Adoptees and Recovering the Ethics of Adoption

August 15, 2004

by Albert S. Wei*
“Isn’t it mysterious and frightening, too, when one doesn’t know of the reason that everything should be so beautiful in spite of the terrible things that are happening?”

• Sophie Scholl, At the Heart of the White Rose
  “Main Entry: eth·ic
  Pronunciation: ‘e-thik
  Function: noun
  Etymology: Middle English ethik, from Middle French ethique, from Latin ethice, from Greek EthikE, from Ethikos
  1 plural but singular or plural in construction : the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation
  2 a : a set of moral principles or values b : a theory or system of moral values c plural but singular or plural in construction : the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group d : a guiding philosophy”
  • Merriam-Webster

I kept this definition over my desk when I was studying international relations and urban policy at Columbia in the early 1990’s. Moral principles and values are normative concepts, to be sure, but they are also the building blocks of any system of political discourse. So I was surprised, when I started to investigate the institution of adoption, to find plenty of politics and certainly innumerable policies which impact the lives of adoptees, often in the most intimate fashion imaginable, but little explicit reference to the ethics – the systems of moral values – which must certainly underpin these political dynamics. The discourse of adoption for the adopted is almost always captured purely in the values-neutral language of mental health clinical practice, psychology, social work, or familial and personal needs and desires and always in ahistorical and apolitical terms. The children were helped, aided, saved. There may be issues to be addressed or differences of opinion relating to the manner and mechanics of salvation, but these are regarded as mere technical details, hardly worthy of the attention of society and the state. Adoption is, therefore, seldom if ever evaluated through the use of overtly political discourse, except, perhaps, as a foil for advocacy groups promoting particular articles of legislation intended to fine-tune or otherwise perpetuate the smooth functioning of that manner and those mechanics. A system of discourse that fails to acknowledge its own normative values is difficult to challenge, criticize or even describe, and so it is with adoption today.
 
But just because a level of discourse is ignored does not mean it is absent. Deliberate frameworks for policy and practice underlie nearly all of the personal triumphs, crises and dramas that inevitably accompany an adoption, on the part of birthparents, adoptees and adoptive parents. Somehow, the children who are to be made vulnerable to the circumstances which can lead to intervention by the international and domestic social service apparatus must be selected. Someone is responsible for the policies or lack thereof that result in the legitimate relinquishment, abandonment, seizure or sale of children. Someone must decide to prioritize (or privilege) adoption vis-à-vis other forms of child placement and care for the affected children. Someone must organize and operate the institutions that arrange for children, sometimes in vast numbers, to cross international and provincial borders, to be cared for while in the custody of temporary caretakers and to be matched with adoptive parents. Someone must create and implement the laws that govern this process. Someone must decide to preserve or destroy the documentation of identity, to provide or withhold personal or medical information, to lie or to tell the truth. And someone must decide how, what and whom to charge for all of the foregoing services. All of this requires policies, laws, procedures, standards of practice and all of the other artifacts of the explicit and implicit ethical standards of societies.

And history has shown that these frameworks can be truly inspired in scale and application, integrally linked to the political realities of the wider societies they inhabit. Certainly this was clear in a few extreme and horrific historical cases where the discourse of adoption was explicitly appropriated as instruments of state terror, oppression and genocide — the Lebensborn babies of the Third Reich, the children of the desaparecidos of Argentina, the industrial schools and Magdalene laundries of Ireland, the Lost Generation of Australia or the Indian Schools of America. All of these past horrors were clearly the products of their respective times and reflections of forces that go far beyond the adoptee and his families. But if political ethics are so clearly, damnably present in these cases, why do they seem to disappear in the ostensibly benign, apolitical discourse of contemporary adoption?

One might very well, even with a cursory examination of the historical record, come to suspect the work of powerful agencies operating on historic and geopolitical scales in the conception and execution of the three largest episodes of migratory adoption in the modern era – the Orphan Trains of America, the Child Migrant Schemes of England and Ireland and the Korean adoption program. Indeed, common sense suggests that the involuntary emigration or in-migration of hundreds of thousands is not something that could be easily accomplished by private goodwill or even by the incidental bureaucracy of compassion acting alone. The benign, generalized and apolitical language of private and public charity and the emerging welfare state usually used to characterize these diasporic migrations may very well conceal hitherto unevaluated motivations and historical processes — politicized “push” and “pull” factors on the part of both the sending and the receiving societies. It is not my purpose in this article to examine these episodes in detail or to explore the values which underpinned them, but rather to highlight their existence and, at a superficial level, their motivations, all of which are documented extensively elsewhere.

By the early 20^th century, the great Orphan Trains organized the in-migration of as many as 200,000 children from the orphanages and streets of eastern cities westward to the American frontier, driven by fears of urban political unrest in the industrial East and the “pull” of the colonization imperative of an expanding empire. Charitable Christian organizations were recruited or formed through the association of social reformers with some of the more powerful and influential political and commercial agents of that empire to conceive, organize, fund, implement and, ultimately, accomplish the diaspora. In fact, much of the political and bureaucratic infrastructure that developed to support the orphan train policy still exists, in the form of the Children’s Aid Society, the Children’s Home Society and other venerable adoption and child welfare agencies. Their message and ethical persona have changed, but their basic mechanics remain in place, albeit shorn of all but the most cursory references to the ethical impetus for their conception five generations earlier.

Christian charity and the language of social reform formed the basis of the rhetoric used to rationalize the emigration of another estimated 200,000 children under the Child Migrant Schemes, which continued from the late 19^th century until the 1960’s, between the British and Irish isles and the Americas, Oceania and Africa, under the sponsorship of the Roman Catholic Church and sanctioned by the governments of the affected states. As with the Orphan Trains, there was another level of ethical discourse at work below the public rhetoric – the “push” of class-driven political instability fears, moralistic contempt for the poor and a desire to remove from public sight the shameful inadequacy of state welfare policies combined, fortuitously and once again, with the “pull” of the need for raw manpower to fuel the geopolitical expansion of the British empire. And here too the infrastructure of diaspora still exists, in the form of Barnardos, the Sisters of Mercy and others, who continue to provide child welfare services, albeit, as with their Orphan Train counterparts in North America, armed with a modernized message and ethical justifications. Their generations-long legacy has, of late, been forgotten, or, in the case of several of the agencies and governments involved, explicitly obscured — the denial of responsibility as both institutional and state policy.

A third great wave of migratory adoption occurred, from the mid 1950’s to the late 1980’s, between Korea and core western countries in the aftermath of war, involving the involuntary emigration of some 150,000 children. Here, the driving ethical influences were reversed relative to the two earlier waves. “Pull” factors included the “new” issues of infertility, childlessness, women’s liberation and the availability of birth control and family planning programs in the imperial core as well as Cold War propaganda imperatives. “Push” factors were strongly linked with the geopolitics of the Cold War, which dictated American support for socially conservative military regimes in South Korea, which, in turn, preferred to conceal from their own countrymen social problems such as the potentially destabilizing presence of the mixed-race children of war, illegitimacy and street children. Charitable organizations, often Christian and missionary in orientation, were employed as the vehicle of choice to accomplish diasporic migration. As with the two previous waves, this infrastructure still functions, entrenched in the form of purpose-built orphanages in Korea, “new” agencies like Holt International or, significantly, several of the “old” agencies of the Orphan Trains and the Child Migrant Schemes. The adoptions continue, almost automatically and shorn of the ethical rhetoric that brought them about two generations earlier. By the 1970’s and 1980’s, some of the “abandoned” children adopted under the second and third generations of the Korean scheme were surprised to discover, subsequently, that they had never been abandoned at all, so great was the imperative for the system to continue to operate.

In each case, forces at the respective imperial peripheries (whether in a sociopolitical or geopolitical sense) interacted with the elite political imperatives of the imperial core, to produce massive, involuntary movements of humanity. These historical episodes have more than a few other factors in common: (i) political ethics played important roles in each of them at the time of their conception and organization; (ii) they were eventually reframed as apolitical, self-evidently humanitarian events by their organizers and the governments that hosted them; (iii) all of them were developed and executed without the consent or engagement of the affected children, despite the fact that they each spanned multiple generations; and (iv) each of them left controversial legacies that are still being debated and evaluated today.

These legacies are controversial because of the outcomes of these adoption waves. It seems likely that thousands of loving families were formed as a direct result of the three diasporic episodes. Surely, the welfare interests of many children were well served as well. At the same time, the migrations were, as often, accomplished with callous disregard for the emerging global discourse on human rights and norms of national conduct. And yet, an examination of the outcomes are insufficient to explain the ethical systems which informed these movements of humanity. Beyond these outcomes and beneath the official rhetoric of charity and compassion, complex rationales integrally linked to the great social and political themes of their respect times and geopolitical neighborhoods were at work. Abuse and labor exploitation of ethnically differentiated immigrant children were integral parts of the Orphan Trains, and the trains themselves may have stalled the introduction of urban and welfare reforms in the sending regions and facilitated the processes of imperial conquest in the receiving regions. Allegations of horrendous human rights violations continue to emerge in relation to the Child Migrant Schemes, which are the subjects of ongoing litigation in at least four countries. The Irish and British schemes were political weapons in a long forgotten war on the poor and disadvantaged ethnic and class groups in the imperial core. In Korea, American military and civilian advisors sanctioned and indeed helped to put in place many of the social conservative policies of successive military juntas which very likely contributed to the surfeit of “adoptable” children, and the same dictators entered into quasi-commercial arrangements for the disposition and care of these children with American Christian charities, even as they tortured, disappeared and otherwise oppressed other citizens. The Korean scheme almost certainly forestalled development of a modern child welfare system in South Korea. In each case, inequities of race, class, power and politics under girded the programs, as implicit, unstated catalysts, and these unexplored values continue to haunt both the periphery and the core.

And do such unexplored ethical imperatives continue to dominate contemporary adoptions? At first glance, this appears not to be the case. Contemporary adoption is seen to be as shorn of political meaning and explicit ethical dilemmas as past episodes. The welfare system, private charities, and helpful individuals (an army of lawyers, facilitators, consultants and so forth) seem to simply find homes for children who need them, using all of the apparently clean clinical and administrative technology available to them.

And yet, one need only read the newspapers to suspect that there are levels of discourse that, as with the past programs, may not be readily apparent. A British family, the Kilshaws’, attempted to adopt Missouri twins in an Arkansas court through the services of a commercial facilitator in San Diego, an adoption that prompted a political crisis and parliamentary inquiry in the United Kingdom. In Tennessee, another case saw a Chinese immigrant family allege abduction and coercion in the “adoption” of their child by a couple and a religious adoption agency who publicly stated that their controversial actions were justified because they are providing a child with a Christian suburban, white middle class lifestyle. In California, unscrupulous practitioners seek to persuade minority and disadvantaged birthmothers to relinquish their children explicitly citing the risks to such children of growing up poor in a dangerous and uncertain time. American authorities have active investigations underway of questionable adoption practices throughout the imperial periphery, from Haiti, to Liberia, to Cambodia, to Guatemala, to Bulgaria. And adoption has become, more than perhaps ever before, a political instrument of empire. The US government recently threatened to link Romania’s accession to NATO to the continued availability of Romanian children to American adoptive families. The European Union responded by threatening to link Romania’s path to EU accession to the non-availability (to Americans) of the same. The adoption of Chinese orphans is a tool of diplomacy, where the number of children made available for adoption in the US is a barometer of the state of Sino-American relations. The ongoing process of US ratification of the Hague Convention in Respect of Intercountry Adoption has been marked by contentious debate, aggressive special-interest-group-driven lobbying, behind-the-scenes deals and, ultimately, backsliding against the notion that migratory adoption needs to be centrally regulated at all. Meanwhile, despite the continued development of both commercial facilitation and intercountry adoption, as many as a million children, often of colored ethnicity and underprivileged background, languish in the American public welfare system. It would seem that unevaluated, and very much contested, geopolitical and social values are alive and well in adoption today.

In fact, these bits of anecdotal evidence from around the world show an institution of adoption that is, more than ever, a reflection of all of the great ethical issues of our time. With some exceptions, the availability of children abroad for adoption by families in the developed world is linked to the recession of empire abroad (in the case of Central and Eastern Europe) and to the legacy of colonialist and neo-colonialist policies as well as more general failures of development and its institutional contexts (in the case of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and parts of Asia). At the imperial core, the desire to adopt and the fall in domestic adoptions are both linked to the sexual revolution, reproductive rights, falling fertility rates, persisting inequalities across races and classes, and to the culture wars, where adoption is seen as one more battle-ground between social conservatism and secular liberalism, as seen, perhaps, in the many frequent legislative fights over open records for adoptees and anonymous abandonment/safe havens. Economic and technological changes in both the core and the periphery have resulted in the increasing commercialization of adoption services. And, finally, globalization promises an increasing role for adoption and all of its attendant controversies and conflicts, well into the future.

So adoption cannot, be divorced from the broader ethical systems and controversies of our society. Yet, as I have already mentioned, the decisions which impact the most intimate aspects of the live of adoptees – whether an adoption occurs, where an adoption occurs, who the adopters are, what happens after adoption, and whether adoptees are allowed to know their own pre-adoption identities or the circumstances of their adoptions – are made, generally, without explicit reference to these systems of values, through political processes of unfathomed complexity, without any scope for adoptees to provide input or otherwise to become engaged. Adoptees have, historically, experienced adoption only as subjects, playing little if any role in its construction. In many respects, an apolitical and ahistorical vision of adoption effectively prevents adoptees from having a meaningful stake in the values, morals and politics that dictate a significant aspect of their lives – an awkward proposition.

And adoption is harmed by their exclusion. It seems to me that, in a world where adoption is secretly fraught with ethical considerations, society as a whole may find it valuable for adoptees to participate integrally in defining what those considerations should be. They certainly have the personal experience to bring a very different guiding moral philosophy, a new normative stance, to the discourse of adoption – one that might conceivably challenge the ethics of imperial conquest, geopolitics, global and domestic inequality, commercial exploitation and unyielding self-righteous moralism that has shaped so much of adoption policy and practice for the last century and a half. This is not to say that many others should not participate in this process of redefining the discourse of adoption. Adoptive parents, through groups like Ethica, have, to date, taken the lead. Birthparents also have an intimate personal stake, and need to be brought into the dialogue as well. But I have to believe that adoptees will bring to this dialogue an extra measure of empatía, authenticity and, perhaps, passion. And, in doing so, adoptees might just be able to contribute toward building a more humanistic vision for our emerging global society. Ethics matter. And we should have a role in defining what the ethics of adoption should entail.
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