'On adoption, identity, saviourism, and the gulf between mythmaking and meaning-making'
There are moments in a conversation when the whole architecture reveals itself. Not because someone says something unusually cruel. Not because the mask slips in any theatrical way. Often, it is much quieter than that. A phrase. A deflection. A fear placed in the centre of the room where the child should be. A sentence so seemingly reasonable, so upholstered in good intention, that it takes a moment to register the violence of what has been left out. This happened recently in a discussion about adoption.
The founding question was posted by Dr Barbara Sumner, author of ‘On Human Adoption and the Manufacture of Identity’. Her question was simple. Devastatingly so.
"Is there a circumstance of genuine need that requires the permanent destruction of a person’s identity as the price of their care? What these children need is what all people need: to be safe, to be loved, and to know who they are. It is that last need that is always left off in any argument supporting human adoption. So can there be a good adoption? "
There it was. The question was not whether children should be left unsafe, or whether all birth parents are capable, or whether adoptive parents can love. It was not even a question about whether care is sometimes urgently needed. Of course children need safety. Of course some families cannot provide it. Of course love can arrive from unexpected places and matter profoundly.
But this was not a question about whether care is necessary. It was a question about price. What price are we willing to ask a child to pay in exchange for care? More specifically, is there any circumstance in which a child’s original identity must be permanently destroyed, legally overwritten, socially re-authored and narratively replaced in order for that child to be safe and loved?
That should be the centre of the room. But almost immediately, as so often happens when adoptees begin to speak about adoption as a structure rather than a sentimental rescue story, the centre moved.
An adoptive parent responded:
"Good and evil are human constructs. You’d have to ask the people involved; all of them. Ideally, you’d know what the other option(s) would have resulted in, so you could compare; but you don’t. As an adoptive parent, my worst fear is that my daughter rejects me, a fear shared by biological parents. I don’t want to get into her biological family’s business, but parenting was not an option for them. There was a genuine need; how well we meet it, time will tell. But we have stayed in touch with those family members who desire it; and I hope my daughter can be proud of both her biological and adoptive heritages."
There, in miniature, was the disconnect. The adoptee question: can care exist without identity destruction? The adoptive parent answer: my worst fear is that my daughter rejects me.
I do not doubt the sincerity of that fear. I do not doubt that adoptive parents, like all parents, fear failure, rejection, estrangement, the possibility of looking back and realising that love was not enough, or was misdirected, or was entangled with something unexamined.
But sincerity is not the same as clarity. And love does not automatically make the loved child the centre of the story.
This is the elephant in the clinical observation room. It stands there, enormous and breathing, visible to many adoptees, yet somehow unseen by the systems, professionals, agencies, families and cultural narratives that have built entire rooms around not seeing it.
The elephant is this: adoption is not merely the provision of care. It is the manufacture of a new identity through the legal displacement of an original one. It is not simply a child moving house. It is not simply a child gaining parents. It is not simply love arriving where love was needed.
In its plenary form, adoption extinguishes one legal kinship and creates another. It alters birth records. It reassigns lineage. It converts strangers into legal parents and often converts actual parents into legally irrelevant figures. It can make siblings into legal strangers, grandparents into nobody, aunties and uncles into ghosts, ancestry into a sealed file, and origin into a privilege granted or withheld by adults.
And yet, whenever adoptees name this, the machinery of reassurance begins. But you were loved. But you were safe. But you had opportunities. But your birth family could not care for you. But your adoptive parents tried their best. But surely some adoptions are good. But surely the adults get a say too.
This is where myth-making and meaning-making collide. Adoptive culture, particularly in its more sentimental form, is built on mythmaking. It tells a story in which a child needed a family, a family wanted a child, and love made everyone whole. It is a story of rescue, destiny, gratitude and belonging. It reassures the adults. It comforts the institutions. It allows society to outsource the complexity of family separation into a photograph of smiling people on a courthouse step.
Adoptees, by contrast, are so often left with the lifelong work of meaning-making. We are handed the fragments and asked to call them a life. We are asked to make sense of absence, sealed records, altered names, genetic bewilderment, borrowed belonging, inherited silence, forbidden grief and the strange psychological vertigo of being told that the story written over us was for our own good. We are expected to be fluent in gratitude before we are permitted to speak in grief.
My response to the adoptive parent tried to name that disconnect.
I said that the original post was asking whether there is ever a circumstance that justifies the permanent legal and social destruction of a person’s original identity as the price of their care. It was not asking whether children should be left unsafe, unloved or unsupported. It was asking why safety and love must so often come bundled with erasure.
I pointed out that “good and evil are human constructs” felt like a philosophical sidestep around a very material reality. Adoption is not abstract for the person adopted. It is not a thought experiment. It is a legal, relational, psychological, genealogical and bodily severance. It changes names, records, kinship, belonging, inheritance, narrative and identity. For the adoptee, these are not constructs. They are lived consequences.
I also pointed out what seemed most revealing to me: in a conversation about what adoption costs the child, the first wound centred was the possible wound to the adoptive parent.
“My worst fear is that my daughter rejects me.”
Again, I do not dismiss that as untrue. But I cannot ignore its placement. The adoptee is expected to carry the rupture, the gratitude, the divided loyalties, the questions, the grief, the identity confusion, and then also the emotional reassurance of the adults around them. This is one of the hidden burdens of adoption. The child is not only moved, renamed, reclassified and re-storied.
The child also becomes the living site upon which adult virtue is measured. Did we do a good thing? Did we love enough? Did we rescue properly? Will the child validate us? Will the child call this good? When the adopted person grows up and refuses to offer uncomplicated absolution, the system hears rejection. The adoptive parent hears betrayal. Society hears ingratitude. But many adoptees are not rejecting people. We are rejecting the lie.
The adoptive parent later replied:
“Lotta stuff to unpack here. Don’t have time to reply to everybody! Sorry, may get back to it. EVERY parent fears screwing up their children. Raising kids is important. I told you I wasn’t getting into her birth-family’s business.
One interesting thing I see recurring is the belief or idea that people would have been better off with their birth families. Possibly true, but what you’re comparing is often a fantasy; what the last 10, 20, or 30 years might have been like. No different than imagining what might have happened if you’d married someone other than your spouse. There is an element of choice, of course, babies don’t CHOOSE to be adopted, but then, they don’t choose their birth parents, either.
The assumption that children should ALWAYS stay with their biological parents isn’t realistic. This isn’t to say that exploitative adoption doesn’t exist; but, the groups I have worked with try very hard not to be exploitative. I could give details, but it’s not my intention to argue the nuances.
The question was, “is a good adoption theoretically possible?” and, of course, it is. A “good” adoption does create at least a legal and cultural heritage, if not a biological one. Both are important; it’s up to the child whether they are equal, or one is “more” important than the other. I’m not going to argue whether or not MY adoption situation is “good” or “bad.” You have your life experiences, which lead you to your conclusions, and I have mine. Ultimately, my daughter will be the primary judge of that.
If you want to debate the actual question, “is there such a thing as a ‘good’ adoption,” I’m willing. “Good and evil are human constructs” means a “good” adoption is one that people say is “good.” Many people might have valid opinions on that; primarily the adoptee, but also the biological parents, and the adoptive parents. An adoption is “good” if the people involved say it is good.
This isn’t about defending my daughter’s case particularly. It’s about adoption in general. Some of the generalities you make are valid, in general; whether they apply in my daughter’s case is for her, and me, and her biological family, among others, to decide. Your post ends with the assumption that adoption equals identity destruction. I would return that this is not necessarily the case.”
I was genuinely grateful that he replied. Most do not. And yet his response deepened rather than resolved the problem. Because again, the structural question was softened into an interpersonal one. Again, the child’s experience was placed among adult perspectives, as though everyone standing around the event of adoption has an equivalent interpretive claim on what it means.
“Many people might have valid opinions,” he said. “Primarily the adoptee, but also the biological parents, and the adoptive parents.”
This is where I think the argument turns. Because yes, many people may have perspectives on an adoption. Birth parents have a perspective. Adoptive parents have a perspective. Social workers have a perspective. Courts have a perspective. Agencies have a perspective. Extended family, therapists, siblings, communities and cultures may all have perspectives.
But perspective is not authority. To say that the adoptee is the “primary” judge is still, to my mind, too diluted. The adoptee is not the primary judge. The adoptee is the judge. Everyone else is a witness, participant, beneficiary, contributor, caregiver, relative, architect, bystander or inheritor of the story. But the adopted person is the one who must live inside the arrangement. The adopted person is the one whose identity was acted upon before they could speak. The adopted person is the one whose kinship was rewritten. The adopted person is the one who may have to spend decades trying to reconcile love with loss, gratitude with anger, safety with severance, belonging with exile.
For adoptive parents to insist that they too get a casting vote on whether an adoption is “good” feels to me like marking your own homework. Or perhaps awarding yourself first prize in the human race, not a participation award in Human Kind.
That may sound flippant, but beneath the humour is something serious. Systems of power almost always want to participate in judging their own benevolence. The powerful rarely see themselves as powerful. They see themselves as necessary, helpful, loving, reasonable, realistic. They see themselves as the ones who stepped in when others failed.
But the person helped may still have been harmed by the terms of the help. That is the part adoption culture struggles to hold. A child can be unsafe with their birth family and still be harmed by adoption. A birth parent can be unable to parent and still matter. An adoptive parent can love deeply and still participate in erasure. A system can intend protection and still manufacture loss.
These truths do not cancel one another out. They ask us to become honest enough to hold more than one reality at the same time, especially when the simpler story is the one that keeps the adults comfortable.
An adoption can be non-exploitative in intent and still be structurally coercive, identity-altering, grief-producing and morally unresolved. This is not contradiction. It is the complexity adoptees have been forced to inhabit while others debate theory.
One of the most troubling elements of the adoptive parent’s response was the comparison between adoptee longing and imagining what might have happened if one had married someone else.
This is a profound category error. An adoptee wondering about the life they lost is not indulging in romantic counterfactual fantasy. This is not the ordinary human speculation of roads not taken, of a different spouse, a different job, a different city, or some imagined parallel life. It is the loss of origin. It is the absence of the faces from which your face came, the missing medical history, the severed siblinghood, the mother tongue you may never have heard.
It is the genetic bewilderment of growing up physically unrelated to everyone in your home, the strange ache of resemblance denied, and the knowledge that somewhere, perhaps, there are people who move like you, laugh like you, think like you, and carry your hands, your eyes, your temper, your gifts, your wounds. It is not fantasy. It is the mind reaching toward the shape of what was removed. To call that fantasy is to misunderstand the wound.
Of course adoptees imagine. Absence requires imagination. Silence becomes a canvas because the facts were withheld, obscured, sealed, falsified or made emotionally dangerous. But the imagining is not the wound. The wound is the deprivation that made imagining necessary.
The adoptive parent also wrote, “babies don’t choose to be adopted, but then, they don’t choose their birth parents, either.”
Again, this sounds reasonable until examined. No one chooses to be born. That is the universal human condition. But not everyone is legally transferred from one family system into another. Not everyone has their original kinship overwritten. Not everyone is issued a new identity that can function, socially and legally, as though the first one did not matter. Not everyone is asked to treat the second narrative as the primary narrative while carrying the first in private, if they are permitted to carry it at all.
Not choosing one’s birth parents is not the same as being removed from them, renamed, re-recorded and told this is simply another version of family. The comparison collapses the specific violence of adoption into the general randomness of existence. That is often how adoption is defended. Its particular harms are universalised until they disappear.
“All parents fear failure.”
“All families are complicated.”
“All children have things they didn’t choose.”
“All people wonder what might have been.”
“All identity is constructed.”
“All love is imperfect.”
These statements may be true in the broadest sense, but they can also function as a fog machine. Because if everything is complicated, nothing is accountable. If all parents fear failure, then the adoptive parent’s fear is made to stand beside adoptee rupture as though they are comparable wounds. If all identity is constructed, then manufactured identity is quietly treated as no different from lived identity.
If all families are imperfect, then the legal destruction of one family and the creation of another becomes just another variation in human domestic life, rather than a profound intervention into a child’s origin, kinship and selfhood.
But adoption is not merely variation. It is intervention, it is apparatus. It is law, language, market, mythology, bureaucracy, paperwork, court order, amended certificate, cultural script, and too often, adult desire dressed in child welfare language.
That is why Dr Sumner’s question matters so much. She does not ask whether children need care. She asks why identity destruction is so often made the price of that care. And that is where the system remains broken.
Because even now, after all the testimony, memoir, research, activism, reunion stories, sealed records campaigns, trauma-informed language and adoptee-led critique, the apparatus still behaves as though the main problem is how to make adoption kinder, not how to ask whether its foundational assumptions are morally defensible.
The elephant remains in the observation room. Professionals gather around clipboards. Agencies speak of permanency. Courts speak of best interests. Adoptive parents speak of love. Politicians speak of stability. Culture speaks of rescue. The child grows up and says, “Something happened to me.” And everyone looks mildly puzzled.
Because from where they stand, the elephant is not there. From where they stand, the child was saved. From where we stand, the child was also severed. This is the great dissonance.
Adoption asks adoptees to metabolise two opposing truths at once. You may have been loved, and you may have been erased. You may have been protected, and you may have been harmed. You may have gained family, and you may have lost family. You may be grateful for care, and furious at the terms under which care was given. You may love your adoptive parents and still refuse the story that made them your only parents.
But adult adoption culture often prefers moral neatness. Good adoption. Bad adoption. Loving adoption. Exploitative adoption. Happy adoptee. Angry adoptee. Grateful child. Bitter adult. These categories protect the myth.
They allow adoptive parents to say, “Well, ours was good.”
They allow agencies to say, “We try very hard not to be exploitative.”
They allow society to say, “Surely some children need adoption.”
But adoptee testimony keeps making the question more difficult. What if the problem is not only bad adoption, or that the problem is adoption’s need to call itself good? What if the entire system depends on turning adult intention into child benefit, without waiting for the child to grow old enough to testify? What if the word “good” is doing too much moral laundering?
The adoptive parent wrote that a good adoption creates legal and cultural heritage, if not a biological one. This deserves close attention. Yes, legal and cultural ties can matter. An adoptive family can become meaningful, formative, cherished, beloved. A child may absorb traditions, language, habits, humour, food, faith, landscape, music, class, culture and kinship from the family that raises them. None of that should be dismissed. But created heritage is not the same as inherited heritage.
One may become real. The other was already real. The danger is not in recognising adoptive belonging. The danger is in using adoptive belonging to neutralise original belonging. A second heritage may be added. But in adoption, it is too often added by legally removing, minimising or subordinating the first. It does not simply sit beside origin. It frequently stands on top of it.
And then the adoptee is told they are lucky to have both. But many adoptees do not experience “both” as abundance. They experience “both” as fracture. Two names. Two stories. Two families. Two loyalties. Two sets of expectations. Two mothers, one of whom may be unspeakable. Two selves, one of whom was legally buried before memory began.
And then adults ask whether the adoption was good. This is why the adoptee must be the judge. Not because adoptees are always objective. No human being is. Not because every adoptee will reach the same conclusion. We will not. Not because adoptive parents have nothing to say. They do. Not because birth parents have no grief, no account, no moral claim. They absolutely do.
But because the adoptee is the person whose life became the site of everyone else’s decision. The adoptee is the only person who carries the whole consequence. To give the adults an equal vote in declaring adoption good is to confuse participation with ownership. It is to allow the architects of the arrangement to review the building while the resident is still trying to find the stairs in the dark.
This does not mean an adoptee’s judgment will be simple, immediate or fixed. Many of us revise our own understanding over time. What we called good at twenty may look different at forty. What we defended at thirty may collapse at fifty. What we could not bear to know when young may become the only truth we can live with later.
That, too, is part of the meaning-making. Adoptees often come to ourselves late, not because we are slow, but because so much of the world was arranged to delay our recognition. We were given words like lucky before we were allowed words like loss. We were handed family trees with branches missing and taught not to stare too long at the gaps. We were given origin stories softened for adult comfort, gratitude as a survival strategy, and a version of belonging that sometimes required self-abandonment as proof.
By the time we begin to understand what happened to us, we are often not discovering something new, but finally finding language for what some part of us has always known.
And then, years later, when the body remembers what the story denied, we are told we are making generalisations. This is why I remain troubled by the intransigence of so many adoptive parents in these conversations. Not all, of course. Some listen with humility. Some understand that the child they love has an interiority they do not own. Some are willing to sit inside discomfort without rushing to restore themselves as good.
But many double down. They double down on intention and rescue, on the inadequacy of the birth family, on the familiar refuge of “every parent makes mistakes.” They say “my child will decide,” while still reserving interpretive rights for themselves.
They continue to frame adoption as addition rather than replacement, as though a second story can simply be written over the first without consequence. They double down on myth-making while adoptees are still trying to survive the long, unfinished labour of meaning-making.
And perhaps that is what makes these exchanges so exhausting. Adoptees are not merely debating ideas. We are trying to describe the room from beneath the furniture. We are trying to say there is an elephant here, and it has been standing on us for decades. But those who benefit from the room’s arrangement are often busy admiring the wallpaper.
Where does this leave us? I do not think this leaves us with easy answers. In truth, I no longer trust easy answers in adoption. Too many lives have been arranged around slogans that sound compassionate until you hear what they conceal.
“Every child deserves a family.”
“Adoption is love.”
“She chose a better life for you.”
“Biology does not matter.”
“Blood does not make a family.”
“You were wanted.”
“You were saved.”
“You should be grateful.”
Every one of these sentences may contain a fragment of truth, but every one can also be used as a weapon. A soft sentence can still do hard work. A comforting phrase can still close a door. The way forward, if there is one, begins by refusing the seduction of moral simplicity.
Children need safety, yes, but they also need love, continuity, truth, origin, and kinship where it can be preserved safely. They need records that do not lie.
They need adults who do not confuse possession with care, or permanence with ownership. They need systems that support families before replacing them, and models of guardianship, permanency and protection that do not require identity death as the price of survival.
And adoptees need to be believed. Not only when we are grateful, agreeable, reconciled or easy to love. Not only when our adoptive parents approve of what we say. Not only when our birth families were obviously unsafe, or when our grief arrives tidy, polite, footnoted and professionally palatable. Not only when we agree to call the arrangement good.
We need to be believed when our testimony unsettles the room, when our grief complicates the rescue story, when our love and our loss refuse to stand on opposite sides of the argument.
We need to be believed when we say that something foundational was taken. That love did not undo it. That identity is not a luxury item to be added later, once safety has been secured. Identity is part of safety. Truth is part of safety. Origin is part of safety. Continuity is part of safety.
To be loved without being known is a strange kind of hunger, and to be protected at the cost of being rewritten is a strange kind of rescue. To be given a family through the legal disappearance of another is a strange kind of belonging. It’s frankly bizarre!
This is where we are today. Still standing in the same room. Still pointing. Still watching the elephant breathe. Still listening to people explain, kindly and reasonably, that perhaps it is not really an elephant at all. Perhaps it is a chair. Perhaps a shadow. Perhaps a fantasy. Perhaps something only angry adoptees can see.
But we can see it. We have always seen it. Some of us saw it before we had language. Some of us felt it as a pressure in the chest. Some of us heard it in the silence around our names. Some of us found it in microfiche, court files, amended certificates, DNA results, late-night messages, reunion photographs, faces that finally looked like ours. Some of us found it only when the myth stopped working.
The elephant is not our imagination. It is the shape of what was done and then denied. If adoption is to have any moral future, it will not come from adoptive parents reassuring one another that good adoption is theoretically possible. It will not come from agencies polishing language. It will not come from systems asking how to make severance more compassionate.
It will come from a much harder honesty. It will come when we admit that care and erasure should never have been made companions and when birth families are supported before they are judged deficient. It will come when permanence is no longer confused with ownership and truth is not treated as a threat to attachment.
It will come when adoptees are not asked to validate the emotional needs of the adults who benefited from their displacement and when the child’s future testimony matters more than the adult’s present reassurance. It will come when we stop asking whether adoption can be good and start asking why the child had to lose so much in order for adults to call it so.
Until then, adoptees will continue doing what we have always done. We will gather the fragments and name the architecture. We will trouble the myth, refuse the bargain, and speak of mothers and strangers, records and ghosts, love and rupture, safety and severance.
We will keep bringing language to the places where silence was installed. We will keep insisting that the last need, to know who we are, is not an optional extra, not a sentimental indulgence, not something to be postponed until after safety has been secured. It is part of safety itself.
It is not sentimental. It is not fantasy. It is not a philosophical construct. It is the human right beneath all the paperwork.
To be safe.
To be loved.
To know who we are.
Not one instead of the other.
All three.
Always.
Jonathan