Untethered Kin
Reimagining the politics of adoption
Jessica M. Harrison
I was born in the spring of 1982 to my first mother, who was one month shy of her eighteenth birthday and about to graduate from high school. She named me Nicole and kept me for five days before relinquishing me to Catholic Charities, a prominent social service and adoption agency, for a closed adoption. I know now that this period was the hardest time of her life. She didn’t know where I went to grow up, and it would be twenty-one years before I was legally allowed to search for my biological family and twenty-three years before we reunited. When I was six weeks old, my adoptive parents picked me up from my foster home on an indelible Tuesday, the day after receiving the call about an available baby girl. They tell me I had a bad cold when we met—a tiny, sad fact about my very early life, a meager clue about that time that no one I know can account for. My beginning was an untethering, and my first few months of life were marked by being born into a family I swiftly lost for the gain of a different family somewhere else.
Every adoptee’s birth and adoption story is unique, but growing up as an adoptee in the United States involves specific cultural dispositions with far-reaching tendrils that shape an adopted life. Adoption exposes the vast possibilities of kinship beyond biological relation. It signals what could be in the form of expansive social and biological family, but these possibilities are refused by the state in its limiting mediation. Bolstered by state authority, social and cultural norms further undermine the possibility that adoption could be a process of expanding family ties, instead fortifying the restrictive nuclear-family model that limits a child’s belonging primarily to one family with two parents. This structure draws on conservative ideals about the family, which perpetuate additional parables about adoption. From the beginning, my life as a white domestic adoptee was intimately tied to my birth mother not having had an abortion. I frequently encountered this false equivalence of discrete pregnancy and parenting decisions, indoctrinated and used by anti-abortion crusaders who insist adoption renders abortion unnecessary. Although no one knew much about my biological parents, it was universally asserted that I was better off in my adoptive home. I should be grateful to be alive, I should be grateful for the parents who chose me with care—I am lucky. It’s said, “love makes a family,” and I was told that it is enough to have been wanted in the wake of being relinquished.
These platitudes were clear and powerful, but they never accounted for my true experience of both belonging where I was raised and longing for my other family. Being in community with other adoptees has attuned me to the discordance we embody as people displaced from families and countries of origin, put into the arms of strangers, and burdened with a liminal life. Despite being surrounded by overly simplified and often contradictory ideals about family and kinship, I enduringly reckon with the dualities of being presumed wanted and unwanted, of losing ancestral ties but gaining a state-sanctioned family, and of being someone’s genetic kin and another’s social relation. I’m othered by the absence and losses of familial resemblance and heritage, bonds that are often taken for granted by non-adopted people. I’m conditionally accepted if I play the part written for us adoptees—which is to say, I fit in as long as I’m unwaveringly satisfied by the adopted life chosen for me. This is an impossible demand, uniquely imposed on adoptees by a doggedly pro-adoption society.
People in the United States adopt more children than any other nation in the world. Although poverty, social stigma, racism, and rigid norms about the family are the basis for adoption’s possibility, adoption is a persistently feel-good concept in the United States. With the adoption industry at the helm successfully promoting adoption as an unequivocal win for everyone involved, people in the United States collectively maintain the status quo of adoption as an uncomplicated social good. The common defending of adoption makes it difficult to listen to divergent perspectives, which, in turn, upholds consequential ideologies about who has the right to be a parent, who is unfit to parent, what adopted people need and deserve, and where the boundaries of family lie.
Adoption’s enduring support also transcends political orientation. In December 2021, conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett cited adoption and safe-haven laws as sufficient alternatives to abortion. A few months later, Senator Amy Klobuchar —a Democrat and co-chairperson of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption (the largest bipartisan, bicameral caucus in Congress)—submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of State, with seventy-three signatories, to expedite U.S. adoptions of institutionalized Ukrainian children amidst the Russian invasion and ongoing military campaign. Although these examples stem from distinct motivating factors, together they showcase how adoption surpasses politics and is readily leveraged as a solution to social problems.
Adoption is rooted in a troubling history that includes its repeated use as a downstream crisis response. Increases in adoptions have historically occurred in the wake of restrictive reproductive policies (e.g., China’s 1980–2016 one-child policy), the devastation of war and other geopolitical upheavals (e.g., the dissolution of the Soviet Union), severe social stigma associated with single motherhood (as in the United States and South Korea), and global poverty. Culturally, adoption is always predicated on the belief that the family a child is entering is better than the family they have left, usually based on the assumption that upward class mobility directly translates to an improvement in the quality of care the child would receive. Adoption as an industry leverages this universal adoption idealism, which conveniently obfuscates its complicity in perpetuating the profitability of crisis. This idealism hinders our ability to consider that adoption is actually a poorly suited solution to geopolitical turmoil and personal hardships alike, and that it has far-reaching consequences for all people involved, particularly the displaced children and their original families. Depending on and exploiting the public’s unquestioning buy-in and the harsh social and economic conditions necessary to administer the adoption process only further marginalizes vulnerable people, essentially disappearing our complex lived experiences in the wake of adoption.
The private domestic adoption industry in the United States is largely defined by the Baby Scoop Era between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. In this time, between 1.5 million infants were relinquished to adoption, often against the will of their birth mothers. Ann Fessler’s 2006 book The Girls Who Went Away amplifies the stories of a cohort of these women, most of whom were white and from middle- to upper-middle-class families, who were sent away from their communities and hidden through their pregnancies, maltreated during childbirth, and coerced to relinquish babies they were often not allowed to hold. Many of these women assert they did not choose to place their children for adoption, but rather they were forced by religious leaders, family members, and an inhospitable society whose adoption coercion revolved around the protection, maintenance, and disciplining of white women’s purity. In the end, these mothers were sent home baby-less and told to forget and move on, saddled with trauma and disenfranchised grief that were unacknowledged and unsupported. Dishonor silenced these women, whose ambiguous loss was often internalized as a consequence for their disobedient behavior. Driven by social norms maintaining heteronormativity, religious conservatism, and middle-class upward mobility, Baby Scoop Era adoptions were seen as a solution to manage stigma associated with reputation-tarnishing unwed motherhood and disgraceful infertility among heterosexual married couples. Secrecy and shame were at the heart of these adoptions, and they formally established notions that married couples whose performances of heteronormativity aligned with social norms had a right to parent, while young single mothers were deemed unworthy of parenting.
This history is the foundation of what has since become a lucrative private adoption industry and it established adoption practices that endure today. State-sanctioned terms (and enforcement) of legitimate parenthood bureaucratically maintain clear familial boundaries. This formal authority obscures adoptees’ access to personal information and origin stories (for example, by sealing adoptees’ original birth certificates and anonymizing or withholding other official records). It prevents expansive relational connections by limiting knowledge of and contact with biological family and disrupts cultural, racial, national, and ethnic belonging. The trend toward allegedly “open” adoption intends to address concerns about the veiled secrecy of the adoption process, but adoptions that actually extend kinship bonds beyond the normative nuclear family remain rare. Instead, these arrangements are still situated within the confines of state-defined parenthood and nuclear-family ideals, and they typically are not enforceable, which leaves birth mothers vulnerable. These mechanisms of adoption set the tone for adoptees, influencing how we form our identities and familial relationships throughout life. Consequently, there can be tension between the social construction of an adoptee’s life and their psychic experience. There is little space to identify and grieve adoption-related loss in a staunchly pro-adoption environment, for instance, and relational complexity or expansive possibilities for belonging are inaccessible to adoptees in a strictly boundaried family structure.
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Given that adoption typically occurs in infancy or early childhood, adopted people cannot consent to be adopted, and our placement into new families often has a price tag. Though difficult, it is important to consider the impressions left by adoption, as an industry operating in global capitalism, on the lived experiences of adoptees—what is the emotional accrual tied to knowing one’s powerlessness as a (dis)placed child who gained family in a financial exchange? Private adoption is a largely unregulated industry that generally relies on the financial investment of prospective adoptive parents—an estimated one or two million of them at any given time—who pay tens of thousands of dollars to wait, sometimes for many years, for an adoptable infant. The industry comprises adoption agencies (the majority of which are religiously affiliated), private attorneys who facilitate out-of-agency adoptions with little regulation, and a growing number of media-savvy companies that help prospective adoptive parents market themselves online to pregnant people who may be considering adoption. Although domestic private adoptions are not well tracked, recent research estimates there are approximately eighteen thousand infants adopted each year—this means only 0.5 percent of all births in the United States result in adoptions of infants.[1]
American adopters turned to international adoption for a period in the wake of the declining supply of adoptable U.S.–based infants and in response to perceived global need. As investigative reporter Kathryn Joyce has documented, the transnational adoption boom was propelled in part by a salvation-driven, anti-abortion Evangelical Christian imperative. Prompted by prominent Evangelical leaders, believers enthusiastically stepped in to adopt children from around the world. These efforts contributed to an international adoption industry that, as Joyce explains, “has become a boom-and-bust market for children that leaps from country to country. In many cases, the influx of money has created incentives to establish or expand orphanages—and identify children to fill them.”[2] In such conditions, there is high potential for fraud and exploitation. Time after time, countries stop their adoption programs when stories of deception and kidnapping emerge. Transnational adoption is also markedly impacted by racialized international politics and geopolitical whims—in a 2012 retaliatory move by Russian president Vladimir Putin, Americans were altogether banned from adopting children from Russia, which was the third highest supplier of children for international adoption and the primary site for adopting white children. We have seen international adoptions to the United States drop from a peak of twenty-three thousand in 2004 to about sixteen hundred in 2020.[3]
For hopeful adopters today, adoption is largely an implausible option, and, given there are dozens of waiting families for each adoptable infant in the United States, many prospective adoptive parents will nevertheless pay into an industry, both emotionally and financially, that never delivers a product. This massive ratio of adoptive parent to adoptable infant is a supply-and-demand problem, as noted in a 2008 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Drawing on data from the National Survey of Family Growth, the CDC concluded that “nearly 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.” In June 2022, the Supreme Court referenced this statement in its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case that overturned Roe v. Wade), and it rightfully generated outrage, especially among adoptees. Not only does the Supreme Court exploit this discrepancy between supply and demand to egregiously argue that abortion is obsolete, but their insinuation that adoption is important for fulfilling hopeful adopters’ desires also underscores that children in this scenario are commodities of consumer demand.
These platitudes were clear and powerful, but they never accounted for my true experience of both belonging where I was raised and longing for my other family.
No matter how much we want adoption to be an altruistic gesture of care for vulnerable children, it functions as a marketplace in a stratified society where the primary beneficiaries are the adopters. In capitalism, the transfer of considerable sums of money for the adoption of a child and the competition between adoptive parents in waiting inevitably compromise the integrity of adoption. In an understated way, that adoption is a marketplace for adopters implicitly bears upon the embodied experience of being adopted. It establishes the terms of an adoptee’s role in familial relationships, such as fulfilling fantasies of parenthood, confirming the benevolence of their adoptive parenthood, and validating the significant investment made by our adoptive relations in their efforts to make a family.
Our society has successfully naturalized adoption as inevitable—sensible, even!—but there is a cruel irony in the financial requirements of acquiring a baby through adoption who was likely relinquished because of their original family’s financial lack. Through her research, sociologist Gretchen Sisson has found that women most frequently cite money as the reason for relinquishing their babies to adoption: in the absence of economic support and social safety nets, parenthood becomes an impossible option for some women, regardless of their original intent or desire to parent. This economic inequality clearly stifles reproductive freedom, and the transfer of infants and children in these conditions illustrates how they are treated as possessions, and how classed boundaries are rigidly enforced when it comes to judging an individual’s or a couple’s fitness for parenthood. The notion of the worthy nuclear family is guarded so fiercely, people would rather support the adoption industry’s financial interests and its commitment to rewarding adoptive parents than share financial and social resources so people can safely and comfortably parent their children.
If economic injustice in private adoption is ever acknowledged, it is usually regarding hopeful adoptive parents who lament its high costs, so the priority becomes making adoption more accessible for deserving adoptive parents rather than seeking to ensure children remain with their birth parents. In such instances, low-cost adoption through the child welfare system is a commonly cited solution to private adoption’s inaccessibility: “There are so many adoptable children waiting in foster care,” some say. Americans generally consider the child welfare system necessary for protecting children from abuse and neglect and for placing them in the care of someone better equipped to parent. The adoption of children from foster care is further promoted by adoption’s predominant favorability and by the saviorism embedded within adoption in the United States.
But in her book Taking Children: A History of American Terror, scholar Laura Briggs brings to light the complex and insidious function of state intervention on the family, including the forceful removal of children from their enslaved parents and the fracturing of Indigenous families and tribes to assimilate their children in boarding schools or with white families. The transfer of children away from their original families has long been a tactic in the U.S. settler-colonial strategy of Indigenous genocide and anti-Blackness—the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide recognizes that “forcibly transferring children of the [national, ethnical, racial, or religious] group to another group” is an act that constitutes genocide. Today, the policing of poor, Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families in the name of “child protection” is a contemporary form of state power, with the United States terminating parental rights more than any other nation in the world. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts’s analysis of the child welfare system uncovers that child protective services intervention is concentrated in impoverished Black neighborhoods, leading to the overrepresentation of Black children in the foster care system (they are 14 percent of children in the United States but make up 23 percent of children in foster care). Roberts advocates for the abolition of this ongoing punitive approach to addressing the needs of Black families, who are most impacted by crime control and the lack of a social safety net.
These scholars’ insights should compel us to reconsider our collective acceptance and legitimizing of a system of family policing that punishes primarily poor and/or Black families in response to the state’s chronic abandonment of the very same families. Situating the child welfare system within the legacy of adoption in its fullest context enables an understanding of how contemporary practices of family separation—including the mass separations of children from their parents or caregivers in immigration detention—are rendered possible in the first place, and then invisibilized in the positive name of family-making and children’s well-being. In confronting its benevolent pretense of family, we must interrogate adoption’s unsavory legacy and use it to inform how we shape a righteously equitable future for children and their families. As Roberts asserts: “We can envision and build a world where tearing families apart to meet children’s needs would be unimaginable,” one in which families in under-resourced environments are offered equitable access to housing, food, education, and health care rather than being sanctioned for their socioeconomic struggles.
Reimagining a more just society for children and their families is a radical demand for political, economic, and social reform. It also calls for a cultural transformation toward expansive kinship and caregiving beyond the rigid boundaries of the nuclear family. Many movements have sought to redefine family and kinship. Queer and trans communities have a rich history of creating chosen, found, or intentional family. Such families were vital during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, when queer people were entirely rejected by their families of origin and society. This legacy remains a core component of queer life today, where radical caregiving beyond families of origin is a community norm guided by queer ethic. Queering the family, in other words, is not reflected in homonormativity (such as same-gender parenthood within the confines of a nuclear family), but in wholly redefining what constitutes family, belonging, and commitments to care. In her call to decolonize kinship, scholar Kim TallBear draws on Indigenous and non-monogamous models of flexible and expansive relations, encouraging possibilities of diverse intimacies beyond biogenetics and colonial notions of a nuclear family. She asserts that our efforts to reimagine community care and kinship ties must include “advocating for policies that support a more expansive definition of family, and not rewarding normative family structures with social and financial benefits.”
Some may consider adoption a pathway to redrawing the boundaries of the family. But adoption is a paradox: though it makes kin beyond biological ties, it persistently draws on and reproduces norms and policies that privilege normativity in the making of families. While this practice legitimizes families by adoption in the context of U.S. society, it subordinates the needs and desires of children and birth parents, and, at the root, adoption participates in and enables global systems of domination, which is far from liberation.
Adoptees carry the weight of the objectionable conditions and systems that defined our “suitability” to be adopted, and we face intrusive written and unwritten rules about our lives. My life as an adoptee has been shaped by a deficit model that normalizes the termination of ties and sets restricted terms of belonging. I have spent my lifetime making sense of who I am, which is an iterative and eternal process that is both conscious and not, both universal in human life and unique to those of us who have been adopted. Adoptees are often pathologized in response to our misunderstood journeys, but situating our lived experiences in the fully revealed conditions of history, culture, and sociopolitical structures should refocus the collective gaze and motivate system-level change.
Although there is no single unanimous adoptee narrative and our diverse lives are shaped by the specific circumstances of our adoptions, we share the experience of (dis)placement without our consent: our adoptions were sparked by something unplanned and often painful, which is fundamentally a part of our inheritance. When we are denied access to our people and parts of our histories—whether because of sealed records, racial or cultural discordance, geographical distance, or adoptive families who are reluctant or ill-equipped to talk openly about adoption—it can be challenging to position and settle ourselves, thus we teeter constantly on the edge of belonging. Despite these burdens, adoptees experience and embody being adopted in complex ways far beyond the limits imposed on us. We are constituted by many relations and histories. We may be taken from our original countries and lose native languages, but our racial and ethnic identities are ever present and defining in the places where we are raised. We may be deeply loved and well cared for while desiring the lost kin in our lives, too. We are both our genetic lineage and our social relations, past, present, and absent, and we are shaped by the lack and abundance of our ties.
Who gets to decide what constitutes a family or kinship ties and how and when to create them? Adoptees are rarely centered in national dialogues about adoption specifically or family making in toto, but the common themes in our experiences should centrally inform cultural adaptations and social policy involving the family. Perhaps, too, the lifelong exercise of reconciling our entangled inheritances can propel an expanded vision of kinship and family life, supported by humane socioeconomic conditions, in the pursuit of justice for a thriving population.
[1] Gretchen Sisson, “Estimating the Annual Domestic Adoption Rate and Lifetime Incidence of Infant Relinquishment in the United States,” Contraception 105 (January 2022): 14–18.
[2] Kathryn Joyce, “The Evangelical Orphan Boom,” New York Times, September 21, 2013.
[3] United States Department of State—Bureau of Consular Affairs. 2020 Adoption Statistics.