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Graphic: Teresa Jordan

ETHICAL ISSUES IN ADOPTION:

Introduction

Throughout history, adoption has been a practice surrounded by moral judgments. In this paper I will (1) trace the relationship between adoption and the way we formulate moral judgments, (2) consider the potential of new approaches to ethics which stress the importance of relationships rather than abstract universal principles, (3) reflect on the ethical dimension of institutional life as it impacts on adoption and, finally, (4) sketch out some practical implications with respect to a handful of adoption issues.

Given that ethical judgments are so bound up in adoptive practices, my central point will be that it is time for a reappraisal of these ethical theories themselves. The imposition of values has at times added to, rather than diminished, the pain and suffering of participants. I want to move us away from a view that reductively asks what ethical principle will tell us the right thing to do when confronted by the dynamic complexity and diversity of adoptive situations. The ethical possibilities inherent in adoption, I want to suggest, centre around our capacity to create value through expressing care for others in specific situations. It is the opportunity that adoption presents for all participants to feel either valued or worthless that shapes my concern. Furthermore, I believe that the human capacity for caring is fundamentally biased; it is biased towards those who are suffering. On this matter, I am in agreement with the critical theorist Theodor Adorno (in Cornell, 1992: 13) who wrote: 'The need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth.'

Adoption as a moral domain

The ethical issues involved in adoption reflect an ever-changing constellation of positive and negative concerns, shaped by historical and cultural circumstances. On the negative side, even though we live in relatively enlightened times, many adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents find that 'an anachronistic but potent stigma still clouds adoption.' (Judith Resnik in Lifton, 1994: 26) On the postitve side, adoptive practices have also been 'shaped by moral idealism' (Post, 1996: 430); that is, they have often been genuine attempts to respond to issues of personal misfortune, abandonment, social dislocation, birth rights, homelessness, illegitimacy and infertility. (cf. Lifton, 1994, 23ff) Many different types of moral understanding have been at work, but when we observe that adoption has been practiced throughout history and across many cultures, we should be wary of naively equating, say, the adoptive practices in Torres Strait Islander culture, with its specific familial relationships and responsibilities, with the institutionalisation of adoption in large-scale industrialised societies. To claim for the sake of definitional clarity that 'adoption is adoption is adoption', is already to devalue the cultural values and beliefs of others. Indeed, to see adoption as primarily a personal matter involving individual rights is already to exhibit a highly culturally specific western understanding.

A common thread throughout history been the ambiguity of adoptees in respect to the usual moral, legal and cultural significance attached to blood ties in most social arrangements. For much of history then, the clarification of birth-rights, for example legal rights to one's family and one's family's property, was important and determined along blood-lines. (Lifton, 1994:24) In the newly industrialised societies, problems of controlling women's fertility outside the conditions of marriage were exacerbated by social dislocation and immiseration of poorer families under the conditions of capitalism. In the nineteenth century, adoption laws emerged as a response to the plight of children, stressing adoption as an alternative to poor-houses and work-houses. While this interest was increasingly being directed to the plight of homeless and indigent children, moral approbation of uncontrolled fertility was at the same time directed at women, who were not to be supported in their immoral behaviour. Adoption was at one and the same time a system of care of the child and control of women. This strange intertwining of concern for the welfare of the child, moral assessment of the mother and belief in the potency of the blood-link is illustrated by a recurring comment on my birth mother's file that she was a 'nice type'. Apparently, in the departmental parlance of the time, birth mothers were either 'nice types' or 'not nice types', or whatever term they chose to write in the file. The children of nice types went to nice families; the children of not nice types might be expected to be more troublesome and were more likely to be relegated to a foster situation.

Eventually, a closed system was created in which records were sealed so that mothers, children and adoptive families could be spared the stigma of illegitimacy and the connection with dubious sexual practice that it implied. (Lifton, 1994: 14) However, what set out as a system for protecting adoptees from the stigma of illegitimacy quickly became a system which served the privacy needs of adoptive (usually infertile) families, protecting them from the birth family and aiding the 'naturalisation' of their family. All this was done 'in the best interests of the child'.

The effects of institutionalising moral judgments were devastating. As Kate Inglis (1984:1) put it, in such a system the adopted child feels they have become, fillius nullius, the child of no-one. And just as the universalising, civilising British justice system could impose its values on an inhabited Australian continent and declare it to be terra nullius, so too could utilitarian policies, formulated for the greater good of the greater number, define birth parents out of existence, bureaucratically rendering them invisible and legally inaccessible. It seems a short, but brutal step from 'you do not value land or children the same way we do' to 'you do not value land and children at all and we will take them from you.' 

Recently, advocacy of the human and civil rights of adoptees, has opened up adoption systems. Advocacy of the rights of birth mothers has followed. Under these new arrangements adoptive parent feel that they have taken over the mantle of moral approbation. (Verrier, 1993:159)

This potted history of adoption shows clearly that what was intended to be emancipatory can end up as domination. Over time, the improvements of one age, broken from their initial caring impulses and solidified into institutional patterns of response which are inattentive to individual suffering, can deteriorate into new forms of oppression. History also teaches us that 'adoption' can never be approached as a single-issue ethical domain. In fact, the variety of ways in which meaning has been given to adoption should makes us wary of seeking the right position. At the moment, when adoption systems are opening up, it is tempting to view the past as a lineal progression towards enlightenment. But in the past has not each incremental attempt to go one better always left further significant ethical issues in its wake? How can we prevent a revolution in adoption from simply replacing one set of imposed moral judgments with another? The fact that these moral judgments may be more just than previous arrangements, does not therefore justify imposing them with no concern for their suffering-effects. Could it be that our very ways of understanding moral issues create as many problems as they solve?

I think we need to give closer attention to some matters often overlooked in traditional ethical approaches such: (1) an understanding of ethics as something quite distinct from imposed systems of morality; (2) the ethical significance of relationships as distinct from abstract sets of principles; and (3) the ethical dimensions of institutions. Indeed, the lessons of the past suggest that the future ethical possibilities in adoption will be better addressed by giving closer attention to caring for the plight of all participants, than it will be from seeking impartial and universal solutions.

New ways of understanding ethics

Explicitly philosophical reflection on the ethics of adoption has been scant in recent years. Indicative, but not perhaps definitive, is a quick survey of the Philosopher's Index , academic philosophers' most important research tool, apart from their minds. In the last eleven years, there were eleven periodical articles published on ethics and adoption. Of these, the majority discussed adoption as a by-product of neon-light issues such as new reproductive technologies and surrogacy (6) and abortion (1). Of the remaining four, one was on transracial adoption (Smith, 1996), two were by the same author (Post, 1992 & 1996) (with essentially the same argument) and one was a commentary on one of those articles (Mahowald, 1996).

Ethical issues are no doubt taken up in ad hoc ways elsewhere; for example, in the psychological and social welfare literature, but this lack of explicit attention on the part of philosophers reflects the general difficulty many moral theories have had in addressing the ethics of personal relationships. The very language of much ethical deliberation is biased towards the consideration of the individual's assessment of ethical dilemmas and their rational appraisal of the ethical situation from the point of view of personal autonomy and impartiality. The language of ethics as a discipline, then, biases our understanding of intimate personal relationships and human bonds. Brenda Almond (1991: 60) writes that it is a 'curious linguistic habit' of liberal philosophers to devalue bonds such as religion, race or country, preferring family and friends as the outer, and very marginal, limits of the private concerns. Intimate close bonds are problematic for philosophical traditions which cultivate intellectual detachment and pit reason against emotions, and radically divide the concerns the public and private spheres. Unbonding, according to Almond (1991: 65), has been interpreted as a philosophical ideal by stoics, existentialists and also, latterly, some radical feminists, who view women's nurturing role as imposed and exploitative and stress ideals of emotional independence as foundational to human liberation. Yet, this abstract, decontextualised, disembodied person is a peculiarly western focus of valuing. As Judith Parker (1991: 297) has pointed out, 'For other cultures ontological primacy resides in the group rather than the individual.' Value judgments about adoption, then, would have different starting points in those other cultures.

Most modern moral theories, whether based on utilitarianism, principles, or rights, have tried to provide a set of rules to guide interactions with strangers, and relatively little effort has been directed to specific moral obligations that might accompany our special relationship to other people such as spouses, family members, lovers, or close friends. (cf. Hinman, 1994:260) Most ethics has been shaped from the point of view of moral deliberation from on high, from the perspective of the universe, effectively modelling itself on the notion of a sovereign ruler (in this case, reason) who deliberates and adjudicates over the messy disputes of the rabble below. From this point of view, universality is equated with objectivity and fairness, consideration of close relationships is viewed as a dangerous source of bias, of potential subversion of the rational. Don Cupitt (1988:30) provides us with a vivid metaphor. In film-making, the General View is considered cooler and more objective than the Close Up. 'The Close Up is challenging, emotive, perspectival and very "hot"'. Anyone who has tried to implement policies designed for strangers in practical situations will have felt a similar heat. Close up, adoption issues and experiences involve all participants at very deep and emotionally challenging levels.

As we get to more intimate levels we come to appreciate how universalising grand theory is often experienced as an imposed system of domination. Druscilla Cornell (1992) has written of the need to understand this experience of morality as a system of domination, which constrains and limits others (effectively rendering them invisible or marginal) and to clearly distinguish it from what she calls ethical relations; that is, relations based on the non-violation of others.

Emerging out of this philosophical and practical concern to revalue the sphere of personal relationships there has emerged a so-called 'ethic of care' approach which stresses the ethical significance of concrete relationships (and attachment) over against universalising grand-theories which privilege intellectual detachment. It was initially based on the descriptive, psychological work of Carol Gilligan (1982) who documented gender differences in the way ethical situations were confronted. Her work set off a deep questioning in many quarters as to whether debate on ethical issues should turn on matters of principle or whether the quality of relationships involved was a fundamental reference point for ethical decision-making.

Rather than being about rules, universality and impartial consideration of consequences, morality is about caring, 'a direct relationship of emotional responsiveness to the suffering of persons, both self and other.' (Hinman, 1994: 331) While this may sound a bit airy-fairy to some tastes, it really means reading practical situations for their potential to generate caring responses; that is, as ways forward which actively express value in practice, rather than reading them as opportunities for detached discussion in which some are made to feel worthless. While it was possible under the old paradigm to be a moral philosopher without seeking moral engagement, this should be impossible from the point of view of an ethics of care.

An ethic of care is not simply the replacement of reason with emotion, nor does it mean making a principle of caring the new universalising grand theory. As Peta Bowden (1997) has persuasively demonstrated, the ethical significance of caring cannot be detached from the practical settings in which it is expressed and it will mean different things as it is expressed in a wide variety of specific relationships; for example, mothering, fathering, friendship, sexual intimacy, nursing, criminal justice and citizenship.

A care ethic is in many ways more practical than traditional philosophical approaches. It focuses on lived experience and adds to our capacity for reasoning 'a sensitive appreciation of practical needs, caring responses to those needs and the wisdom resulting from such encounters.' (Campbell et al., 1997: 14) Furthermore, rather than being an amorphous, unfocused emotional response, an ethics of care prioritises our concerns. 'A care ethic focuses primarily on two kinds of consequences: (1) the extent to which people might be hurt by a particular decision and (2) the degree to which a particular decision might diminish the sense of connectedness among the participants in the situation.' (Hinman, 1994: 335) Healing and reconciliation are central to an ethic of care. The method by which these are determined is strongly intersubjective, not the product of detached calculation of consequences in academic or bureaucratic isolation; rather, 'the caring person attempts to weigh consequences by talking with the participants and allowing them to participate actively in the process.' (Hinman, 1994, 335)

Those working in the field of human services are familiar with the gap between policy and implementation. The impersonal context of policy where decisions must be made for large numbers of people who are strangers to us encourages utilitarian approaches which address the needs of the many at the expense of the few. These policies, however, must always be implemented in personal contexts where utilitarianism can have unpleasant unintended consequences, often destroying the very relationships which the policy aims to recover or protect. Those mediating reunions under more open adoption systems, for example, are aware that opening a system does not necessarily also open hearts and much emotional trauma can still be involved.

Before I return to consider some implications of an ethic of care for some specific adoption issues let me first mention another important shift in ethical thinking: consideration of the moral dimension of institutional practices.

Adoption as an institution

We are used to considering moral issues as belonging to rational individual deliberation and that public institutions, not having minds of their own, are the domain of irrational social forces and group pressures which can only subvert moral deliberation. Furthermore, because of their very power, some are suspicious of all institutions as potential imposers of particular values to the exclusion and active marginalisation and denigration of others. But institutions do not go away and a consequence of this suspicion of their moral potential is that, in practice, our institutions continue to impose other type of values, economic, administrative, technical and so on.

For all their negative effects, we need to seriously consider institutions; not the least because many areas of concern to us are the product of social, not individual, choices. If we encounter homeless people in our cities we know that our individual response, though important, will be inadequate by itself. People are not homeless just because individuals have made them so; homelessness is a combination of factors including long-term unemployment, changing practices in industry, gentrification of the inner city and de-institutionalisation (Bellah, et al.,1992).  A knowledge that we are shaped by and shape our institutions is important; more important is the confidence that we can shape the way in which our institutions express value.

It is tempting to see adoption as a private and personal matter, but it too is also an institution. As in other institutions, the fate of individuals has not always been the product of their conscious individual choices. Papers elsewhere in this collection by Tricia Farrer and Dian Wellfare vividly document the way in which the choices of birth mothers were constrained not only by personal and familial pressures but also institutions such as homes for unwed mothers, state adoption services and hospitals. These institutions expressed value by routines and practices which silenced birth mothers and privileged adoptive parents, even to the extent of encouraging the direct circumvention of legal responsibilities. To maintain the fiction that all birth mothers gave informed consent for their child's adoption is becoming increasingly hard to sustain in the face of the evidence and the ethical discussion should move on from issues of consent to issues of reparation.

Clearly, some birth mothers did value, and continue to value, adoption in a closed system. Their attitude often reflects the pain of their personal struggle with specific situations in the past. When shaping our present responses, we need to be attentive to each individual's story and circumstances. We do not care for birth mothers if we do not care about past injustices; equally, we do not care for them by ignoring their deeply felt fears and anxieties. That does not mean, however, that we cannot attempt to persuade others to change their point of view.

Tim Costello (1996), reflecting on the way in which institutions are changing in Victoria, has observed the emergence of two competing set of values, or story-lines, as to how institutional practices should be shaped. One story--line, currently being played out, stresses values of customership, user-pays, growth and profit, private ownership, competition and individualism. An opposing story-line, while giving some recognition to these in their proper context, gives priority in the provision of public services to values of citizenship, the common good, social value, co-operation and community. The competing story-lines between concern for growth and profits and concern for social values have obvious implications for the future provision of adoptive services, just as the competing story-lines between concern for the community and concern for individual will shape the ethical contours of the so-called trans-racial adoption issue (Smith, 1996). Space does not permit their exploration here.

Adoption as a set of relationships

How can an ethic of care help illuminate some of the specific issues involved in adoption? Let me address a handful of random issues: (1) the question of 'who is the real mother'; (2) the moral significance of bearing children; (3) the need for directing attention to the quality of relationships rather than quantifying alleged harm effects; (4) the moral deficiency of a closed system of adoption; and (5) the need for a clear bias towards those who are suffering.

One of the perennial points of contention between adoptive parents and birth parents is the question of who is the 'real' parent. Often, attempts by adoptees to contact their birth parents are felt as a devaluing of the adoptive parent's role and identity. This may be so even if the adoptive parent at a conscious level has encouraged the adoptee's search. Searching necessarily involves a commitment of time and emotional energy, which is not drawn from an infinite store. In practice, then, some relative revaluation does take place. This felt competition between adoptive parents and birth parents is an external reality, but it is also felt as an internal conflict for the adoptee.

Obviously, it does not help if the issues are intellectually framed so that parenting is defined according to one essentialist set of criteria which excludes other real relationships. 'True parent' should not be seen as an flag to be won in a win-lose contest. Looking at parenting from the point of view of relationships rather than essences, birth parents and adoptive parents have quite distinctive relationships with their children and the ethical possibilities inherent in those relationships flow from these quite distinctive roles. Collapsing them into one is not a good thing.

The strength of Nancy Verrier's (1993) work is that it explores the significance of prenatal experiences. The adopted child has already been in a significant relationship with the birth mother. That relationship was full of ethical possibilities as the birth mother cared for the child in utero; at the time, she even may have decided to relinquish out of concern for the child. Of course, this might not have been the case and the child may have been traumatised in utero, but this just underlines the ethical significance of the relationship. That pregnancy and birthing matter is confirmed by the fact that, generally, for birth fathers, relinquishing is seldom regretted or criticised. (Mahowald, 1996:438)

The desire for contact between birth mother and child is not so much, then, the claiming of an abstractly defined right; rather, it is better viewed as a natural expression of care and concern for a person with whom one has had a significant relationship. The prenatal relationship remains for both birth mother and adoptee an important part of their narrative sense of self; that is, the sense in which one's personal identity is defined in terms of a past, a present and a future. Whatever quantifiable harms may flow from the trauma of adoption (and here contending parties will produce their respective evidence), attention to caring as a qualitative feature of ethical relations would seem to always demand a practical concern for how the birth mother and child have faired over time. What I hear Verrier saying is that when adoptions do proceed all participants must remain open and attentive to each others needs. Caring for others will mean that we will be sensitive to the hurts involved in all areas of human need: survival, well-being, identity (personal and cultural) and freedom. We must seek to balance these concerns and not pit them off one against the other.

Whatever happens, we must continue to care. Adoption, as a system of care, of genuine care for children and mothers and adoptive parents, can only work if all participants adopt the fundamental ethical stance of other-directed concern. Self-interest has no place in adoptive practices. If some participants are uncaring, then, to the best of our ability, we a morally entitled to educate and persuade (but not force) them to change.

Caring, rather than being a vague feeling, involves the thoughtful exercise of a number of practical skills such as 'the ability to detect vulnerability and insecurity, the ability to notice and read silences, the ability to moderate one's action so as not to dominate or override the views of others, the ability to see ourselves as others see us, and the ability to appreciate the felt but unspoken needs of those with whom one is dealing.' (Campbell et al., 1997:14) Adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents and those that assist them already know how important these practical virtues, rather than intellectual skills, are to ethical outcomes in adoption.

If the way forward lies in close attention to the ethical possibilities of personal practices of caring in personal relationships, then we should not support a system in which matters of care and responsibility are no longer required. The possibilities to practice care are diminished in closed systems of adoption where individuals are isolated from each other. Also, legal secrecy legitimates secrecy in personal relationships, and tempts a crossing of the fragile boundary between secrecy and lies. The motivation might be noble in intention, to protect the child from emotional disturbances, but it can only be done in a way that forever excludes the person lied to from any responsible input. I cannot exercise care and responsibility in a condition of ignorance. Sissela Bok (1989), in her review of lying in public and private life, observed that in almost every case the attempt to morally justify lying is a one-sided affair; it is justified from the point of view of the liar. Lying has rarely been morally advocated from the point of view of those lied to. I have written elsewhere on my own personal experience of being lied to by my adoptive parents for twenty-four years (Jordan, 1995). What hurt most deeply about being at the centre of an elaborately sustained fiction was that, for all our life together, there was at the heart of my relation with my adoptive mother, a lack of truthfulness, a lack of trust in me as a person to handle the truth. It is the very nature of secrecy and lying that they diminish our capacity to value and care for others in an inclusive way.

Some may view these comments as biased by my own experiences. I will admit it; experience has shaped my voice in these matters. Accusations of bias are also directed at authors such as Nancy Verrier and Betty Jean Lifton, who write about their experiences with those involved in the adoption triangle. Their sample of information is biased by the clinical setting, it is claimed (cf. Post, 1996; Bartholet, 1993); they are only dealing with those who have had negative reactions to adoption or relinquishment. That may be that case, but it would not be fruitful at this point to attempt quantitative comparisons. As Australia's stolen generation found out to their detriment, quantitative considerations of educational and economic advantage can be severely and tragically detrimental to the quality of relationships. From the point of view of an ethic of care, the quantity of suffering or disadvantage, while important, is not the key issue and comes dangerously close to playing the same game that has justified oppressive practices in the past. From a care perspective, the ethical possibilities lie in our capacity to listen to the voices of those who are suffering and to respond through sensitive caring practices which promote non-violative judgment, negotiation and understanding.

The richness of a conference such as this is its capacity to hear many voices. All voices should be respectfully listened to, but not all voices will have equal claim to our responsive action. If we care, we listen for those voices which express sorrow and pain as well as celebration and triumph, but in the end the ethical possibilities of caring practices lie in privileging those who express hurt. The need to let suffering speak, then, is not only the condition of all truth but the very corner-stone of care as an ethical approach to adoption which has the non-violation of others as it goal.
 

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