Adoption

A Brief Social and Cultural History

P. Conn

• Éditeur: Palgrave Pivot
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137333919
• Sujet: Ciencias sociales
• Sous-sujet: Matrimonio y sociología familiar

Combining advocacy and memoir with social and cultural history, this book offers a comparative, cross-cultural survey of the whole history of adoption that is grounded in the author's personal experience.

1

Doing What Comes Naturally

Conn, Peter. Adoption: A Brief Social and Cultural History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137333919.

In 1976, on an otherwise pleasant weekend afternoon in March, my wife Terry and I confronted a serio-comic dilemma. We were filling in one of (what seemed like) several thousand forms required to legalize the adoption of our Korean daughter, Jennifer, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Jennifer was our fourth child, and the first we had adopted. Jennifer had come to us, at a bit over two years old—her birth date is uncertain—malnourished and covered with sores, from an orphanage outside Seoul, a place with a fifty percent mortality rate. Which is to say, children either got out fairly quickly or they died. Korea’s laws and customs conspired to make it almost certain that Jennifer would not find a home in her own country.

Given these high stakes, Terry and I were studiously patient with any and all red tape and inefficiency. Until Jennifer’s adoption was final, she could, at least in theory, be taken from us and sent back. So we paid numberless fees and filled out countless forms. Knowing how urgent our task was, Terry and I plodded through the paperwork, meekly and honestly answering every question, however intrusive, until we came to this one:

“How many natural children do you have?”

We paused. We groaned. We laughed. We knew what the Commonwealth’s bureaucrats meant. They thought they were asking: “how many non-adoptive children do you have?”

In fact, the bureaucrats had tripped over an obvious but venerable semantic mistake. Think about it. If the three children we already had, who had joined our family via the more traditional reproductive route, were “natural,” then poor Jennifer was being consigned to a bin labeled “unnatural.”

I used to tell this story as a small joke. It is not a joke. Many years ago, John Stuart Mill described the word “unnatural” as “one of the most vituperative epithets in the language,” an assessment that remains true a century and a half later.¹

We drafted a long, respectful letter, in which we thought we might enclose an edited version of the requisite form in which we would cross out “natural” and replace it with “non-adoptive.”² Writing the letter made us feel better for an hour or two, but then we came to our senses, deposited our unsent letter in the nearest waste basket, and simply complied with the form’s demand. We couldn’t risk the delay that would surely follow any argument with the commonwealth’s functionaries.

“Three natural children,” we testified through clenched teeth.

I use the story to introduce the subject of this first chapter: just what is “natural”?

There may not be a more vexed or vexatious word in the English language. “Nature,” and its adjectival sibling, “natural,” have an exceptionally complicated, contentious, and sometimes downright contradictory history. Raymond Williams, in his influential book Keywords, called it “perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Williams identified three large, overlapping but distinct areas of meaning: the essential character of something, the inherent force that directs individuals and the world, and the material world itself.³

Whether intentionally or not, in emphasizing the elusiveness of “nature” Williams was following John Stuart Mill. In the posthumously published essay, “Nature,” Mill observes that the word, in its various forms, is at once ubiquitous and opaque. Used indiscriminately to denote so many different entities and phenomena, nature has become a cause of confusion rather than clarity:

Nature, natural, and the group of words derived from them, or allied to them in etymology, have at all times filled a great place in the thoughts and taken a strong hold on the feelings of mankind. That they should have done so is not surprising, when we consider what the words, in their primitive and most obvious signification, represent; but it is unfortunate that they [have become] one of the most copious sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law.⁴

Today, most of us would associate the word “nature” with the third of Raymond Williams’s definitions: the visible world, and specifically the parts of the world that have not been manufactured or altered by humans—sea and sky, plants and animals, clouds and mountains, rivers and forests.

Or, in the grander language of the Oxford English Dictionary, “nature” denotes (among many other things), “A state unaffected by human intervention; spec. (with reference to plants or animals) a wild condition that is not the result of cultivation, breeding, or rearing; (with reference to minerals or land) an uncultivated, unworked, or undeveloped state.”

This is the nature of Wordsworth and Romantic poetry, the nature that “never did betray the heart that loved her,” the nature of unspoiled views and birdsong, the nature that offers a retreat from the noise and congestion of the modern city.

Mother Nature: nurturing, simple, warm, safe.

Something like pastoral is at work here, a genre that can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans. Poems of this type attach moral significance to the contrast between city and country: immorality and sophisticated forms of vice lurk in the city, while the country is the abode of innocence and simplicity. It is, after all, the place of the natural.

That combination of aesthetic and moral judgment has lingered to this day. Rural second homes afford affluent city-dwellers temporary escape from their hectic urban lives, and from the dangers that have always lurked in cities. Even politics resonates with the echoes of old pastoral hierarchies: “real Americans,” we are often told, live in small towns, in the “heartland,” anywhere other than the urbanized Left and Right Coasts.

Those small towns, which Americans have in fact been abandoning for over a century, retain the symbolic allure of “authenticity.” Here is where a cluster of earlier and allegedly superior American values still repose, where neighborly and face-to-face transactions take place between people who know and trust one another. The myth has survived its repeated disproof. (Among other disproofs, crime is now a bigger problem in rural and suburban locales than in most American cities.)

That assumption of authenticity hovers over the idea of the “natural.” It is the “way things are”: to invoke nature is to claim the legitimacy of the presumed order of things. What is not natural—to reflect again on our scuffle with Pennsylvania’s adoption bureaucrats—is more or less self-evidently artificial, something that has been made up, invented rather than simply “there.” An essay on adoption in nineteenth-century Japan opens with the sentence, “Adoption is a long-standing system of fictional kinship.” And a recent book on adoption in early modern France bears the title Blood Ties and Fictive Ties.⁵

And of course what is fictional is patently not natural. Meeting our adopted Korean daughter for the first time, well-meaning strangers would often ask whether we also had children “of our own.” That phrase is one of the many ways in which ordinary language choices stigmatize adoptive kinship. Barely concealed under this question is the assertion, if not “our own,” then someone else’s, and not ours at all.

This is not a new attitude. Back in 1929, social work educator Jessie Taft had this to say on the subject: “No one who is not wilfully deluded would maintain that the experiences of adoption can take the place of the actual bearing and rearing of an own child.”⁶

This sad comment is made even more self-lacerating by the fact that Jessie Taft was the mother of two children, both of them adopted.

What is fictional is also not real. In an essay called “Kith and Kin,” Julian Pitt-Rivers observes that the people of several regions, including southern Spain, Mexico, and Peru, “commonly distinguish between ‘real’ kinship and adopted kin; and the distinction is significant, since only the ‘real’ kin are fully part of the kinship system.”⁷

Full disclosure. Our daughter Jennifer apparently once agreed that adoption does not bring “real” kinship. On a memorable afternoon in 1978, three years after her arrival, and in the midst of an argument about something or other now long forgotten by both of us, she paused, lifted her five-year-old self to her full height, pierced me with a steely gaze, and announced in a low, steady voice: “You are not my real father. I am going back to Korea to find my real father.”

Now, I had been prepared for this moment. During the long adoption process, our ever-cheerful social worker had warned me that such statements are not uncommon, that I should not be alarmed, that Jennifer would almost certainly not resort to this particular tactic more than a couple of times, that she wouldn’t really mean it—in short, keep it in perspective, and all would soon be well.

Despite all that sensible advice, my immediate reaction to Jennifer’s declaration was, of course, to burst into tears. My blubbering, apparently, was more than she had bargained for. She instantly transformed herself from adversary into nurse and did what she could to console me. Nonetheless, her accusation proved that she instinctively understood the power of the word “real.”⁸

Years ago, in a provocative book called American Kinship: A Cultural Account, David Schneider investigated what he called the “two orders” of kinship that Americans used to distinguish human relationships: the order of nature and the order of law. The “order of nature” includes persons who share the same substance, specifically the same blood; these are relationships constructed in biogenetic terms, and derived from sexual intercourse. According to Schneider, these connections are perceived by Americans to be objective, permanent, and unalterable. The “order of law,” by contrast, includes persons related by choices such as marriage and adoption. Such relationships, Schneider argues, are not understood by Americans to have the “strength” of biogenetic ties.⁹

Because it is seen to lie outside the order of nature, adoption’s assumed eccentricity—indeed its presumptive deviance—is sometimes revealed by its absence from explorations of the family.¹⁰ In The History of the Fa...