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Excerpt from Privileging Adult Desire Over the Best Interests of the Child. . . .

By csw, Section Research
Posted on Wed Sep 24, 2008 at 07:55:20 PM EST

The question should be whether it is wise social policy to ratify the decisions of adults to intentionally truncate the child’s familial heritage in order to advance adult rights.

Excerpt from: Camille S. Williams, Privileging Adult Desire Over the Best Interests of the Child: Will Hungary Legalize the Marriage of and Adoption by Same-Sex Couples?

To be published by: Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development, Qatar Foundation

NOTE: Footnotes have been omitted due to formatting constraints.

We do not have a long known history of same-sex couples raising children. The conjugal or biological family has long been the site for child-rearing, and still is the primary site. Surely children are resilient . . . However, the test of a wise social policy should not be how much of the common heritage of humankind we can strip away before the child becomes pathological; rather the question should be whether it is wise social policy to ratify the decisions of adults to intentionally truncate the child’s familial heritage in order to advance adult rights. . . .

Using Children to legitimate Adult Desire The push for same-sex marriage is part of the movement for "sexual autonomy" rights, something akin to a recognition and legal affirmation of whatever relationship(s) a couple or other group of persons agrees on (polyamory, polygamy, etc.). [Laws] . . . are being interpreted to extend marriage to same-sex couples, and then to extend parental rights to those couples, and, perhaps, to other configurations of adults. However, there are some important, fundamental differences between same-sex and opposite-sex households; recognizing those differences in law is not a violation of human dignity, it is a recognition of the dignity of the biological family.

Categorization on the basis of biological characteristics has been used as the basis for discrimination, but such categorization and discrimination does not make biology irrelevant in all situations or in all relationships. Biological relationships are determinative to some aspects of laws regulating support of children, abuse or neglect of children, intra-familial torts, and inheritance laws.

The biological family is recognized in law because it is the common state of humankind. One man and one woman, each with normal fertility can produce a child unaided by the state or by medical technology. Children produced through assisted reproductive technologies are not so common. Some of these children are conceived at great cost, some are conceived as part of a political statement. Because some techniques and technologies are so new, we have little data about long-term effects on the physical, psychological, and social health of the babies produced or of the families initiating the reproduction.

Introduction: Ignoring Familial Heritage

Same-sex marriage advocates in the United States assert that legalizing same-sex marriage would be in the best interests of children. Most advocates for same-sex marriage consider the family to be socially constructed; they contend that the family can be reconstructed to fit the desires of individual adults, regardless of sex or gender. They believe that children in such reconstructed families will fare well, and that as long as family processes are warm and affirming, the structure of the family does not matter.

Central to this advocacy is the focus on the family as household. But to focus on the household as family is akin to taking a time-bound “snapshot” of a family and recommending policy on the basis of that cropped picture, while reflecting little or nothing about the generations prior or succeeding. Such a truncated view of the family does not allow for a full appreciation for nor understanding of marriage or parent-child relationships. It ignores completely intergenerational relationships beyond the parent and the child within the household, and even the intra-generational relationships between siblings who do not share the same household. This is short-sighted social policy indeed. A surprising number of nations who value and carefully preserve their natural, national, and cultural heritage, seem poised to redefine marriage and family to include same-sex marriage and adoption of children by same-sex couples.

A careful consideration of children’s identity development and children’s subjectivity contradicts the notion that redefining marriage and family to include same-sex couples is in the best interests of children. In fact, the use of children as part of the arguments for legalization of same-sex marriage is an attempt to normalize same-sex desire with the imprimatur of the state, and to transcend the biological limitations to procreation that same-sex couples face by legitimating the use of ART in nonconjugal settings. To insist that that family processes are not significantly affected by family structure is to assert that good parents are in some sense fungible, despite a wealth of research showing differences in familial interaction on the basis of biological sex, biological relationship to the child, and the parents’ relationship with each other.

In contrast, [familial] . . . relationships have been recognized as in some sense predating the state, existing apart from the rights granted by the state, and to a significant degree, arising from biological sex and conjugal and biological relationships.

. . . while it may not be a tort recognized in law, it is a gross abuse of power for an adult to bring a child into being with the intention of deliberately destroying the child’s ability to know one or both of her or his biological parents and that parent’s family. Such an act of hubris does not adequately consider the best interests of the child, nor adequately recognize the subjectivity of the child. The law restricts parental alienation and parental kidnapping, but does not now uniformly protect children not yet born from parental-induced motherlessness or fatherlessness. Having one nurturing mother, or two excellent mothers does not necessarily compensate a child for not having her or his biological father as a part of daily life, nor does having two loving fathers compensate for the absence of a biological mother--just as having two arms on the right side of the body would not necessarily compensate for not having an arm on the left side of the body; nor does possessing statistical information about the missing biological parent adequately substitute for the child’s missing relationship with one or both biological parents across the lifespan.

The Child’s Heritage and Identity

The biological parent is part of the social family, even when absent from the child’s life. Historically, death and divorce or abandonment could result in parental absence in the child’s life. However, the absent mother or absent father has a placeholder in the family story, at least, to help them live in the child’s understanding of who she or he is as a person. These family and individual narratives, which help constitute who we are in the world, include biological and social relationships that extend beyond the household in which the child is reared. In addition to the “family as household,” Patricia Smith points out that children learn about the “family in the abstract”, which: is really an idea or an ideal that refers to a family name or genetic line, the extended family in the largest sense, whose boundaries or members extend over both space and time.

Advocates for same-sex marriage, procreation of children via ART for individuals or same-sex couples, and the adoption of children by individuals and same-sex couples focus primarily on what Smith calls “the family as household,” while Smith’s focus is primarily on the obligations felt by family members, both to the family as household and to the family in the abstract, she notes that those obligations arise from “membership,” which may not be “reducible to anything else.” When the genetic, biological, or social ties between a child and a parent are severed, the child’s felt membership may be weakened. Most of us can identify with an idea about the families from which we were born, this may be “construed as a blood line and relates to the perpetuation of inherited characteristics, both genetic and social, and sometimes material as well.” “Family in the abstract,” according to Smith, “always relates to genetic inheritance . . . and often to perpetuation of certain values, life styles, or other commitments.”

Part of a child’s identity and place in the world is that child’s biological heritage, that child’s embodiment arising from a specific woman and a specific man. As we grow from infant to adult, we see ourselves as like and as unlike the parents who brought us into being. If we have a significant shared history with each of those parents, each of us is in a better position to know about our own self and our own potentials and limitations. If we have contact with and knowledge of our grandparents and extended family, our sense of identity is enriched.

Research looking at the experiences of adult and adolescent adoptees has often used an identity framework, and there are now some efforts to apply identity process theory (IPT) to children of donor insemination (“DI”). It has been suggested that there are four major aspects of identity--self esteem, continuity, positive distinctiveness and self-efficacy—that are part of the processes of “assimiliation-accommodation and evaluation,” which determine how new material is incorporated into the identity structure. Examples of threats to identity of DI-conceived children might be that the inability to answer questions about biological origins may lead to low self-esteem, and incomplete sense of self. Perceived lack of openness about their origins may undercut the DI children’s sense of positive distinctiveness and social worth, and subsequent disclosure can negatively affect “donor offsprings’ perception of honesty and trust within family relationships . . . threatening their sense of familial continuity.”

In the ordinary course of human development, embodied persons construct a life narrative to delineate to self, if to no one else, likeness to and differences from parents and siblings. Certainly such narratives are part of family narratives, and part of individual and collective identity, constructed by individuals in relation to family and to the larger society. But such construction projects have limitations, one of which is biological. “No personal identity is infinitely malleable; all are constrained by facts of one kind or another,” Hilde Linemann Nelson explains. Personal identities as narratively constructed must bear some significant relationship to the facts of the matter, or that narrative and identity have become fiction, fraud, or delusion. Because no one individual unilaterally owns or creates or sustains either an individual or a collective identity, it is not possible for a parent to control the identity perspectives of a child.

It has never been the norm that children consciously determine the structure of their families; adults arrange themselves, and children have relatively little say in the arrangements. So it is with household structures today. Children conceived for same-sex couples via assisted reproductive technologies are relative newcomers in the human family, and because of their manner of coming and their parents’ lifestyle choices, the standard narratives of family of origin do not apply, especially when the couple has decided in advance of the child’s birth that the child will be motherless or fatherless on a day to day basis. Narrative accounts of the baby hunger in these nontraditional families give insight to the longing those adults have for children of their own to rear, but we have very little knowledge about how these children feel about the novel circumstances in which they live.

While a significant number of advocacy studies have claimed that children of same-sex couples are as psychologically healthy and as well-adjusted as children raised by conjugal couples, those studies have not yet explored the children’s subjective experiences over the lifespan. Most of the studies on donor offspring are small-sample studies of young children who at the time of the studies were likely “too young to have developed the abstract thinking that would be required for them to reflect in depth on their parental relationships and psychological well-being.”

There is anecdotal evidence that, as in any family, the adult children of donor insemination, and the children reared by same-sex couples love their parents and loyal to them, and do not want to hurt them by publicly criticizing their parents’ choices, but that at least some of them feel that their parents’ choices disadvantaged them severely. In “How It Feels to be a Child of Donor Insemination,” Anonymous describes her love and gratitude to the father who raised her; but acknowledges that as she approached adulthood, “I began to think increasingly about where I came from and became angry that I had been deprived of what I believe are my basic rights.” She is curious: “I have a natural desire to know about my biological origins. I am fascinated to find out more. Why did he donate? What does he look like? What are his interests, his job? Who knows, he may want to know more about me.” “I am allowed to find out if any future husband is related to me, but I cannot screen every boyfriend.”

Because of the sensitivity of parent-child relationships, and the highly individual responses within families, “what it means” to be the offspring of gamete or embryo donation, or “what it means” to have been raised by a same-sex couple with one biological parent absent may be difficult to ascertain currently on the very limited knowledge we have of children in these households. One thing it surely means, however, is that the child’s knowledge of and shared history with half of her or his biological kin is severed or severely truncated. That lack of knowledge is not merely an artifact of that one individual life, but will also be reiterated in the lives of her or his progeny.

The Family’s Biological and Heritage and Identity

Knowing our multigenerational biological families helps us learn how to be reconciled to our bodies, because those with bodies quite like our own have gone before. Knowledge of biological origins is important not only for medical purposes, but also for individual and group identity. Adoptee rights organizations, the increasing reports of children of donor insemination hunting for their fathers, and the ongoing popularity of genealogical research attest to the importance of the multigenerational biological family in the lives of individuals and households.

Because individuals and same-sex couples are themselves nonprocreative, nonperpetuating units, they will draw on help from individuals outside the couple. Simply starting a new family narrative, one about two mommies or two daddies is to require that the child enter into fiction building, rather than family building, “creating a fictitious filiation by law-two fathers, or two mothers- which is neither biologically real nor plausible. . .. Such narratives build a new family form only through the destruction or attenuation of the actual biological relationship the child has with one or both parents, and may prevent or destroy the social relationship the child could have with one or both biological parents, grandparents and the larger family.

Many contemporary households reflect the reproductive autonomy of the adults in the family, but may do so at the expense of the child’s multigenerational family. The multigenerational family is part of the individual and the group narrative history. A narrative can be loaned to the child: her two same-sex parents can brings the child into it, but in a real sense it does not belong to the child in the same way that it belongs to the adult. The child’s entrance into the same-sex couple’s family costs the child some or all of the membership she or he has in her multigenerational biological family, her family in the abstract.

What the same-sex couple sees as legitimating and protecting their individual and familial privacy by preventing legal and familial ties from being developed between the child and one or both of her biological parents, the child as an adult may view as a species of damnatio memoria, which succeeds in nothing so much as making it impossible for the child to fully know her biogenetic heritage. We recognize the cultural loss when acts of damnatio memoria result in the loss of architectural and cultural artifacts; it appears that we are slow to recognize as a legal wrong intentionally causing the loss of an individual’s biogenetic, social and familial material history.

The Material History of the Family and the Child

In addition to being the source of inherited physical characteristics, the multigenerational biological family is the repository of the material and cultural history of the child’s family of origin. The material objects that reflect the lives of our own biological ancestors are not only interesting, but also provide continuity for our own identity. The physical tokens of our heritage are part of the legacy one generation gives another. . . .

Family identity is inextricably associated with material history, for “a family may be identified with certain material possessions such as a house, an estate, heirlooms, or land. It may be identified with an enterprise such as a business, a political office, or a profession. . . .We don’t require biological families to maintain a repository of material history for the family, so it may be argued that the lack thereof is no particular harm to a child. It might be argued that a child can’t miss what she or he has never had; but that isn’t so. Once a child knows that most people can identify both biological parents, and have a relationship with both, and can access prior generations of family members, there may begin a longing not just for what she or he has never had, but also for what she or he can never have. . . .

It is a rich heritage, indeed, to know one’s own multigenerational family. This richness of the multigenerational family’s material history is not at all uncommon, and yet it contrasts sharply with the lament of DI children who would just like to know what their father-donors look like; or would like to see a picture of their donors, and know what he does for a living, or what he likes, and whether he would like to meet his DI children. It is true that the coparent/intentional parent can lend her material history to the child, but that is not the same as seeing evidence of your own family in your own flesh and blood.

Disrupting the Child’s Identity for Political Gain

The multigenerational family can be disrupted in various ways: natural disaster, war, genocide, epidemics, famine, political regimes which use rape with forced pregnancy, or forced sterilization, or “breeding” programs which encourage births to a favored subpopulation and discourage or punish births among the disfavored classes. Arguably, apart from the wrongs done to the persons and lives of specific individuals living during those regimes, additional grievous wrongs are committed against generations of children due to the intentional disruption of conjugal and filial relations.

For example, slaves in the antebellum southern United States had “no legal right to their own person or their progeny.” Their descendants are in many ways forever blocked from knowing about them. . . . Similarly, the child designed to live without one or both of her or his biological parents may be able to fit into the family history of the individual or the same-sex couple who raise her or him, but will have a difficult, if not impossible task should she or he desire to know her or his hidden biogenetic family, present and past.

. . . We have recognized that peoples can be disadvantaged when their children are absorbed into another culture; when their cultural sites, such as churches, temples, mosques, museums are flooded or bombed, when their libraries are burned. Surely we replicate in smaller ways these kinds of wrongs, wounding our children when we intentionally cut them off from a portion of their biological, familial, material, and cultural heritage. . . . Seeing yourself in a family of biologically unrelated persons is different from seeing your place in your own flesh and blood family. It is not the same thing to see the London Bridge in London, England, as it is to see the London Bridge in Lake Havasau, Arizona.

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