Adoptees' Right to Know

John C. Sonne's argument on behalf of adoptees' right to the information on their original birth certificates is an important one [“The Psychological Consequences of Ignorance: Adoptees' Right to Know Who their Biological Parents Are,” JPCS 2, 1 (Spring 1997)]. For too many years, the psychological consequences of the erasure of adoptees' biological origins have been ignored, if not compounded by the state's illegalization of such knowledge. Indeed, Sonne's work suggests that in lieu of the adjective “illegitimate,” used for generations to degrade the adopted child, it would be more accurate to say that adopted children have been subjected to a process of legal and cultural delegitimation, in the interest of upholding an idealized nuclear family.

But precisely here one finds a troubling theme in Sonne's essay that requires some careful parsing if we are truly to understand what is at stake in the erasure of the adopted child's biological origins and the resistance on the part of lawmakers and others to legislation that would render to adoptees the right to know those origins. Arguing that the legally sanctioned anonymity provided to birth parents places an unjust and damaging burden upon adopted children, Sonne represents the birth mother as “bad luck for the baby,” narcissistic, and irresponsible. Throughout the essay, the author discusses birth mothers with a degree of misogyny that is as obfuscatory as it is troubling. Pointing to recent cultural artifacts such as the film Losing Isaiah, Drucilla Cornell has recently argued that adoption is represented in public discourse as a war between two women, the birth mother and the adoptive one [“Adoption and Its Progeny,” At the Heart of Freedom Princeton: Princeton UP, forthcoming]. In Sonne's article, another battle emerges: that between the birth mother and her adopted child. That these two sets of conflicts might be the effects of adoption law and thus interrelated seems worthy of consideration; certainl