On April 24, 1993, I legally adopted my daughter in Asuncion, Paraguay. I will never forget that day. I was a complete nervous wreck. Our adoption was being expedited because the first free elections in decades were to be held that spring, following the 35-year rule of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who was ousted in a military coup in 1989. There was much uncertainty as to whether the election would even take place, and concern that another military coup might prevent it. Tanks were in the street, and there was a sense that the country might well fall in to a civil war.
Against this background, adopting a baby might have seemed like a small issue. But in fact, all the opposition parties agreed on one thing: they would quickly stop all adoption to the United States, and indeed, in 1995, a law was passed to suspend adoptions from Paraguay until there had been a complete overhaul of adoption procedures.
I will never forget — having always considered myself a progressive person — the night my hotel was surrounded by demonstrators protesting against us for stealing Paraguayan children. I was staying in a hotel whose guests were exclusively United States citizens adopting Paraguayan children. I tried to comfort myself by remembering how scrupulous I had been in working with my Paraguayan lawyer to follow all the rules and procedures that were to govern adoption under the old regime. But of course, the old regime was a dictatorship, and completely corrupt. So how could we really be sure that we had not fallen into a corrupt situation, one in which the children being adopted had not been given up willingly by their families, or at the very worst stolen and trafficked?
I had read stories about children being stolen from their parents; these stories were all over the press at the time I was in Paraguay. And of course, the issue is still with us today. Recent news stories reporting the abduction in China of children for international adoption have again brought to light the flaws and complexities of a system (or many systems) by which children are adopted. They have also raised questions about the ethical responsibilities of those systems and those who participate in it.
I still believe that I legally adopted my daughter, but only because I was able, by paying a friend of my daughter’s birth mother under the table, to get as much of her story as I could, including that she had legally put her daughter up for adoption. There were many other difficulties that at times almost overwhelmed me, including the ill health of my then-daughter-to-be, who urgently needed medical care, which could only be provided by the solicitation of bribes.
The adoption of children is an act fraught with innumerable intersecting personal histories and motives. While not traditionally known to be a topic of philosophy, it is in fact deeply intertwined with many of the most fundamental issues of the discipline — personal and political freedom, self-determination, free will, and of course, human rights.
Central to all of these matters is the issue of the child’s best interest, or more broadly, children’s rights. An international treaty, theHague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which the United States ratified in 2008, has gone some way toward establishing protections for children and parents in the adoption process. But of course problems remain.
Leif ParsonsThere is a voluminous literature arguing that the act of child adoption itself constitutes a trauma. For example, the writer Betty Jean Lifton argued that no matter what adoptive parents do, an adopted child has undergone a foundational trauma. I have argued against that position because for Lifton, biological connection is the only way for a family to constitute itself through a foundational narrative of belonging. On that view, an adopted child will necessarily be robbed of such a narrative, and will be without answers to basic questions like “When did mommy meet daddy?” and “What happened on the day I was born?”
But of course it is not only adopted, children who lack such narratives. Those who do not live in conventional heterosexual families are also cut off from them. The normalization of the heterosexual family — mommy and daddy and baby makes three — does not describe the majority of families. If one narrative of family belonging — in this case traditional heterosexual — is treated as the only valid one, it cuts off other possibilities for other stories of how one becomes a family and belongs to a family. Thus, the very argument that adoption is foundationally traumatic shuts down possibilities that would allow adopted children to tell different family stories and be part of different kinds of families. The argument itself becomes exclusionary.
In my own writing on adoption, I have emphasized the importance of what I call the “imaginary domain,” both within the United States and in the context of international adoption. The imaginary domain is an aesthetic idea that represents the psychic and moral space individuals need in order to come to terms with the complex identifications all of us face in our relationships with our family, our sexuality, and our national and linguistic identities.
One way of trying to facilitate the protection of an adopted child’s imaginary domain is through open adoption, in which the biological mother or parents and the adoptive family know each other. However, open international adoption is very difficult; some of the countries that still allow international adoption either do not have records of the birth parents or have laws and practices that prevent access to the birth parents. There is also a deeper problem. Many of the countries that allow adoption are at times unable to control the privatization of adoption, with the result that some orphanages end up in the hands of mafias. This raises the specter of children who, if they have not been outright stolen, have in some way or another been coercively removed from their family of origin.
In 2009, Madonna was caught in a legal battle in which some members of the family the second child she adopted from Malawi claimed that they had not truly chosen to put their child up for adoption. In a country struggling with a weak or collapsed economy, it is often difficult to maintain the line between legal adoption and trafficking. It is not surprising, then, that many countries, as they attempt to constitute themselves as independent powers in the global economy, outlaw international adoption altogether, as a signal to the world that they want to take matters of intergenerational relationships into their own hands. For example, China, which used to be one of the most sought-after countries by the adoption agencies of the United States, has now drastically limited international adoption to the Global North. Indeed, one country after another has limited or shut down adoption to countries in the Global North over the last 10 years.
How, then, do we confront the reality that some countries from which children have been adopted are now ferociously opposed to international adoptions, for the reasons given above? And what does it mean that with some exceptions, international adoption is generally a one-way street from the Global South to the Global North?
Often those who adopt children from the Global South are hailed as saviors of children from countries that have fallen into hell, on the grounds that those children were unlikely to grow up to lead meaningful lives, or even to physically survive. Adopting such children can seem like a humanitarian gesture, which allows the adopting parents to pat themselves on the back for “saving a life.” Why is this humanitarian gesture problematic? After all, these parents are breaking out of the conception that an acceptable family involves members who look alike, are from the same culture, speak the same language, and so forth. Many parents have even insisted that their children have access to the culture and language of the country from which they were adopted. Such measures are of course extremely important if one takes seriously the literature on trauma and adoption that emphasizes that the break that occurs in a child’s life when she or he is adopted be at least open to a meaningful narration, so that the child can begin to understand the complexity of her or his life. The need for this kind of narration is basic to what I have called the imaginary domain, and if it is denied, the psychic life of the child can be rendered fragile.
Of course, such measures are to be applauded as attempts to protect the imaginary domain. But they cannot entirely escape the underlying narrative that children from the Global South are better off if they are removed from those countries to the more “developed” world of Europe and the United States.
As an adoptive mother, I have had to think about my own responsibilities towards an adopted child from Paraguay, who, by all signs at the time, would not have survived if I had not adopted her. The way I think of it now is that my own action was what the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called an “enabling violation.” I enabled my daughter’s life by adopting her, but in another sense it was a violation for my daughter, who was uprooted from her home, her language and her country of birth. I may have violated the people of Paraguay by participating in an adoption process that the vast majority of Paraguayans deeply disapproved of and ultimately sought to end. I have of course tried to make sure that my daughter always knew the story, not only of her adoption, but of what I could gather of her birth mother’s decision. But I will never feel at ease until my daughter and I visit her birth mother and hear it directly from her.
There is no easy way in which the adopted child’s imaginary domain can be facilitated, although dual citizenship seems to be a minimum guarantee to adopted children, so that they can return to their country of birth if they so desire. Ultimately, international adoption is profoundly implicated in relations of inequality that cannot be addressed on the basis of one family alone. Perhaps, then, if we at least recognize international adoption as an enabling violation, we can avoid the worst kinds of self-righteous humanitarianism, and find ourselves pointed towards a struggle for a more just world.
Related: Relative Choices, a 2007 opinion series with contributions from adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents and others.
Drucilla Cornell is professor of political science, women’s studies and comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of numerous books, including “Moral Images of Freedom” and “Clint Eastwood and Images of American Masculinity.”