Notes on Kinship with Strangers

Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture, by Judith S. Modell (1994)

The state cannot make me a grasshopper, or this chair, a table; how then can it decree who is whose child? Modell explains, in the first chapter of this book, why American adoption procedures moved from the legislatures to the courts, but not why governments acquired power over kinship in the first place. True, the answer goes way back. The Romans practiced adoption, the internet tells me, mainly from an interest in inheritance. I also learned that modern adoption practices were an attempt to deal with large orphan populations. But this is not a review of the internet.

Modell is most interested in what it is like: to be adopted, to be a birthparent, and to be an adoptive parent. Her book draws on extensive interviews and features long quotations. The focus is less on who or what adoption is “for,” but the facts she reports suggest some answers. Maybe the practice was, at first, for the benefit of children who lacked parents, but the government’s power to determine kinship soon expanded, from creating kinship where non existed (orphaned children) to destroying kinship for a child’s benefit. Modell quotes a Pennsylvania judge writing in 1838 that

The right of parental control is a natural but not an inalienable one...where [the parents] are incompetent or corrupt, what is there to prevent the public from withdrawing their faculties?

“This decision,” Modell tells us, “recognized the state’s right to sever biological ties in the face of a parent’s opposition.”

My sister often wears a shirt reading abuse of power comes as no surprise. A man named Chapsky lost his rights to his child in 1881, and the justification given by the Kansas Supreme Court is chilling:

while there is no testimony showing that the father is what might be called an unfit person, that he life has not been a moral one...He seems to us like a man still and cold, and a warm-hearted child would shrink and wither under care of such a nature, rather than ripen and develop.

I hope we agree now that neither the way a man’s character “seems to” a judge, nor some merely-guessed-at bad effects his parenting may have, are grounds for taking away his child. Better evidence is needed, but how good can the evidence ever really be? In assigning a child to new parents, the things the state most needs to know are the ones it finds hardest to learn. Surely children should be placed with adoptive parents who will love them; “yet,” Modell asks, “how could subtle emotional attitudes, or parental love, be evaluated in people who had (usually) not had children?”

If the practice of adoption was originally organized around the welfare of the children, over time it shifted, until by the 1970s, “adoption had become a service for infertile couples.” The “system” had turned from finding parents for needy children, to finding children for would-be parents. Sometimes this “finding” amounted more to pushing children into that category who otherwise might not have been. One birth mother tells this story (note that this takes place before the adoption, when the baby was still in every legal sense her child):

So when I wanted to see her [the baby], they [nurses] wouldn’t let me see her through the night or the next day. I kept asking and they wouldn’t let me see her, and I believe it was the second or third day after, and it was the day before I was going home and they had not allowed me to see her. I kept telling them that I had to see her and I really felt that I could see her, that I couldn’t go through with it without seeing her. It’s strange but that’s how I felt. So they just kept trying to talk me out of it. I guess it was the next morning when Dr. King came in and we talked, and he felt the same way as they did. He acted more like a father with me. He said, “I know what’s best for you and I know it’s hard, but it will be easier if you don’t see her.” I insisted and he finally agreed with it and it was hours later when they finally brought her in to me. They nurse brought her in and I held her, and the nurse was standing over me, wanting to take her back instantly. So I can’t say I had her more than three minutes when they whisked her back away from me.

Here is another:

And these are all the things I think the social worker, the message she gave and like, “how can you possibly take care of this baby? You’re not even through high school, you’re going to hate the baby when you want to go out on a date and you’re going to be stuck with this kid. And how are you going to pay the baby’s doctor’s bills? What are you going to be able to give that baby for her birthday? What can you possibly give that baby? We’re going to give her to a home where they are, where they have money. She’ll have everything, what can you possibly give her? Sign the paper. ... And I’m hysterical. I don’t want to give away my baby, and I signed the papers and I’m bawling and I could hardly see the paper to sign it and big drops are dripping all over the paper.

Modell comments:

Convinced of their generosity, birth-parents gave away a child, only later to consider the manipulation inherent to the act. As one birthmother put it, “And then, you know, I realized just last year that here I had the most important thing that my daughter ever needed and they say, ‘what could you have given her?’ And now I answer ‘me.’...And so what if she didn’t have the party dress, my god, she has her cousins, her grandparents, her family. What the hell is more important than that? And they made me buy that, the fact that I couldn’t provide a party dress or a nice toy made me unworthy as a mother.”

In the late 70s a movement began to “[redefine] adoption as dedicated to finding families for children who need them.” If the birthmothers Modell interviewed felt that the people “helping” them with their adoption were playing for the other team, the adoptive parents she interviewed felt the same (this was in the 90s):

A professional and quite sophisticated woman in her early 30s told me: “We had loads and loads of forms to fill out and they ask us everything and they asked us to fill things out separately and they wanted to know everything. They even wanted to know about your sex life. And you know, I even put, ‘this is personal.’ You know, come on.”

Modell, summarizing, says that “the [adoption agencies’] questions were probing, intrusive, and humiliating for everyone.” Another woman told Modell:

It seemed like what they [agencies] wanted was they wanted you to be married twenty years, to have tried to get pregnant ten years at least, to make $70,000 [maybe $150,000 in 2023 dollars], but they only wanted you to be twenty-five years old. And I’m not sure how people, I mean I don’t know how they do it, and maybe they find people but it seemed like almost impossible qualifications.

If adoptive parents had little love for the system, some of them also “had to feel the birthparent was wrong in order for adopting to be right.” One adoptive mother said, about her child’s birthmother:

Nobody ever told me about her until I saw her at the termination of rights hearing and she needed a momma herself. I mean she’s just a pathetic little—as far as I know she had seven children out of wedlock...

This kind of demonization is a two-way street. One birthmother said, about her daughter’s adoptive family,

[My daughter] says that they [the adoptive family] don’t even see each other...Everybody went their own way. Her mother and dad went golfing every weekend. Little things like that bother me, too. Things about her father especially bother me...when you’re told you’re giving your child to this ideal family, when I hear about him being so narrow-minded and—, that bothers me.

When you are born, the details are recorded on an official birth certificate. Then, when you’re adopted, you are issued an amended one. Your adoptive parents take the place of the originals. Getting your hands on that first birth certificate, and learning from it your birthparents’ names, is sometimes essential to finding them; but in many places you are legally barred from seeing it. For some adoptees the original birth certificate attains a talismanic significance:

as their first action, most adoptees requested the unamended birth certificate; they needed that proof. [Adoptee and prominent adoptee-rights advocate Betty Jean] Lifton provided the axiom: “But the Adoptee says: ‘I’m not sure I ever was born.’...Without the original birth certificate, he has no proof.”

I find this absurd. I’m fairly confident I was born. I believe I could even prove it. But it is weird that anyone can read the Pentagon Papers and the FBI file on John Lennon, but the government won’t show me my original birth certificate.

When you’re adopted your birthparents’ names are known to judges, social workers, and adoption agency representatives, people to whom those names mean nothing; they know, but they are not allowed to tell you. Some of them, however, are good people, and they bend the rules:

She’s [the social worker] not allowed to say where you’re born but we got talking about the search business and there is a thing there, a listing of books like Searching in California, Searching in Indiana, Searching in Wisconsin, and Searching in Ohio, and I kind of read the list and went, “Searching in California, Searching in Indiana,” and she said, “Yes, that’s the one you want.”

Later chapters detail the surprising and overwhelming emotions that blindside all parties during an adoption reunion. If the focus falls naturally on that moment when an adoptee and birthparent first see each other, or speak to one another, I appreciated that one birthmother emphasized the long game:

I feel like I had nineteen years without her...So all that number of years on one side, then I have to wait until I have that many years knowing her before it equals out and then, I think, then I’ll look at it and see where we have come.

I remember (from the other side) that milestone in my own case.

I also remember, when I was a young adult, reading news about the US finally “normalizing” its relations with Vietnam. Twenty years had passed since the war had ended. I didn’t know the history, but I latched on to the idea. Sometimes, there must needs be a gap between the end of something, and normalizing the relations that it disrupted. An adoption reunion may be the end of a long separation that began, in some cases, at one party’s birth. But normalizing relations between adoptee and birthparent, and between the other pairs from the triad, can still be a long way off.