Surrogacy and Birth Certificates

At times, I think we're living in the future.  Crazy technologies exist that people couldn't have possibly imagined fifty years ago are now parts of daily life that we don't even consider. Our embrace of new technologies sometimes outpaces our willingness to think about the long term consequences of the application of all kinds of new technologies.

New reproductive technologies have allowed many people who would not have been able to have their own children to have children to parent.  It is an extremely touchy topic these days, particularly in the context of an increasing number of states recognizing the legality of gay marriage and adoption.  

[Standard adoptee disclaimers apply: I don't hate my parents, I don't hate gay parents, I don't hate anyone's parents, etc etc etc.]

The adoptee community has been up in arms about gay civil liberties issues because the enfranchisement of gay couples as legitimate legal families has immediate consequences for issues of adoption.  It is very hard to write about and analyze the critical intersections of between LBGTQ civil rights and adoption without sounding homophobic. [For the record, I'm a supporter of LBGTQ civil rights.  Greater civil rights for everyone can only be a good thing.] It would never be my intention to come across as insensitive to the very real issues that gay couples face in their efforts to secure their own civil rights, but my fear is that in their own struggles to secure legal rights, gay couples are participating in the oppression of adoptee rights.  

Being recognized as legal family has huge implications for gay couples who have long been denied basic civil liberties and rights that heterosexual couples enjoy: the right to a legally recognized marriage, the right to spousal benefits in the workplace, the right to parent.  Its this last point that has the adoption community up in arms.  The fears are these:

First, that the increased number of legally recognized married couples unable to have their own children [for whatever reason] is going to lead to a greater number of adoptions.   The fear here is that gay couples will want to adopt newborns.  Adoptee rights activists have been trying to decrease the number of newborn adoptions for years now, pointing out that newborn adoptions should be an absolute last resort.  Adoption should only exist to provide homes for children who need them, not for parents who want them. [See the post about the Cheerios commercial.] There is some evidence that gay couples tend to adopt children from foster care, as well as the children considered more difficult to place for adoption.  Adoptee rights activists would love nothing more than for gay parents to adopt foster care kids [who really genuinely do need homes].  We just don't want an increased demand for newborns to increase the already gargantuan size of the current multi-billion dollar adoption-industrial complex.

Second, new reproductive technologies like sperm banks and surrogates are making actual biological reproduction for gay couples a possibility and raising issues about the effects of these technologies on the lives of the children created as a result of their use. Reproductive technologies sound like great news, but there are some very real fears that the demand for these technologies in the pursuit of the creation of children on demand will lead to some very serious ethical problems.  Just recently came this story about a Thai surrogate who opted to keep a Down's syndrome baby twin after refusing the request of the biological parents that she abort. Renting the uteruses of poor women in developing countries preys on the poverty of women in places like Thailand and essentially turns them into breeding cows to create children on demand for cash. Its worrisome that surrogacy is now being marketed as a normal way to start a family.  Sperm banks are no better, as their confidentiality policies leave children without any links to fully half of their biological information and leave them in the same place as adoptees in terms of access to information about themselves.  

Third, the issue of amended birth certificates is the absolutely most sore point about gay adoption and the one that has outraged the adoptee rights community.  The problem is that in their desire to establish their own civil rights, gay adoptive parents are adding support and weight to one of the most despised parts of the entire adoption process: the amended birth certificate.  As most adoptive parents, gay parents want their own names on the amended birth certificate instead of the biological parents' names in their efforts to establish legal parentage.  The adoptee rights community has been fighting for years to halt the mutilation of the birth certificates of adopted people and it is disheartening and disappointing to see gay parents continue to demand that birth certificates be filled with false information that does not reflect the child's biological truth.  If I had one thing to say to potential gay adoptive parents, it would be this: PLEASE HELP STOP THE PRACTICE OF AMENDED BIRTH CERTIFICATES RATHER THAN DEMAND THE LEGAL FALSIFICATION OF THE BIRTH CERTIFICATES OF ADOPTED PEOPLE.  EVERYONE DESERVES TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR ORIGINS.

The massive ethical problems that arise from the use of new reproductive technologies to create children for families who want them are not new to adoptees.  The adoptee rights community has been talking about this for a long time.  The people who are going to bear the brunt of consequences of these ethical issues are, of course, the children involved.

Adoptees and Amended Birth Certificates In Ireland

Despite the fact that genealogy is one of the most popular national hobbies, its a difficult sport to participate in if you happen to be adopted.  People love discussing families, origins, immigration stories, and making family trees.  These activities are considered trivial concerns for adoptees, who aren't supposed to care about the details of DNA, blood, medical history, genealogy, family roots or origins.

Irish adoptees were back in the news this morning, with the Daily Mirror reporting that nearly 60,000 Irish adoptees have no legal rights to information about their own identities or histories.  The article reports that because Irish adoptees are forbidden from obtaining their original birth certificates, they face considerable obstacles in finding their "real" parents.  [Side note: the article headline really did say, "real parents." Cue the predictable backlash.]  Some adoptees, the Mirror reports, have had their birth certificates forged, making searching for their biological families that much harder.

I don't know if in Ireland adopted people are subject to the same type of legal falsification (read: forgery) as adoptees in the United States, but it wouldn't surprise me.  Despite public pretenses of adoption as a wholly positive event, it is still shrouded in secrecy and the birth certificates  of adopted children are routinely mutilated in order to make the child appear legally as if born to the adopted parents.  Even today with "open" adoptions being the norm, childrens' birth certificates are regularly changed to hide other people's identities and histories and proclaim new ownership as if a birth certificate was somehow as malleable and temporary as a car title.

Secrecy and the legal fictions necessary to create a new family start the snowball of lies that continue to torment adoptees.  The very foundations of our lives have been fictionalized--is it any wonder that so many of us struggle with questions of identity?  I read recently on an adoptive parent blog that adoptive parents should make sure to write down and document their "adoption journey" so that they could share this history with the child someday.  I hope that someday adoptive parents understand that their child's story is different than their own.  My personal story didn't start with my legal parents--it started it very different circumstances that I was never supposed to care about or want to know.  

The shaky foundations of secrecy and lies that built the modern practice of adoption are part of the reason that its so hard now to reverse sealed record laws and restore adoptees' legal access to their own information.  A healthy sense of self can't be built on lies and neither can a legal institution that's supposed to be devoted to the welfare of children.  We deserve nothing less than honesty, openness, and transparency in order to combat the shame and secrecy of earlier eras that resulted in unjust and unfair laws.

Primate Maternal Deprivation Experiments

Among the many things that Google sends me alerts for, news about non- human primates seems to generate the greatest number of posts. When I originally set up this news alert, I thought that I'd get periodic conservation stories and occasional feel-good news about chimpanzee retirement. This was not to be because of two interesting and interrelated factors I've learned:

1. Non-human primates are often in the news 
2. Non-human primates are often the center of great controversy

Today's news, brought to us by the website Isthmus, has to do with proposed maternal deprivation experiments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  If you aren't already up-to-date on non-human primate research history, UW was also the university where psychology Harry Harlow conducted his experiments to measure love and attachment on monkeys in order to evaluate the nature of the maternal bond.  Harlow's research was, and still is, quite controversial.  At its worst, it subjected baby monkeys to extreme psychological damage from which they never recovered.  Harlow's experiments, nonetheless, yielded some important findings; namely, his research showed that the maternal bond between a mother and infant is about more than just a physiological need for food.  Mothers, Harlow discovered, play a crucial role in the psychological and emotional well-being of their young. Today, this sounds like a complete no-brainer [and clearly, Harlow never interviewed actual, you know, mothers], but at the time, this was quite revolutionary thinking.  This research helped to destroy the popular idea that children shouldn't be touched or nurtured, lest they become spoiled and needy, as well as called into question the conventional wisdom that dictated the institutionalization of orphaned children.  Most importantly, Harlow's research indicated that children need families, and specifically, nurturing from the mother, in order to flourish.

Fast forward to today. UW is still in the non-human primate research biz, despite the fact that non-human primates are being retired and the validity of experiments with them and their applications to humans are being called into question.  UW's latest experiment involves, 

"...[the removal of] 20 newborn rhesus monkeys from their mothers, give them anxiety-inducing tests for a year, and kill them along with another 20 infant monkeys used as a control group. The researchers hope to learn more about how trauma and stress early in life affect emotional development in humans -- and how it can be treated."

Killing baby monkeys in the name of science has provoked a strong outcry from the UW community. Several people have also questioned the ethical issues surrounding the intentional creation of depression and anxiety in the animals for the purpose of developing medications to treat these conditions.  The loudest outcry seems to revolve around the issue of taking the monkeys away from their mothers at birth.

So here's my question: if we, as a society, recognize the inherent ethical issues of removing baby monkeys from their mothers, why do we not extend that recognition to human children?  Human children get removed from their mothers at birth all the time as part of the adoption machine and I've yet to hear an equal outcry.  If we can recognize the psychological dangers and potential damages to breaking the maternal bond in animals, why do we refuse to consider that removing baby children from their mothers at birth creates trauma and ruptures the maternal bond that's important for normal psychological development?  Instead of raising ethical issues, society assumes that children removed from their natural families and placed with strangers should be full of joy and gratitude and grow up like their peers raised with their natural families.

Here's some news: getting a new family doesn't make the trauma and loss of the original somehow easier to cope with.  Remember the monkey experiments?  Removing babies from their mothers at the moment of birth [or any time, really] causes psychological harm.  If we can recognize the ethical issues and potential for psychological problems in non-human primates as a result of removing baby monkeys from their mothers, we should be able to draw similar conclusions about doing the same to human children.

End.

The Cheerios Effect: André, Jonathan & Raphaëlle’s Story

Its things like this that can put me right over the edge on an otherwise quiet Friday night.  I confess, I was bewitched by this video: the story is touching, the little girl is adorable beyond words, and they appear to be a happy and beautiful family.  I'm haunted by the part where one of the men mentions the tension during the period when Raphaelle could, "go back in her biological family." The message is pretty clear here: adoption is a socially acceptable way to build families for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to have children of their own. Furthermore, the ad implies that this little girl is much better off with this set of parents than her original family.

[Standard adoptee disclaimers apply here:  I do not hate my adoptive parents.  I do not hate adoptive families.  I strongly support gay parenthood.  I am not angry.  I don't have a miserable life. Etc.etc.etc.]

However, I beg marketers with all of the civility that I'm capable of: please stop using adoption stories to sell products.

This isn't the first instance of hawking a happy adoption story to sell consumers some new stuff along with their shiny new babies.  Remember the awful Kay Jewelers ad? The majority of the outrage about the Kay Jewelers ad came from adoptive parents angry that the ad glossed over their painful realities [and possibly brought home the reality that adoption is a financial as much as an emotional transaction?].  The ad angered adoptees as well, who astutely noted that the ad never so much as mentions the actual adoptee [who, as the standard narrative dictates, never has a voice]. The ad also failed to say anything about the baby's biological family, presumably because biological families are so eager and happy to dump inconvenient children into the arms of total strangers and then run.  Badvertising, all the way around that pissed off adoptive parents, adoptees, and first parents in less than thirty seconds.  Way to go, Kay Jewelers!

Perhaps learning from the Kay Jewelers uproar, this ad takes a different tact--we're touched by the love story between the two men and their love for their adopted daughter is palpable. Its a more tolerable ad because of its approach. We're pulled along by the tangible emotion here.  Nevertheless, its still using happy adoption stories to sell products.

Adoptees are people with individual stories.  Some of them are blessed with happy stories. Some of them have sad stories.  In the diverse [and often divided] community of adoptees can't speak for anyone but myself, but I resent having adoption stories used in this way.  It looks to me like just another happy story that covers a whole host of things about adoption that we'd rather not think about: race, class, financial transactions, broken families, the infamous adoptee issues, shame, guilt, lies, and secrets.  And that's just for starters.

It is quite socially unacceptable these days to criticize gay adoption, but its important to think about whose interests are being served and for what purpose.  I've seen a lot of angry stuff coming out of the adoption community in the past few years about the rights of gay parents to adopt, to the point where one might be tempted to think that the rights of gay parents and adoptees are incompatible. It is frustrating as an adopted person to watch the civil rights struggles of some groups of people surpass those of the children whose best interests are supposed to be at the center of adoption.  Its heartbreaking to watch a new wave of adoptive parents insist on their names on the amended birth certificate instead of insisting on legislative changes that would preserve the information on the original birth certificate of adoptees.

But this post isn't about gay parenting.  This is about using adoption stories as marketing ploys to sell products.  In our adoption-centric world, this is probably a marketing strategy that will succeed.  Nevertheless, by over-dramatizing the happy parts of adoption in order to sell Cheerios, it continues to trivialize the voices of adoptees and their very real pain and struggles.  We're people, not marketing tools.  Our stories are ours.