Finally! Part Three of Three: In Which I Get into All Manner of Trouble with You

Part One Now with update!
Part Two

Occasionally the question arises in the adoption subculture of the blogosphere, whether adoption would exist in a “perfect world.” Though setting out guidelines for perfection is a daunting task, here’s my stab at answering that question. Here’s my stab at answering my own question about what our families might look like if we lived according to community values rather than market values:

I realized why the “no adoption in a perfect world” idea bugged me when I read Jacqueline Stevens’s article, “Methods of Adoption: Eliminating Genetic Privilege” in Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays. What was bothering me was the inherent devaluing of non-biological connections between people that the no-adoption idea presumes. The presumption that family ties made between people without blood ties are less “perfect” than blood ties goes very much against the grain of queer family values in which non-biological ties are often as important or even more important than biological ones. It goes, even, against the idea of marriage as a bond that makes two non-kin people “one flesh” as has been such an important idea to so many cultures, societies and legal structures throughout the world and throughout history. And if you say “but people choose each other in marriage, which isn’t true in adoption” Stevens, by my reading, would say, well neither do babies choose their biological parents. Adoption is not uniquely a situation in which a baby has no choice about the decisions made on its behalf by adults. That is pretty much a baby’s lot in life, no matter who is doing the decision making.

Following Stevens, then, in my perfect world, not only would adoption exist, everybody would be adopted. This is the framework Stevens lays out in her essay. Let me quote at length her proposals (which, she explains must all be taken together as a whole and cannot be considered in isolation from each other):

1. The government should provide health services to everyone, including reproductive health services.

2. The government should make child-care services available to all parents.

3. Every child has one mother, the person who gave birth to him or her.

4. Every child shall have one or more parents. For purposes of legal custody, a parent is someone, including a mother, who adopts a child alone, or in a group of two or more.

5. The adoption is valid until the child is twenty-one years of age.

6. The mother is responsible for finding one or more parents to raise her child within three months of birth. She fulfills this responsibility either by (a) signing an enforceable contract with the state acknowledging that she is adopting the child herself; or (b) by forming a larger group to legally adopt the child; or (c) by finding another adult group that will sign this contract; or (d) by requesting that an officially sanctioned adoption agency perform these activities. No money other than incidental fees can be exchanged for the purpose of executing adoption contracts.

7. All adoption contracts will require minimum adult commitments to child care.

8. Marriage is a purely private activity, receiving no recognition as a legal status by any government agency. (pp 89-90)

In these guidelines, Stevens gives mothers—meaning women who give birth—unique power to decide who will parent the children born to them. She does this not on a genetic basis, but on basis of the labor the mother has gone through (and by “labor” she doesn’t mean childbirth exclusively, she means the bearing of children throughout gestation). So, mothers can choose to parent their children, to parent them with others, or to relinquish them to others to parent. Mothers alone make this decision. Agencies do not. The state does not. Notably, genetic fathers do not, as they have done no labor, according to Stevens’s definition. In fact, the term “father” has no significance in Stevens’s model. If a mother chooses, her baby’s genetic father can be a parent if he is willing to sign the adoption contract requiring real labor from him for the child’s care. Or the mother can choose another man, men, woman, women or combination to parent her child with her, or instead of her.

So mothers are not necessarily parents and (female) parents are not necessarily mothers. Instead, adults choose to parent, which automatically means they choose to take legal responsibility to care for the children in their custody.

In order to even propose such an idea, notice that Stevens has to provide everyone with equal access to reliable health care and childcare. And notice how the importance of marriage recedes entirely, for purposes of legal privilege. The idea is that once we have basic needs met, based on humane, community values, we can freely choose to partner with each other, choose to bear and/or to parent children (or not) without the sometimes violent pressures of a market-based value system such as we have now.

Stevens’s system doesn’t mention reproductive technology except to specifically de-privilege genetic relationships, taking any claim to a child born of donor gametes away from the donors and maintaining the sole rights of the (birth) mother. So I have to think that “donor” gamete-made embryos wouldn’t be off-limits for reasons of revering genetic ties. But in a world in which genetics are no longer the imagined center of human identity as they are now—a world in which the chosen and performed labor of relationships is shifted to the center—I have to doubt that there would remain much of a “market” for such embryos. Perhaps “embryo banks” would exist, but given Stevens’s restrictions on any but incidental fees for adoption, I don’t think profiteering on embryos would have a place either. I imagine in such a world, embryos might well be available for similar incidental fees, and “donors” would truly donate rather than euphemistically sell their genetic material.

I like Stevens's proposal. I like it because I agree with its logic that genetic connections between people are just happenstance, and not of real significance. This doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize the imaginary power genetic connections hold for some (many) people. I know, for example, that my daughter might one day want to look up any number of genetic relatives whom we know little about today, and that’s just fine by me. I intend to support her fully should she ever feel the desire. People spend time and money tracing their genealogies (or selected genealogies, as the case may be, since we all have infinite family tree roots to choose from). In no way am I saying my daughter’s first mother is unimportant. To the contrary, by endorsing Stevens's ideas, I’d be allowing that her first mother is her only mother, however many other parents she may have, whatever she may call them. And since we did not come by the parentage of Nat through the human value system Stevens insists be taken as a whole with her other proposals, our adoption is not an example of adoption in the “perfect world.” Far from it.

But I do think that Stevens has given us another way to think adoption. Not as a second-best, even third-best, unfortunate side-effect of one tragedy or another, but as a natural—at least as natural as genes—trait of human community. We all adopt in one way or another, and in one way or another, we are all adopted—even if it is by our biological parents, who freely chose to parent us, rather than not to. Recognizing the impulse and ability within us to love and commit to each other, without the imagined guarantees of our “own” blood or the engineered “best bets” a genetically selective embryo bank might offer, is worth our time and thought. Reforming our policies from a place that honors that impulse is worth our effort.

Comments

[Lisa]

Hmm, hmm, hmm. Trying to wrap my brain around it. Actually, it is a similar concept to that of Firestone that I recently read about on Twisty's site. Okay, I found it:

"During the few years of their infancy we have replaced the psychologically destructive genetic “parenthood” of one or two arbitrary adults with a diffusion of the responsibility for the physical welfare over a larger number of people. The child would still form intimate love relationships, but instead of developing close ties with a decreed ‘mother’ and ‘father’, the child might now form those ties with people of his own choosing, of whatever age or sex. Thus all adult-child relationships will have been mutually chosen - equal, intimate relationships free of material dependencies."

Her objective is to allow women to be lifted of some of the undue burden of childbearing/rearing that helps to keep us from reaching equality. But I can see how it totally translates to adoption as well.

Also, as I was writing my recent post about how father's should take responsibility, I was thinking to myself how much of a bitch it is to have to use up our energy to force someone to do something and take responsibility for something he doesn't want to. So, in this case, I could theoretically get knocked up by some guy who could care less...keep my baby (as I may decide that I would want to adopt it) and then find some other people/group of people--male or female (even a grandmotherly type that could take the place of my MIL!!!)--who actually voluntarily want to be a part of my baby's life? Sweet! I think I might like it. Interesting. Would blow a lot of people's minds, but interesting at that.

[frog]

Huh. VERY interesting. I'm one of the people who thinks that, in a perfect world, adoption wouldn't exist, but after reading your post, I think it's a semantic difference more than anything.

[mijk]

I love this idea. I am pretty sure in this perfect world of yours I would end up with the same children in the same parentgroup of two but the idea of making the desicion to parent my children a formal step feels really right. I loved the baptism of my children as I found the earthshattering change of becoming a parent lacked rituals so badly.

[PhoenixRising]

Interesting. What Stevens is describing here is very close to a policy prescription to bring law into harmony with human nature, specifically the nature of mothering.

I've been around the track, I think here as well as on others' blogs, about Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's excellent book about maternal instincts...so I'll take it easy on that hobbyhorse today by summarizing: If she's right, and what makes us human is that we assess each newborn and decide whether to parent at that moment, well then that throws infant abandonment and adoption into a different light. In fact, it implies that the most natural thing in the world is to make our families out of who we encounter. It's just human behavior, why not formalize it in our public policy?

[Sarah V.]

Sorry - been a few days behind, and only read this today.

The first thing I notice about this proposal is that this would be a system under which _women_ could freely choose to parent children. Men couldn't. They could, of course, choose _not_ to parent children, which would be the choice that many men would want; but a man would have no automatic right whatsoever to become involved with his genetic child. This proposal seems to have been worked out from a very gynocentric perspective.

This is, of course, due to Stevens' belief that genetic connections mean nothing. I think this needs questioning. It seems to me that there's a middle ground between believing genetics to be the be-all and end-all, and believing it to be of no significance whatsoever. Regardless of your own views on this, the fact remains that – as you've noted – genetic ties are important to a great many individuals. Endorsement of Stevens' ideas doesn't imply that Nat's first _mother_ is unimportant, but it sure as hell implies that about her father. You recognise the need to acknowledge the validity of Nat's feelings about genetic connections even if they differ from your feelings. Shouldn't we be equally willing to acknowledge – and, more than that, support by action – the feelings of men who find genetic connections important?

Another concern that springs to my mind is that, since this proposal does away with the idea that a baby is automatically and by default considered the child of its mother unless she takes specific steps to transfer this relationship to others, and since it would make adoption the norm for society, it might well increase the risk that a woman might make a poorly thought-out or ill-informed decision to relinquish a child for adoption by others without being fully aware of the possible long-term consequences of this decision for herself. I think it's naïve to assume that the pressures that lead women to make adoption decisions that are later regretted are due only to market forces or that they can be eliminated purely by providing free, universal childcare and healthcare.

And, finally, as far as that point goes, I also think it's naïve to assume that putting responsibility for funding a service entirely onto the government is somehow going to remove all market forces. The government isn't a magic fairy that can provide universal good-quality healthcare and childcare by waving a wand; it has to get the money from somewhere and figure out how to spend it. I work in a government-funded universal healthcare service, and, no, I wouldn't trade it for the one you've got – but I would also not speak about it as some kind of wonderful panacea that can simply be assumed to be of enormous benefit without any further discussion of the matter.