The Unnatural Family

Why loving the unrelated child is framed as virtuous - and why that matters.

Part 1 of 3: The Altruism Bonus series

As a person taken for adoption, I am often asked: “When did you find out?”

Perhaps I was six or seven. The information was delivered as a plain fact, a clinical diagnosis of difference. But there was nowhere to take that new knowledge. It seemed important, but there was no context beyond a grudging comment: “The doctor said it was best for you to know.”

Sometimes, my adoptive mother would repeat this almost under her breath, as though reciting an article of faith, as though she was doing me a favour, a kindness at her own expense.

I did not understand this dynamic until I came across a journal article from 1984: “Adoptive Parents’ Hostility Toward Their Adopted Children.”

Just reading the title felt transgressive, heretical even. The authors brought a unique perspective to the idea of adoption as synonymous with natural parenting:

“The adopted child, who is an expression of their [adopters] failure, is a constant reminder of ‘something wrong.’”

They describe adoption as an unnatural condition, and how the concept of the natural child stigmatises the adopted person (who is someone’s natural child), framing them as an unnatural person.

Reading the article gave me an aha moment. I was not uniquely deficient in my efforts to transact the daughter role; I had a normal response to an abnormal situation.

But also, by acknowledging my non-biological state, my adoptive mother’s wound of infertility was on display for me and the world to see.

She was living the contradiction, attempting to mother as if the child were her own while only distantly recognising that impossibility.

The authors continue exploring the damaged self of the adopter, who looks at the adopted child as someone unable to represent her:

“The child, being an extension of the parent’s ego, will be in a conflictual bind. This child isn’t a biological part of the adopting parents, yet is to be an emotional part of them.”

This claim is echoed in ‘An Exploration Into Some of the Attitudes in the Community Surrounding the Adoptive Family’, a Canadian master’s thesis from 1957 that reveals attitudes of insidiousness toward infertility are associated with invidious attitudes toward adoption:

“The central hypothesis … is that people who consider lineage important will tend to consider adoption a deviant pattern.”

According to the thesis’s joint authors:

“[I]n the adoptive family, where these [biological] ties do not exist, mutual identification must arise and develop between the child and parents through social interaction alone.”

They discuss this within a society that values family identification through blood ties. They quote from a paper from 1952:

“Can the adoptive parent have the same narcissistic identification with the child not of their own flesh and blood as with their own child?”

Sharyn White, an Australian adoptee rights advocate, says such studies and attitudes would not stand a chance today:

On social media, there’s a pattern. I could be calmly explaining the reality of adoption and how it breaches human and civil rights, how it commodifies adopted people, giving examples of specific legislation—talking about systemic issues—and the denier will tell me I’ve just had a 'bad experience' with adoption. Usually followed up with a caring declaration that they hope I get therapy because I am so bitter.

This is often followed by a story of how adoption would have saved an abused child. Asking the denier things like why they think replacing a child’s birth certificate and identity is needed before they can be cared for does not help.

Privilege or cognitive dissonance won’t let them conceive of the idea that adoption itself is a bad experience."

Our collective default has shifted from a historical base of serious consideration that adoption is profoundly abnormal to normalising and contextualising it as just another parenting choice.

But the pursuit of ‘just another parenting choice’ requires a heavy dose of virtue signalling. Particularly by those who have acquired an unrelated child via adoption or, increasingly, its scientific offspring, assisted reproductive technologies.

In an essay in The New Yorker, ‘A Passage to Parenthood’, Akhil Sharma discusses the experience of IVF.

He describes a game he and his wife played when they thought they might still conceive in the usual way, inventing futures for their child and infusing him or her with their extended family histories. When the child created from donor gametes ­­was born, Sharma writes:

“I leaned down to look at her. When I bent, my soul fell out. I was in love with this purple crying child, who, even if I had had a million years, I would not have been able to imagine.”

Sharma’s fine writing obscures the underlying narrative.

He wants us to think he could not have imagined this child because of her unique perfection.

But really, he’s saying he has no basis for imagining who she might be.

While intact bloodlines and genetic history were central to the child he and his wife hoped to conceive, he now deems them irrelevant for this person he has caused to be created.

Nevertheless, this child must live without the easy biological cartography and ancestral identity Sharma and his wife take for granted.

He is signalling his altruism by telling us he loves this child despite her non-biological connection and his loss of genetic continuity.

This form of altruism is brought home to adopted people in the regular headlines about parents suing over donor gamete mix-ups or fertility frauds.

In a recent case, parents who conceived their daughter with their own gametes and the assistance of intrauterine insemination (IUI) used a DNA test to trace her father’s distant relatives.

He was raising her to be proud of her Italian-American heritage when he discovered he was not her father. He sued the fertility clinic, claiming they had harmed their family:

“Learning that your entire reality isn’t what you believed it to be is hard to explain; it’s sort of waking up in somebody else’s life.”

The article does not mention how his daughter felt about her loss of genetic continuity.

Still, her putative father said he would always support and protect her and consider her his daughter.

While Sharma and the IUI father are not adopters, both invest time, money, and protection in developing the genetic lines of others.

The fact that one father declares his love so overtly and the other reassures the world he is still committed to his parental role speaks to the innate understanding of the unnatural construct of the fictive family.

And the double standard that all adopted people must live with.

Next week: To Be Adopted Is Not Fate, part 2 of 3: The Altruism Bonus series

Coming up: The Better-Life Lie, part 3 of 3: The Altruism Bonus series

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