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Abstract
This article explores the common theoretical ground between disability studies and adoption studies and between the cultural positions of adoptees and disabled people. The author forwards the social model of disability, championed by impaired activists and scholars in the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s, as a basis for discussing socially disabling cultures and practices that affect adopted people. The social model posits that, while people may have varying levels of impairment, all disability is socially constructed within societies that only permit those with abilities considered “normal” to access everyday experiences. In such societies, it is the impaired who are forced to adjust to the norms of society instead of society recognizing the needs of all people. The author applies the concept of the social model to adoption, theorizing how adoption practices and cultures disable adopted people by denying them access to and control over birth histories, cultures, and family relationships within discourses on the “right to know” one’s biological origins.
Notes
1 For an engaging discussion on disability as one of several factors in adoptive parent decision making see Raleigh, E., & Rothman, B. K. (2014). Disability is the new Black. In V. B. Treitler (Ed.), Race in transnational and transracial adoption. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
2 For an engaging critique of the primacy of the social model within disability studies, see Shakespeare, Citation1993, Citation2014.
3 This position is also taken up by Alex Lubet, Citation2011.
4 The belief that adoptive families are not “real” families continues to exert social and cultural pressures on adoptive families. As painful as this assumption may be to members of adoptive families, it does not currently manifest as structural discrimination toward adopted families, who do not have and have never had lower access to housing, employment, heath care, nutrition, or state services.
5 Ethnographic research shows that transnationally adopted persons can develop strong connections to other adopted persons on the basis of shared experiences; participants in this research reported that other adoptees were the only people to whom they did not feel the need to “explain themselves.” However, some Korean adoptees sometimes reported that loyalty to White family identity precluded participation in the socially and racially marked communities of transracial and transnational adoption (Park Nelson, Citation2016).
6 The depiction of adoptive parents as heroic saviors of the rescued child is still common in public discourse, although contemporary adoption research and much of the current adoption industry generally rejects this as a valid motivation to adopt.
7 One need only Google “grateful adoptee” to find a multitude of blog posts, articles, and other discussion of this trope.
8 Somerville primarily uses these arguments not against the broader practices of growing and commercialized reproductive technologies, but only against the legalization of same-sex marriage, claiming that same-sex marriage will increase demand for donor-conceived and adopted children. Other recent statements condemning same-sex marriage and child-rearing, likely in direct response to the swiftly changing legal and social status of same-sex marriage in the United States, have used similar tactics, which pit adopted persons and donor-conceived persons against same-sex couples. However, it makes no sense to single out same-sex parents in the ethical debate over adoption and donor gamete IVF; if adopted and donor-conceived people are deprived of their rights, it does not matter who adopts them or commissions their births. Leighton (Citation2012, p. 507) counters such arguments by asserting the heteronormativity of “right-to-know,” arguing that “… championing children’s right to genetic knowledge provides a way of imposing order on families living outside the heteronorm by centering on the apparent certainty and permanency of genetic relationships.”
9 A recent example is actor and adoptive parent Sandra Bullock’s request that the term “adopted children” be “banned” in favor of the blanket term “our children.” (Petit, Citation2018).
10 For more on the problematic history of research on transracial and transnational adoptees, see the chapter “Adoption Research Discourse and the Rise of Transnational Adoption, 1974–1987” in Park Nelson (Citation2016).