Placing the "gift child" in transnational adoption

Law & Society Review, 2002 by Yngvesson, Barbara

In this article I focus on discourses of freedom and exclusive belonging that structure the conventions of giving in transnational adoption, and I examine state practices for regulating the production and circulation of children in a global market economy. I argue that while the gift child, like the sold child, is a product of commodity thinking, experiences of giving a child, receiving a child, and of being a given child are in tension with market practices, producing the contradictions of adoptive kinship, the ambiguities of adoption law, and the creative potential in the construction of adoptive families.

gratuitous 1. Given or granted without return or recompense; unearned.

2. Given or received without cost or obligation; free; gratis (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language).

What would be a gift that fulfills the condition of the gift, namely, that it not appear as gift, that it not be, exist, signify, want-to-say as gift? A gift without wanting, without wanting-tosay, an insignificant gift, a gift without intention to give? Why would we call that a gift?

-Jacques Derrida, Given Time, 1992

Even if reversibility is the objective truth of the discrete acts which ordinary experience knows in discrete form and calls gift exchanges, it is not the whole truth of a practice which could not exist if it were consciously perceived in accordance with the model. The temporal structure of gift exchange, which objectivism ignores, is what makes possible the existence of two opposing truths, which defines the full truth of the gift.

-Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 1977

Complex Truths

A front-page story in the October 25, 1998, edition of the New York Times describes an open adoption in which Kim Elniskey chose Yvette Weilacker and her husband to adopt her newborn son. The story, illustrated by a picture of the future adoptive mother reaching out to touch the child in the arms of his birth mother, quotes Elniskey as saying, "I want you to feel that this is your baby, your family" (Fein 1998:1). The only intimation of tension between giver and receiver, and the force this might have in shaping the landscape of adoption and the experience of the adopted child, is the comment, made almost in passing, that "loaded" phrases such as "real parent" and "natural parent" have been replaced in the current climate of transparency surrounding adoption. The birth parent gives, relinquishes, and chooses; the adoptive parent receives. Together, they become "part of a clan."1

The fascination this story evokes-its representation of a selfless mother who gives her child away in order to create a family for him-is an effect of its moral ambiguity for the educated, white, middle-class audiences to whom it is directed. A mother who gives away her child is unthinkable. She gives the child away because she loves it so much, the story and its accompanying image imply; but the unspoken subtext-If she really loved the child, how could she bear to part from it?-is no less powerful a message in a moral economy in which becoming a woman is inseparable from the work of motherhood and the assumptions about nurturance this implies (Ginsburg 1989). A birth mother I interviewed several years ago, who had placed her infant son in an open adoption in 1993, described the shocked admiration of friends who told her she was "so brave," followed immediately by the cautionary statement, "I could never give away my child." This woman is still haunted by the sense that her gesture of love and trust was morally wrong, whatever her aspirations for her son, and that he will eventually condemn her for it, possibly hate her (Yngvesson 1997:55-56).2

that the "a-word" should be abandoned in favor of more neutral language-"making an adoption plan," "placing" a child for adoption-which depict the motives of a mother in a way that is less injurious to the feelings of the adoptee (Brown 2000). For similar reasons, the rhetoric of giving has been criticized in howto books on adoption, which suggest that placing the child is more of a piece with the birth mother's increased visibility in contemporary (American) society. The visible birth mother makes "a voluntary decision and a positive plan" for her child, rather than giving her child away (Melina 1989:26-27; 1998:94-95). Similarly, the giving nation is positioned differently in contemporary adoption rhetoric, as vigilant over the loss of its most precious national resources-children-rather than as a country that has only children to give away (Carlson 1994:256; Yngvesson 2000:185; Stanley 1997:1).3 The rhetoric of giving and the experience of loss go hand-in-hand in these representations, in which alienation (the split subject, the fragmented nation) is an inevitable consequence of "giving." By contrast, child "placement"-understood as planned, consensual, and regulated by the nation-state-is celebrated by adoption professionals and policymakers.

In spite of efforts to reconceptualize the physical movement of a child between persons or nations as placement rather than gift, the gift child remains a powerful and persistent image in adoption discourse. I suggest that the reason this is so is related in part to the ambiguity of the concept-the difficulty of interpreting what gifts signify about the relationship (or absence of a relationship) between donor and receiver, an ambiguity that resonates with the experience of the adoptee, the adoptive family, and, in some cases, the birth family. Ambiguity, in turn, is a function of the traces gifts bear of their passage in the world-their movement from and to someone and someplace, however vague the identity of the donor may be. By contrast, "placement" conveys a sense of grounding and permanence that is at odds with the experience of being adopted, of giving in adoption, or of adopting, verbs that imply a transformation of belonging and identity. A woman who wrote in response to the New York Times article with which I began, commented on this disjunction between language and experience: