Dear readers,

I write this the night before my annual hike to the summit of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, reputed to be the world’s most climbed mountain after Mount Fuji. There are a few posts I wish to write: one a set of reflections on my recent meeting with cousins on my biological father’s side (my first face-to-face contact with anyone in his line); and another on how, when adoption makes news, the automatic empathy extended to adoptive parents overwhelms all else, silencing adoptees and birthparents.

I was expecting to tackle at least one of these projects this weekend, but a convergence of circumstances favored something else: a trip to the top of my favorite mountain in New England, alone with my binoculars, my portable shortwave radio, my notebook, and my thoughts.

There is a hanging file folder in my desk drawer that holds both my birth certificates.

I file them together because together they embody the upside-down pairing of two contrasts: the one that records the actual facts is legally null, and the one that ordains fictitious facts is legally binding.

[Do Not Agitate]

I learned my biological father’s name from my birth mother. She mentioned it in the first words I’d ever received from her, an email she sent shortly after her brother and sisters told her, during a Christmastime dinner, that I had found her. I had received a copy of my original birth certificate two months earlier. Her name appears, typewritten, in the blank labeled “mother;” there is also her signature in a lovely, loopy cursive. That signature was the stone that shattered the 40-year-old glass house that was my family as everyone had defined it for me.

Nothing appears in the blank labeled “father.”

I had his name, and for eight years I did almost nothing with it. I found his Facebook page. I compared a few recent photos—in a golf shirt and baseball cap with his wife, in a tux at my half-brother’s wedding—with the ones of his teenage self that I had scraped from his high school yearbooks. In none of them did I easily see either of us in the other.

Last night I started putting questions about the ethics of adoption to ChatGPT. I want to use my next few posts to talk about what we can learn from this.

First, a word about my interlocutor. ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), a neural net trained on a staggeringly huge corpus of text (570 gigabytes, or 300 billion words) to carry out string prediction, that is, to predict the likelihood of the occurrence of the next linguistic expression given the preceding linguistic context. Think of autocomplete with godlike powers. After all, 300 billion is a reasonable estimate of the number of stars in the Milky Way. The human brain contains a mere 86 billion neurons, give or take. One estimate of the number of word tokens (particular occurrences of words, in speech or writing) that an adult hears or reads in a year is roughly 12 million. This is an utterly miniscule fraction of the size of ChatGPT’s corpus. Whatever the sense in which ChatGPT “knows English,” it knows it in a humanly impossible way.

I don’t believe ChatGPT knows English, because I don’t believe knowing a language consists in, or is reducible to, or even capable of perfect (undetectable) simulation as, statistical prediction of syntactic tokens on the basis of the patterning of syntactic tokens previously encountered. Knowledge of word patterns is not knowledge of meaning. (The linguist Emily Bender has ably defended this view here and elsewhere.)

About a month ago, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) entered into the politics of kinship language when at a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, she questioned the credentials of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who had advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on school closures and other public-safety efforts.

At the hearing, Weingarten described herself as a “mother by marriage” (having married a woman with children from a prior marriage), thereby failing Greene’s test of motherhood, which requires being a biological parent.

If things go as I intend, my birth mother will receive a lavish bouquet from her local florist this afternoon. If instead things had gone as everyone else had intended, my birth mother would have gotten nothing, because I would not have known her name, or her home address, or whether she was alive or dead.

Mother’s Day is an occasion for breakfast in bed, a vase of flowers, brunch with mimosas. It is also an occasion to teach and reinforce a doctrine. It celebrates mothers who mother.

First, some “touching messages” for Mother’s Day.

Sometimes, even I wonder if I gripe too much. But once again, recent events demonstrate the need to shout ever louder.

I have been following, with mounting horror, the news about states that aim to “streamline” the process of relinquishing and adopting a child. There is Indiana, poised to pass a bill that, in the interest of “streamlining” abandonment and adoption of newborn infants, would omit any oversight and regulatory safeguards to prevent anonymous trafficking of those infants through the state’s so-called “newborn safety devices,” commonly known as “baby boxes.” Gregory Luce of Adoptee Rights Law clarifies the implications here. See also this from Marley Greiner, who has acted as a campaign of one to raise awareness of the disaster for adoptees’ rights posed by baby boxes.

Legislators in other states, including Alabama and Tennessee, are talking about seeking to “streamline adoption”—“trying to get kids into a permanent home as fast as possible,” in the words of one Alabama lawmaker. A Tennessee legislator states the aim this way: “Our idea is to make it easier, cheaper and faster to adopt or become a foster parent.” The principal change is to speed the timeline for termination of parental rights.

An uncompromising statement: I am opposed to adoption because adoption is opposed to the truth.

I need to qualify this. I am opposed to the dominant idea of adoption in our society, and in other Western societies, which is that adoption is a nonbiological means of building families with children who have been severed from their parentage. It is the idea I oppose. I do not oppose all adoptions, or even all adoptions carried out under this dominant idea. I do not oppose my own adoption—which is to say that I believe neither that I should not have been born, nor that my mother should not have relinquished me, nor that the people who subsequently called themselves, with legal sanction, “my parents,” should not have been able to do so. Opposition to the dominant idea of adoption is consistent with all of this. Different adopted people who, like me, oppose the dominant idea of adoption hold different views about their own adoptions. Some believe they should have not been born, i.e., that their parents should have had the option to terminate their pregnancies or, if they had the option, should have taken it. Others believe that their parents should not have relinquished them—either that they should have had the support necessary to keep their child, or that (assuming they actually did have the necessary support) they should have used it. Still others believe that the people who ultimately, by legal sanction, started calling themselves their parents should never have done so. These are all reasonable views to take, and every adopted person’s life is different. I oppose the dominant idea of adoption without opposing my own adoption.

But I do regret and criticize the way my adoptive parents—which is to say, the way they and the panoply1 of social workers, physicians, legislators, lawyers, priests, and admiring civilian onlookers—understood what happened when the decree of adoption lowered the veil of mutual secrecy between my birth mother and my adoptive parents—and between her and me. Despite my Catholic upbringing, I do not believe in miracles of transubstantiation. No intoning of words or signing of papers or, indeed, a lifetime of attentive and loving care, has the power to make or unmake kinship relations.

I have said that adopted people owe no one gratitude for their adoptions. I’m going to explain this thought by linking it to the idea in my previous post that adoption creates an absurd reality that resists our efforts to make sense of it.

Jonathan Lear, whose work I cited in that post, is interested in the place of gratitude in ethical and social life. In “Gratitude and Meaning” he discusses Aristotle’s analysis of gratitude, which goes roughly like this. When you are grateful, you recognize that someone has performed a no-strings-attached act of kindness, with nothing further required from you in return. It is a genuine act of kindness (kharis in Greek), and not something done with the expectation of repayment or reciprocation. It is not transactional: a favor bestowed is not part of an exchange in a “gift economy,” although actions like it, and the feelings of gratitude they elicit, are important elements of a functioning social order, as Aristotle understands it. And yet we sometimes use the phrase “debt of gratitude.” Why?

I want to state this as plainly and neutrally as possible, with no polemical intention: Adoption is absurd.

When I call adoption absurd, I am not calling it wrong. Nor am I calling every form or instance of adoption absurd. My core case of adoption—the example that all of my writing on adoption assumes by default, unless I specify otherwise—is the plenary adoption of an infant or small child, where “plenary” means the total legal severance of that child from their biological parents and the transfer of legal custody to other adults, newly deemed their parents. This case encompasses both intercountry and domestic adoptions, and, given that the subject of the adoption is assumed to be very young at the time of severance, it assumes that that person exercises no agency over their severance or adoption.

Adoption, described to that extent, does not sound absurd. For if “parent of” and “child of,” as described, are legal statuses, then plenary adoption is the splitting of the biological or “natural” statuses of parent and child from their legal or “conventional” counterparts—a splitting that typically does not happen to “kept children,” but could “in principle” happen to them, as often happens not only to babies but to older children whose parents’ legal rights are terminated through the operations of what I join with others in calling the United States’ Family Policing System.1 Severance may be necessary in some cases, cruel in (many) others; but in what sense is adoption, which presupposes severance, absurd?

I picture my relationship to my childhood memories as something like the view, from an airplane at 30,000 feet, of cloud cover far below. Most of the landscape is hidden behind a gray blankness, save what I can glimpse through the occasional hole. Last night I caught such a glimpse when I suddenly remembered that Greg Louganis, decorated Olympic diver and household name in 1980s USA, was adopted as an infant, and that my adoptive parents extolled him as a role model for me. I Googled his name and found a 2017 article on People.com, from which I learned the story of his reunion with his biological father and, in time, with more of his original family.

This set off a rush of memories I hadn’t revisited in forty years, and with them, a tumble of startlingly intense emotions. I realized I had resented Greg Louganis as a child. I remembered that I felt mild, malicious satisfaction at the news that he had sustained a concussion at the 1988 Seoul Games. As a child and then adolescent I did not theorize these feelings, and I now know why. To theorize them—to understand that my resentment was grounded not in Greg Louganis the person but in my parents’ tokenizing of him as what adoptees can achieve—I would have needed to be able to theorize my own resentment of my parents. And to do that, I would have needed to be able to theorize my adoption in terms that separated myself, and my questions and needs as an adoptee, from my parents, and their motives and needs as adopters. Like other people adopted in my time and circumstances, I had nothing in my emotional and social lifeworld to nurture that ability, and plenty to suppress it.

I took to Twitter in what might have looked like a fit of pique, though for once I wasn’t piqued. I posted this:

Tony Corsentino @corsent

“Why do you need to know who your biological parents are?” is a remarkably obnoxious question. It’s on a par with my asking you why you need both kidneys. In both cases, the correct answer is, “Wtf is wrong with you? I don’t need to explain to you why I deserve what is mine.”

4:05 AM ∙ Nov 11, 2022

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322Likes37Retweets

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.

“Speak your truth” is good advice. Tell your story. Show due respect, of course, for others’ feelings, and for their privacy. But claim ownership over your story. People whose lives begin with severance and secrecy especially need to hear this advice, because what secrecy in adoption does is to make one’s story into contested property, where truthseeking, not to mention truth speaking, can be received as betrayal.

But what value does speaking truth have, beyond the personal value of empowering the speaker of that truth? Not that this is trivial; not at all. The nearly universal expectation is that adopted people are grateful for their adoption—grateful to their adoptive families, grateful for a system that rescues infants and children from perilous circumstances, from abusive homes, from orphanhood. That expectation imputes a form of dependence to adopted people: that of being beholden to their adopters, and to the system that placed them in their adopters’ families. It rings odd in many ears to say that people should be grateful to their parents for begetting them. But the expectation that adoptees are—should be—grateful to their adopters for adopting them is part of the common conception of adoption. Given this, speaking one’s truth about one’s life as an adopted person is an act of self-emancipation.

There is a risk in framing one’s convictions through first-person narrative, which is that everything one attempts to convey becomes tagged with the qualifier “This is (just) my experience.” If this is my truth, then what do we do if your truth is altogether different? If I give testimony to the costs of adoption for me, then what if your testimony is, “My adoption did not cost me any of those things?” Consider this exchange, and notice how the Red Circle is attempting to rebut the others:

I joke that when I brought my adoptive father and two of my birth mother’s siblings together at my wedding last week, I was the evil mastermind bending them to my will. There is truth in this. But now, nearly one week on, I’m trying to understand how much, or little, I have achieved.

I invited my adoptive father, my birth mother, her brother, and two of her sisters to my wedding. Two of the siblings, including my birth mother, were unable to attend. I told the other two that they would likely be meeting my adoptive father. I dithered over telling—warning?—my father about the presence of my biological relatives. I waited until the day he flew into town. After dinner with my fiancée and our children, as I was driving him to his hotel, I said that he would be meeting many new people, including two of my biological relatives. He repeated the phrase quizzically. “Biological relatives?” It was as if he didn’t understand the words. I briefly recapitulated the story of my search and reunion, although I didn’t say that I “reunited with” my birth mother; I said I “met” her. My father is approaching eighty years. I am approaching fifty. Talking with him, I still shrink from suiting my words to my thoughts.

He took a beat, then said, “I’m glad they chose to stay in your life, son.”

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:

“A child’s parents are those who raise them.” That will sound like basic wisdom to some people, but it sets me off.

The reason it sets me off is the context in which I typically see it stated: as a rebuttal to people who criticize the extreme nature of plenary infant adoption, which involves the legal erasure and concealment of the child’s original genealogical identity—as through the practice of issuing an “amended” birth certificate naming the child’s adoptive parents. Those of us who, like me, question the need for so drastic a measure in the transferral of parental rights, often point to the way it serves a particular idea of adoption: the creation or augmentation of a family by legal and nonbiological means. Genealogical erasure and concealment aid in inflating this idea into a fantasy, in which the child’s pre-adoption history itself is excised from biographical reality, and the child is “as if born” to their adoptive parents.

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.

Today, eight years and five months after I met my birth mother and her siblings in person, I am filling out a registration form with the International Soundex Reunion Registry, or ISRR. It is an almost purely symbolic performance. I am formally announcing my desire, which I may or may not already have consummated, to find and be found.

My adoptive mother died in February of 1995, two months before my twenty-first birthday. She missed my wedding a year and three months later, but she met the woman I married. She also missed my acceptance to graduate school, and my move to New England three months after my wedding. She missed my move to New York City, and my cancer diagnosis, and the birth of my first child, and my return to New England, and the birth of my second child, and my divorce, and my meeting my new partner, whom I will marry two months from now. When she died I was a college junior, immersed in scholarship, learning about the philosophy of language and Plato and modal logic and epistemology, formally enrolling in graduate seminars and studying Latin and Attic Greek. One month after she died I traveled to Boston and I presented a paper at the New England Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at Tufts University. At the age of twenty and ten months I was cocksure, almost wholly neglectful of my friendships, and rightly convinced I was bound for a Ph.D. at a prestigious school, and equally but wrongly convinced I was bound thereafter for a career as a professor.

My adoptive mother died eighteen years and eleven months before I saw my birth mother in person for the first time since I was a days-old infant. When I began to think, for the second time, about searching for my biological parents, I was no longer cocksure. My last adjunct academic appointment, at Boston University, had ended two years earlier. Friends in academia put in a good word for me when I applied for a miscellany of jobs in department administration and academic advising. None went anywhere. I spent most of my days looking after my children, preparing meals, brewing beer, and wondering how I seemed to have so fully squandered my talents and my opportunities and allowed my youthful friendships to wither. I was no longer cocksure. Self-pity was my new enemy.

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.

It can seem that adoptees who demand champion adoptees’ civil and human rights have few allies. We can sympathize with Treebeard the Ent, who, when the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask if he will join the side that opposes Mordor, replies:

“I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me.”

The American Civil Liberties Union takes no official stand on the rights of adoptees to their birth records, still under seal in nearly four of every five states. The citizenship rights of intercountry adoptees are still not secure. A bill granting automatic citizenship to all intercountry adoptees whose adoptions were made final before their eighteenth birthday has passed in the House of Representatives, but its fate remains unclear as differing versions of a larger bill including it await resolution. (The House version contains it, the Senate’s does not.)