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Listening to Stories, Negotiating Responsibility

An Ethics of Responsibility

A feminist ethics, Walker argues, requires members of an “epistemic community” to commit to understanding the collective grounds of their moral knowledge (1998, 58) and “account[ing] to each other for their identities, relationships, and values that define their responsibilities” (61). In contrast, any nonnegotiable ethical ideal (a “theoretical-juridical model” [53]) functions within a patriarchal, hierarchical system that devalues socially variable lives, reinforces existing privilege, and excludes deeper insights into lived realities, emotional contexts, complex human relations, and systemic social inequality (54–55). So people working together in good faith can develop expectations for relative behavior that are actually more moral (because more specific and more flexible) than following any preconceived standards. “Being held responsible in certain ways, or being exempted or excluded from responsibility of certain types or for certain people,” constitutes an “ethics of responsibility” (78). Members of an epistemic community aim to become “morally reliable” for one another (117) and to achieve “nongeneric accountability” (115) appropriate to their respective situations, needs, and capacities. Schutte, additionally, advocates the moral benefits of allowing oneself to be “decentered” through openness to someone with divergent experience and social position. “The breakthrough in the concept of understanding the other,” she argues, “occurs when one combines the other as different from the self with the acknowledgment of the self’s decentering that results from the experience of such differences . . . Interpersonal and social interactions marked by cultural (as well as sexual, racial, and other kinds of) difference allow us to reach new ethical, aesthetic, and political ground” (2000, 48).

The experience of international adoption clearly requires adoptive parents and adopted children to reimagine their identities, but can those seeking a collective ethics work out relative responsibilities and new identities without everyone engaging in face-to-face dialogue? Those whose rights presumably conflict, birth parents and adoptive parents, rarely interact. Postcolonial feminist scholars would likely insist that reliance on text rather than encounter leaves too much to the imaginations of the economically and racially privileged adoptive parents, empowering them to put words into other people’s mouths (Mohanty 2003) and believe self-serving projections of birth parents’ experiences (Spivak 1988). Walker’s model, however, emphasizes flexibility and encourages participants to revisit earlier solutions, which one can argue is happening as more adoptive parents seek contact with birth families or means to learn about and to alleviate oppressive conditions in children’s birth countries. Furthermore, a folkloristic perspective argues that birth parents could never realistically tell adoptive parents a single definitive story that would resolve all ethical dilemmas, which is precisely why the ethics of responsibility meshes so well with folklorists’ understanding of the complex dynamics of sharing stories.

Stories and Ethics

Working out decisions and expectations about the ethical conduct of international adoption not through rancorous debate, but through sympathetic conversation, would allow all involved to tell their stories and negotiate their claims. While one might want to hear from many others, including adoption facilitators and authors of national and international law, in this essay I focus on the stories told by those most intimately concerned: adoptive parents, adoptive children, and birth families.

Insights about storytelling articulated by folklorists and linguistic anthropologists offer guidance for making sense of these consequential narratives. Foundational in this work was Bakhtin’s argument that every utterance is formed in response to prior statements and in anticipation of the ways interlocutors will understand, report, and transform what they hear (1986). A story, like an individual word, necessarily “tastes of the contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (1981, 293). The contextual approach to folklore study, emphasizing interpretation of narrative texts in their cultural, social, and historical setting, is a congruent and converging development (Bauman 1986; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1975). Deborah Tannen argues that words spoken in one context and reported by the listener in another are grossly misunderstood if perceived and responded to as the words of the original speaker (1989, 101). Shuman questions the assumption that telling and retelling stories creates meaning and, ultimately, mutual understanding, noting that “the farther stories travel from the experiences they recount, the more they promise” (2005, 1), yet “storytelling is pushed to its limits both by the use of a particular story beyond the context of the experience it represents and by the use of a personal story to represent a collective experience” (3). Stories are crucial for making sense of experience, but recipients must think critically about their origins, circulation, transformation, and intended audience and the claims they are being used to bolster in current contexts. Not only is access to the single true story impossible; there is no such original to grasp.

Adoptive Parents’ Stories. I begin with the stories with which I am most familiar, those adoptive parents tell to each other and potential adopters, and those they tell to their children. Adopters or those who are contemplating the possibility avidly trade accounts of the process. By sharing hard-won knowledge and recounting arcane details, obstacles, and missteps, parents offer resources and establish expertise. I recall listening eagerly to recently returned parents’ advice about which hotel to choose in Guatemala City and how to remain calm during the nerve-wracking visa process at the U.S. embassy. Later, I enjoyed playing the expert, describing my vain effort to stop a county official from putting whiteout on a notarized document in order to warn those still “in the paper chase” about mistakes that would force them to repeat time-consuming steps. These accounts can be a lifeline for parents preparing for, or stuck midway in, the adoption process and are shared on listservs and blogs as well as in person. Among successful adoptive parents they establish bonds and substitute for mothers’ rite-of-passage stories about giving birth, verifying the new parent as one who has done the hard things necessary to bring a new member into the family. Notably, however, adoptive parents shape these stories almost entirely for others within their privileged category, with little apparent thought of how they might sound to those who have relinquished children under difficult circumstances. And in depicting a process that can be bewildering, exhausting, and enraging, adoptive parents position themselves as those with morality on their side and with rights to children born in another country to other parents, while often situating the legal systems intended to safeguard children’s and birthparents’ human rights and civil liberties as the enemy.

A remarkably influential subset of parent-to-parent stories, shorthand comparative national characterizations, offer apparently authoritative advice to prospective parents facing the strange task of selecting from which country to adopt.³ The reliability of blanket claims describing an entire culture in a phrase might seem questionable, but for those with little knowledge they can have a determinative influence. These are metonyms of narrative (Kalčik 1975), abbreviated references that imply but rarely inquire into more extensive accounts of what has transpired in particular countries. Korea, for instance, has a reputation as a good place to adopt from—efficient, honest, first-world medical system, healthy babies. In addition, a sense of Koreans as prejudiced against “mixed-blood” children, although primarily relevant to those fathered by U.S. servicemen half a century ago, still gives Korean adoption a superior ethical cachet.

When I was seeking to adopt, I heard (although I cannot recall from whom, confirming the tenacity and unaccountability of these floating stories) that I should avoid India because of AIDS and Russia because of fetal alcohol syndrome. Cambodia had recently closed amid accusations of illegal activity by an American adoption agency. Guatemala was apparently ideal since, I was told, babies were placed with decently paid foster mothers to ensure their health, and the process was cleaner than in the past, with DNA tests required to prevent illegal abductions. I asked acquaintances familiar with Guatemala for advice and got conflicting reports. One woman recently returned from a trip to Guatemala reported the disapproval of adoption expressed by the nuns at the Guatemalan orphanage where she had volunteered. One of the nuns claimed that “a lawyer will just pay a prostitute to have a baby for any American who wants to adopt.” Conversely, an NGO worker who had spent several years in Guatemala insisted that the nuns’ attitude sprang from competition between the Catholic church, which runs orphanages in Guatemala, and Protestant denominations that promote adoption.

China generally tops the moral hierarchy, given the clear story about baby girls dumped in orphanages because of the government’s one-child policy (which strikes feminists and conservatives alike as a draconian infringement upon individual rights) and a cultural system that demands sons to perpetuate the family. Yet the very demand for Chinese babies encouraged China to establish more stringent requirements for adoptive parents, including weight limits and restrictions on single women (the latter evidently aimed at blocking lesbians from adopting). A clear attraction of China is that adoptive parents can imagine themselves allies of Chinese women forced to relinquish their children by a heartless national bureaucracy rather than by poverty or even through fraud. I doubt, however, that American parents consider the ease with which they stereotype a Communist state as evil or recognize the cultural background of their own outrage at the Chinese legislation of family size, which is legal within that governmental system.⁴ For Guatemala, the legendary machismo and irresponsibility of Guatemalan men serves as analogous justification (Dubinsky 2010, 124), giving American parents a villain to blame and a way to position themselves as supporters of women or rescuers of babies.

This shifting moral hierarchy can produce smugness about one’s own choice and judgmental impressions of others’. The first time historian Karen Dubinsky recounted her adoption experience in an academic lecture, for example, an audience member holding her own (apparently) internationally adopted infant challenged, “But really, why on earth did you choose Guatemala?” (2010, 103). What deters one person may, however, motivate another. I chose Guatemala partly because I had spent time there and felt comfortable returning, but I was also impelled by a developing critical awareness that Guatemala and the United States had been linked for more than a century by agribusiness and industry looking for cheap labor and by U.S. support for totalitarian regimes bent on keeping that labor available and tractable. As beneficiary of my government’s exploitative and violent policies, I reasoned, I bore more direct responsibility for the conditions that might make cause a Guatemalan woman to relinquish her infant than for those in China or Kazakhstan, the two other countries then open to a single woman of my age. Critics could instead see my adoption as an extension of the pattern of exploitation, but I report my motivation as an example of parents’ thinking, based on the stories they grasp at crucial junctures.

In terms of Walker’s ethical model, in telling these stories adoptive parents serve as an epistemic community. But we do so almost exclusively for each other, justifying our choices only relative to other adopters and mostly blocking awareness of the stories and claims of birth parents, except in self-congratulatory ways. The availability of simplified stories supplied by other parents and adoption agencies may keep potential adopters from sensing a need to research the situations that make individuals and countries allow their children to be adopted. In Shuman’s terms, these partial characterizations of the child’s birth country have been carried too far from their source to reliably support the authority attributed to them. As Emily Noonan argues, parent discourse reveals how globalization is understood and negotiated at the level of the family (2007). In the early stages, parents may indeed leave unchallenged a pervasive sense that denizens of wealthy countries are the unproblematic, deserving recipients of the products that flow to us from the global South.

Recall, however, that Walker insists that certain people can (at least temporarily) be relieved of certain responsibilities. Parents often come to the decision to adopt only after struggling with infertility, mourning the lack of a partner with whom to conceive, or debating whether to add their own biological progeny to the world’s population. Stories that assist in identifying a child and getting her or him home are arguably the only accounts that the adoptive parents’ own internal family-building story of disappointment, frustration, search, and hoped-for success can reasonably accommodate—at least during the adoption process and in the early years of family consolidation.

Once adoptive parents are more secure in our own identities and ability as parents, we are often more able to take on formerly intolerable responsibilities. For years we have known that we finesse complicated and imperfectly known histories when we assure our children, “Your birth parents loved you but were not able to raise you.” We recognize that the “adoption story” that others urged us to document for our children as a substitute for a birth story (Larsen 2007, 52) and the pictures of a fancy hotel as “the place where our family began” are not fully satisfying for them or us. So we set out, belatedly, to learn more about the political and economic history of our child’s birth country, to raise money and contribute to efforts to improve the situation of families like the one from which our child came, or even to try to find our child’s birth family, hoping to hear their stories and possibly establish a relationship. Indeed, an emerging story genre is the one we find on the American Family: Just Your Typical American Family . . . Sorta blog, in which the mother/author recounts finding one daughter’s birth family in China and her emotions as they arrange phone calls and plan for a visit to the village where she was born (American Family 2012).

Children’s Stories. As internationally adopted children reach adulthood, many communicate with each other about common concerns, creating blogs, artworks, and memoirs, and sharing their stories with filmmakers and scholars. A full account of this ongoing process is beyond the scope of this chapter; I highlight emerging trends. It might be expected that adopted children may suffer trauma and that adoptive parents may or may not understand or deal well with children’s need to mourn their loss of birth family and to be reassured that their current parents will not abandon them (Eldridge 1999). Issues vary as much by generation as by birth country—consider the difference between a Korean adoptee forty years ago, the only Asian in a White community, whose adoptedness was never discussed, and my daughter, who regularly plays with a group of adopted Guatemalan kids, adores her fictive “big sisters,” one from Cambodia, one from China, and encounters other international adoptees in almost any public gathering. Overall, I am struck by how variable and complex adoptees’ reactions are.

A vociferous minority, like those who write blogs under the screen names “Transracial Abductee” and “Bastardette,” lash out with vituperative condemnation of international adoption, calling it “a racist system of forced assimilation and brainwashing” (Transracial Abductees 2011; Daily Bastardette 2011). These adoptees invest in naturalized notions of family composition and birth culture that adoptive parents see themselves as progressively transcending. It would be difficult for any adoptive parent not to react defensively, and these writers seem interested in blasting adoption advocates and rallying those who share their anger rather than talking with anyone with a different perspective. But I would love to understand what led them to this tragic pass. I dare to suggest that honest conversation in a broader epistemic community might help these bereft and angry adult adoptees understand and be understood as well as help parents learn how to support other adoptees in working out an identity that accommodates two (or more) places, cultures, and families.

In contrast, many adoptees either find no pressing need to delve into their origins or affirm their primary identity as a member of the community in which they were raised. The nine-year-old granddaughter of friends, whose parents arranged for them to live in Guatemala for six months, declared to her grandmother upon their return, “I’m a Carrboro [North Carolina] girl, not a Guatemala girl!” although she might reconsider someday. A majority of adoptees are evidently stretched in positive ways as well as challenged by the need to reconcile the two facets of their identity. The Korean adoptees studied by Eleana Kim affirmed that their experience neither vilifies nor vindicates the practice of which they were the subjects (2010). Even among those who decided to spend extended periods in Korea, few said they felt alienated from the (usually European) cultural identity with which they had been raised. Even egregious cases of deception can produce positive results. Nelson Ward de Witt, who learned as a teenager that his birth mother was a murdered Salvadoran guerrilla and that his grandmother had sought him for years, reports that developing relationships with his Salvadoran family brought him closer to his American parents and brother and has turned both himself and his adoptive mother into memoirists, exploring his birth mother’s decisions (de Witt 2011a, 2011b; Ward 2011). In the context of an epistemic community, adoptees might narrate their lives to make different claims relative to either family, but these honest, emerging self-characterizations—formulated first to help the adoptee make sense of his or her own experience—offer a clear story to which others can respond.

Birth Families’ Stories. Walker’s model of narrative sharing and negotiation would require that all members of the adoption triad have reliable access to each others’ developing life accounts. Yet the stipulations of plenary adoption combined with distance and fear (on the part of stigmatized birth parents, adoption coordinators reluctant to have their methods scrutinized, and adoptive parents) mean that most adoptive parents and adopted children have only generalized or speculative knowledge of birth parents’ stories, and only a few birth parents have knowledge of the child after their separation.

The few birth parents whose stories make it onto the Internet or occasionally into the news are precisely those whom adoptive parents pray are not their own child’s original families, those seeking to retrieve children abducted and sold for adoption. Adoptive parent organizations like Guatadopt.com publicize these accounts and call for the return of kidnapped children, although critics might dismiss this as attempting to bolster what those opposed to international adoption see as a nonexistent distinction between voluntary and involuntary relinquishment. It remains difficult, however, to extrapolate the pervasiveness of fraud or abduction from limited examples. Dubinsky, for example, conveys credible reports of Guatemalan intermediaries between birth parents and adoption lawyers pressuring and manipulating pregnant women (2010, 118). Yet she also argues that scandal stories peopled by predictable figures—profiteering lawyer, desperate, deserted pregnant young woman, older friend who offers help to a girl in trouble only to take advantage of her—easily take disproportionate hold on audience imaginations (2010, 100–103).

A few classic texts expressing birth mothers’ feelings have been available for at least a decade, and more are appearing. Korean adoptees have the touchstone collection of letters, I Wish for You a Beautiful Life, that birth mothers at the Ae Ran Won “home for unwed mothers” were encouraged to write to process their grief (Dorow 1999). The mothers write directly to their children, often explaining their decision to let the child be adopted, but especially declaring, “My dear son, please remember that I will always love you very much. I also want you to remember that you are my son and are very important to me” (17). Dana Sachs recounts the heartrending stories of Vietnamese mothers who sent beloved children abroad during the 1975 Operation Babylift (2010). Chinese journalist Xinran published the collection Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love (2011), which provides more complex accounts of the interaction of tradition, old landownership laws favoring males, and the one-child policy in individual lives and recounts the heartbreak and even suicide of mothers forced to relinquish daughters. Barbara Yngvesson quotes a letter that a Colombian birth mother included in her son’s adoption dossier, although it tells nothing specific about her reasoning except that “I do not want him to lack what he needs or to suffer” (2010, 1–2).

Adopted children and adoptive parents form an eager audience for these accounts, a key reason that I see the beginnings of an epistemic community in this mediated space of books and blogs. But presumably for now most of the communication from birth parents is one way, except in rare instances where adoptive families seek out and find birth families. And birth parents, resigned to the already enforced separation, write almost exclusively to their children or perhaps in protest against government policies or cultural strictures that prevented them from keeping those children. We can sense implicitly what they would ask of adoptive parents for the children—to love them and give them a “better life” (however the birth parent might conceptualize that). But these texts give them little opening to express what they might ask of adoptive parents for themselves.

Trying to make sense of our own child’s situation, adoptive parents piece together stories of birth parents we never met from whatever fragments of information were conveyed by intermediaries. The Guatemalan adoption lawyer with whom I worked sent photos from the day my daughter’s birth mother put her in the care of the woman who would foster her until the adoption was complete.⁵ In retrospect, I realize that these were intended to prove that the child was not stolen—the woman holding the baby appears to be the same one in the photocopy of the birth mother’s national ID card in the adoption dossier. But what am I to make of this young woman’s modest pink turtleneck or her apparently calm demeanor? When the foster mother put my daughter into my arms, she made a point of telling me that the birth mother had not cried when she relinquished the baby. Mindful of Tannen’s warnings about reported speech (or, in this case, reported lack of communication), how should I interpret this assertion? It seems suspicious, too convenient for encouraging me to believe that the birth mother did not want the baby I so desired. It emphasizes the foster mother’s caring nature, since she sobbed when it was time to leave the baby with me. And supposing that the birth mother did not cry, what might that mean? That she was relieved? That she was too proud to let the foster mother see her cry? That she was traumatized and numb? I cannot know, though I can encourage other adoptive parents at least to ask these hard questions.

Still, fragmentary evidence tells little about nuanced, conflicted lives. As Dubinsky notes, “In public discussions, birth mothers are caricatured as victims or villains and thus rendered mute . . . Does adoption enhance or foreclose on reproductive alternatives for Guatemalan women? . . . The full story of transnational adoption is simply unknowable until the conversation includes birth mothers” (2010, 125). Fortunately, increasing numbers of adoptive families are searching for and finding birth families, often with the help of in-country intermediaries who recognize an opportunity to do well-remunerated work while filling a pressing need. From the accounts of paid searchers and families who have searched successfully, adoptive parents are starting to get answers to the kinds of questions we would like to ask of birth families. When children were not given up voluntarily, as in the army’s separation of children from murdered leftist parents during the civil wars in Latin America, grandparents have been indefatigable in their search (Ward 2011). Paid searchers appear sensitive to the risks to a birth mother whose neighbors or current partner may not know that she once gave up a child, yet report that only a tiny percentage of birth families refuse the opportunity to reconnect (M. Jones 2007). They do want to be found. And reunion reports do not suggest that birth families blame adoptive parents who have lovingly raised the child, nor that they usually demand the child’s return.

Yet what would birth families ask of adoptive parents, if given the chance? Some are content simply with knowing that their child is safe and well provided for; others want to enter into an ongoing relationship. Some will refuse any money from the adoptive family, while others will accept or request support for their other children or themselves. Some will even ask if the adoptive family can take in another child to give her or him the same chances (M. Jones 2007). Yet I have also heard of an instance in which the birth family rebuffed the adoptive family’s attempts to assist another daughter with her education, marrying her off at fifteen, presumably because they could not really imagine the life of the adopted child even after meeting her in person. Birth mothers are likely to share feelings that adoptive parents find it hard to hear; “Beatriz told us that she was deeply depressed for a year after the adoption was finalized. She got through her pain by turning to God,” reports journalist Elizabeth Larsen (2007). The pervasive sense from accounts of birth families reunited with adopted children is that they are pleased that adoptive parents have given the children what their birth parents hoped for: education, health care, and opportunity. Yet we are still far from the point where birth parents can engage not only with the fait accompli of a past adoption but with recommendations for future policy.

Following Shuman, we recognize the moral benefit of giving birth families the opportunity to communicate directly and repeatedly with the parents who adopted their children (2005). Yet a Bakhtinian perspective also emphasizes that when adoptive parents or children or researchers manage to talk with birth parents, the stories they might tell are also inevitably shaped for the current audience and circumstances. It is not possible to recapture perfectly the life and motivations of a birth mother at the time she relinquished her child, nor of any other party to the adoption at a prior stage. Teachers at the Guatemalan Spanish school where I studied when my daughter was a toddler doted on her and smiled at me, apparently regarding the adoption as a positive development. Yet on our last day the school director informed me that he had assisted adoptees searching for their Guatemalan birth families. “Bring your daughter back in twenty years,” he urged, “and I’ll help you look, but be prepared to hear stories completely different from the ones you’ve been told.” I am eager to help my daughter search, perhaps even sooner, but must remind myself and teach her that no single story will tell us the whole truth.

Analysis and Reflections

This essay proposes a framework, based on the feminist ethics of Walker and Schutte and on Bakhtinian narrative theory, to help those directly involved in international adoption move toward negotiating appropriate relative responsibilities. Walker’s nongeneric accountability asks all participants in the epistemic community to be honest about the privileges from which they benefit, generous about their resources and capabilities, and reasonable but not self-abnegating about their needs. Each person must respect the contributions others are currently able to make, although that does not preclude challenging others or oneself to do more or think differently.

This as yet fledgling epistemic community would presumably agree that those already parenting internationally adopted children must prioritize raising the particular child who has become ours and fulfilling our commitment to enable that young person to realize his or her potential. In an earlier exploration of the ethics of international adoption I concluded, “Or maybe next week we’ll just work on eating with a spoon” (Sawin 2005). Some might hear this as a flip cop-out, but for me that remark still captures our primary—and absorbing—responsibilities to the children we made a promise to parent. Yet it is incumbent upon adoptive parents, given our relatively privileged position, to take the lead in establishing a functioning epistemic community in which differently situated actors may eventually converse and, meanwhile, to draw upon the available evidence to envision what others involved in international adoption might expect of us. In order to make an effective level of mutual communication possible, adoptive parents must, in my view, tackle four substantial and, for many, unanticipated challenges.

Those of us who have already adopted must, to begin, find the time and energy to learn more about the complicated political histories of our children’s birth countries and other sending countries and not content ourselves with festive cultural practices appropriate to share with our young children. Scholarly critics of culture camps may not appreciate what goes on in these specialized epistemic communities, where adoptive parents assured of a sympathetic ear explore moral anxieties and share strategies for tackling medical and learning challenges common to children from particular countries. Still, to the extent that such gatherings and other “birth culture” resources emphasize purely “celebratory representations of cultural difference,” they “make invisible the historical events and political and economic structures that shape understandings of race, ethnicity, and difference” (Anagnost 2000, 391). They may effectively deprive adoptees of crucial information about the conditions that led to their separation from their first family.

As a corollary, adoptive parents must consider the stories we share with potential adopters, resisting the inclination to exaggerate our expertise or let our accounts of the search for a child eclipse imperfectly known stories of birth families and emerging stories of adopted children. Likewise, we must refuse to let a sense of psychic connection with birth families, however sincerely felt, obscure actual power relationships. Susan Barrett and Carol Aubin, for example, write, “Feminists who adopt internationally are in a unique position to further the active connection among women of varying cultures . . . We, ourselves, are inextricably bound to another woman who gave birth to the children we raise” (1990, 134–135). For once I agree with Transracial Abductee, who calls this “self-indulgent wishful thinking” (2011).

Further, I urge adoptive parents to capitalize on Schutte’s vision of allowing ourselves to be “decentered.” Early in our children’s lives we must focus on incorporating them and making them feel securely part of the family, emphasizing their similarities to us. But as they inevitably differentiate themselves, we can revel in and celebrate their distinctiveness, rather than “simply taking the decentering [we] might experience in the light of the other’s differences as a deficit in [our] control over the environment” (2000, 48). When families, schools, religious congregations, sports teams, scout troops, and communities as a whole embrace as their own children who are “visibly different,” what is visible as difference shifts. When those children fulfill expected roles in Western, middle-class families—loving their parents, learning from them, carrying on family culture (Zelizer 1994)—yet do not also perpetuate the biological inheritance of those who raise them, the notion of family shifts. Thoughtful adoptive parents can scarcely help but have their own sense of identity and of who belongs to/with whom “decentered” by the long-term relationship with a child whom they love unconditionally, yet who always in some ways asserts his or her persistent difference. Likewise, learning that our family happiness is inextricable from complicated and tragic events half a world away will not be comfortable, but we can appreciate the possibility for intellectual and ethical growth.

The next logical ethical step for most adoptive families will be to search for the birth family or for as much information as can be garnered about their specific history. I acknowledge that this is a tall order. Even the most adventurous adoptive parents imagine locating their child’s birth family with a mixture of hope and dread (American Family 2012; M. Jones 2007; Larsen 2007; Ward 2011), and few anticipated that adoption might require them to build relationships with an unknown extended family. Not every parent will have the emotional or financial resources to pursue this kind of knowledge, nor will every child wish for or even tolerate it. Not all searches will succeed, although some individuals are discovering that even ostensibly impossible searches in China, where children must be abandoned anonymously and illegally, can prove successful (American Family 2012). Other countries may eventually follow Korea in welcoming adoptees back and opening adoption records (Kim 2010). We are barely on the threshold of figuring out how to converse and connect with birth families different from us in culture, language and, most dauntingly, education and class, but the process of writing this chapter has convinced me that we must plunge into that unknown.

For those considering adopting internationally, the parallel requirement is to give up the “privileged innocence” whereby families evince little curiosity about the circumstances under which their child comes to them (Dubinsky 2010, 124) and to insist upon greater transparency and more complex, if painful, stories from adoption agencies. Adoptive parents need to acknowledge from the beginning the ways we are implicated as beneficiaries of the imbalanced global economic system, precisely because that challenges our implicit sense of entitlement to the world’s poor children. Whatever struggles we have faced in our own journey to parenthood, we cannot treat birth families like global storks dropping into our laps babies of whose source we remain blissfully ignorant. Thus we need to insist upon information about and, ideally, contact with birth families at the time of adoption. Ultimately, we must move toward Yngvesson’s visions of open international adoption (2010, 115) and even cross-cultural co-parenting (2004, 221–223). Adopted children are most likely to thrive with secure roots in both families. Stable connections with birth families provide adoptive parents a personal conduit for learning about and acting to remedy the forces that separate children from their original families. International adoption is (crassly put) a consumer-driven process, so if adoptive parents pursue contact with birth parents and demand that fuller knowledge be a condition of adopting, policies will change and the practice of (re)connecting with birth families will become more commonplace and guided by clearer expectations on all sides.

I ask a lot of adoptive parents, believing that our children and their birth parents would ask these things of us. Yet the ethics of nongeneric accountability allow us some leeway. We should be hopeful but realistic about what we as individuals and as a group can accomplish and recognize that change takes time. Many adoptive parents are already responding to their sense of others’ needs and their consequent ethical duties: supplying adopted children’s requirements for knowledge about their birth countries by organizing culture camps; raising money to build schools in their child’s birth country; publishing pro-adoption legal articles and opinion pieces; heading a research institute on adoption issues; or doing the ethnographic and historical research that advances and challenges our understandings.⁶ I honor, and urge others to honor, all of these efforts, even those one finds imperfect or misguided, as the contributions that those with particular perspectives and abilities are currently able to make. Crucially, I believe, adoptive parents must resist debilitating defensiveness about our particular adoption, recognizing that we acted in good faith to provide a loving home for a child, that we will never know everything about the circumstances under which she or he came to us, and that international adoption almost certainly offers children greater emotional and material support and greater opportunities to grow up healthy and educated than if they had remained in their birth country as poor, out-of-wedlock, or over-quota children. Nongeneric accountability likewise surely excuses adoptive parents exhausted by the demands of raising an infant or attending to a child with special needs from leading the move toward systemic improvement. Happily, too, important parts of this work will be done by others: by the anthropologists and historians who provide access to more complex stories; by intermediaries within sending countries, who can talk to birth parents in ways we cannot; and ultimately by our children as they forge their own paths and make their own decisions about what and who they need to know to form their evolving identities. But adoptive parents will need to rise to many unanticipated challenges, exercising courage, compassion, and humility. If we truly appreciate the privilege of raising, loving, and being loved by children born to and separated from other parents, I believe we can find the energy to participate in the full epistemic community of which our children make us members.