist with whom I first started talking freely about my feelings about my adoption. She did ask me why I decided to search (although without phrasing it in the somewhat judgmental form “Why did you need to”).
It has become central to the way I work through my thoughts about my adoption, and about adoption generally, that I publically pose such questions to myself. These are questions that even the people who love me the most don’t know how to approach, because they intuit—as do those who raise the questions with malicious intent—that they can cause discomfort. Let me suggest two ways that “Why do you need to know who your biological parents are?” can cause discomfort.
One is that the question intrudes on a zone of privacy that people should respect. There may be no knowing what pain lies underneath an adopted person’s relation to the decision to search, or not to. To ask the question could be a trigger. Compare this to “Why did you terminate your pregnancy?” or, of course, “Why did you relinquish your child for adoption?” Whole histories of hurt might have preceded, and culminated in, these decisions.
A moment ago I hinted at another way the question can cause discomfort. “Why did you need to know?” carries a challenge to the presupposition that I did need to know. Did I “need” to know? And how would I go about establishing that I do? What harms can I point to from the failure to meet this need? Here is another tweet I sent recently:
Followed with:
In fact, I can point to a harm, perhaps the harm most commonly cited of family severance that, in effect if not also in law, mutually anonymizes children and their parents: loss of access to ongoing family health history. And I know that many adopted people argue that neonatal separation, even with swift placement into an adoptive home, is itself trauma with lasting neuropsychological effects. To the extent that severance causes such harms, and that discovering one’s genealogical identity can help (or even be essential) to assuage these harms, then we can give real content to the idea of needing to know our genealogical identities.
But part of what I was suggesting in these tweets is that we must separate needing to know from deserving to know. Whereas we can investigate, as a topic for empirical research, what fuels an adopted person’s need to rediscover their roots, I say that the question of deserving to know is thoroughly normative. Why do you deserve to maintain control over your own body? Why does your voice deserve to count in public decisionmaking that affects your life? Why do you deserve to know who (the fuck) your parents are? If we can answer these questions at all, we cite other normative ideas that are grounded in our overall picture of human dignity and freedom. When I hear a spokesperson for a reproductive-technology lobbying organization say that people don’t have a right to know their biological parentage, I know that there is no point in arguing with him. He has what is, by my lights, a defective understanding of the dignity and freedom human beings possess. He is not to be persuaded; he is to be defeated.
So the other kind of discomfort that “Why do you need to know?” causes is by implying that “I deserve to know” is either false, or else not enough of an answer. But it is enough of an answer. Therefore, I don’t need to “need to know.” I should simply be allowed to know. I would go further. Adoptions must not only not conceal adoptees’ access to this knowledge; they must preserve adoptees’ access. (Say “NO!!!” to safe-haven “baby boxes.”)
In the end, then, you must forgive my prickliness. A friend took me to task for adopting an unhelpfully combative stance against the question “Why do you need to know?” I replied that even if the question is obnoxious, I would not necessarily default to an obnoxious answer. On the other hand, if people better understood how deeply adoptees like myself are committed to reclaiming our moral dignity, and how central to that dignity the question of knowing really is (and is it really that difficult to see?), then we would not need to practice so much forbearance.