Facts from The Adoption Mystique: A Hard-hitting Exposé of the Powerful Negative Social Stigma that Permeates Child Adoption in the United States.
The Scope
• Adoption may directly affect one in eight America families. There are no reliable statistics about the number of adopted children and adults in the Untied States. For every adopted person add at least one adoptive parent, two birthparents, plus additional siblings, grandparents, and other extended kinship.
• The adoption industry gains authority and control of adoption policies and practice from the desperation, neediness and powerlessness of the unwed mothers, infertile couples, and adoptees it serves
American Adoption: A Shame Based Culture
• The dominant culture places its highest value on procreative parenthood. Society perceives adoption as “second best,” or the choice of last resort.
• Adoption is a social convention contrived to artificially imitate and purposefully substitute for what most people consider the real thing.
• Adoption artificially creates, intimately resembles, and is meant to be equivalent to non-adoptive parent-child legal and kinship ties. It is not the same.
• All children of adoption have two sets of parents. Blood ties and a common ancestry connect them to their birth parents in a way not possible with their adoptive parents.
• For much of the twentieth century the only choice for white, single daughters of the middle, upper middle, and upper classes “caught” in an out of out of wedlock pregnancy was to surrender their “mistake” to adoption, with society forever marking their offspring “bad seed.”
• An out of wedlock pregnancy was a public symbol of a women's transgression. The punishment for unwed mothers was the relinquishment of their babies. But to be born out of wedlock is not the same as being adopted. The culture only profiles the adopted child once the fact of his or her adoption is made known.
• The influence of environmentalism and a belief in the supremacy of nurture over nature—during the earlier part of the twentieth century— dominated adoption practice, leading to a belief that a “clean break” between the child and his or her hereditary history and genetic origins was in the best interest of the child.
• In an attempt to render the adopted child indistinguishable from other children in the community the adoption process amends the birth certificate, confers a new identity, and seals birth and adoption records.
• The intent behind confidential court proceedings, and sealed birth and adoption records was to cut old parental ties, and replace them with “new” ones.
• Much of adoptive practice was based on social attitudes and values originated in the context of society more than eighty years ago.
• Arguably, the clearest most public manifestation of the stigmatization of adoption is in the oppressive, repressive, unequal treatment of adopted persons as non-entities, their heritage held hostage by the District of Columbia and forty-five out of fifty states.
The Adopted Child: Clinical Issues and Psychosocial Problems in Living
• The culture's pervasive bias toward reproductive family structure; social work's historic affinity for psychodynamic theory; and the literature on the adopted child, from Florence Clothier (1943) and others exert a dominant, prejudiced and persistent negative influence on public and professional perceptions of adopted children.
• Society fails to recognize that adoption, like divorce, is a condition extrinsic to the child. Labeling them adopted children, not children of adoption, like children of divorce, or children of alcoholics, suggests otherwise.
• The omnipresent perception that adoptive family structure is deficient, and that the adopted child is faulty or flawed— and in need of treatment— associates adoption with mal-adaptation. Adoptive status is associated with psychopathology.
• Perhaps nowhere does the psychiatric literature on the adopted child represent a greater confluence of imagination, interpretation, and psychoanalytic theory, politics, social attitudes, child welfare principles and adoption practice then over the meaning of search.
• Adopted persons wanting to search for their roots are suspect. Presumptions about their unhappiness, dissatisfaction, low self-concept and low self-esteem prevail. Non-adopted persons are not subject to similar assumptions when persuing knowledge of their roots.
• Despite many claims to the contrary, no emotional or adjustment problem has been reliably identified as specific to adopted persons. Studies that compare groups of adoptive with non-adoptive children in psychiatric settings fail to demonstrate a unique relationship between maladjustment and being adopted.
Discrimination Against the Adoptee
• Adoptive stratus carries with it social disgrace, disapproval, and legally sanctioned discrimination.
• The child's adoptive status, not his or her genes, nor illegitimate birth, singularly renders him or her different. Adopted persons become identified with a group that is stigmatized as being different, and inferior.
• Biased, stigmatic and stereotypic thinking, beliefs, opinions, attitudes and myths about the adopted child proliferate and endure.
• Negative adoptee archetypes are embedded in the cultural psyche.
The Task of Telling
• If people believed that telling children they are adopted would be perceived as good news, the difficulty with what to say, when and how to say it would not exist.
Anti-Adoptee Media Bias
• The media keeps labeling 30, 40, 50, 60 year old adopted persons as “adopted children,” reflecting a tenacious pattern of adult adoptee infantilism.
Open Record Legislation
• Before the 1940's, U. S. child adoptions were less secret and more open. Birth and adoption records were generally not sealed.
• In the 1940's and 50's states began to place adoptee's original birth certificates under court seal—substituting an amended birth certificate naming the adoptive parents as the parents— and substituting a new name in place of the original name of the adopted child.
• The abrogation of adopted person's civil rights is based solely on their adoptive status, a reason that is wholly beyond their control. Except for adoption there would be no abrogation of adopted person's rights, and no basis for prejudicial and discriminatory treatment.
• Essential to any shame based adoption legislation is the perception that adopted children are “dirty little secrets” that come from “bad seed.” “Dirty little secret” legislation functions to restrict and deny adopted persons access to their heritage, protect the status quo, and maintain negative adoption stereotypes.
• Adopted persons do not search for “mommy and daddy.” For them, the central point of a search is the need to know their identity—to find their roots.
• Re a birthmother's right to privacy: A 1997 decision by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit Court (Doe v. Sundquist) ruled that no one has a constitutional right to preserve his or her anonymity from their offspring.
• Re promises of confidentiality to birthmothers : No document has ever been produced containing a single promise of confidentiality.
Research
• Empirical adoption research is limited in quality, quantity and scope. It almost always lacks control group information—therefore failing to demonstrate any unique characteristic associated with adopted persons that is not characteristic of a corresponding non-adoptive population.
© 2007 by Joanne Wolf Small. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.