Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt created The Making of Me as a platform for conversations about all aspects of adoption. But it’s a podcast with a twist. In each episode, the hosts and their guests discuss a book about adoption. In the first season they tackled Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, and now just a few episodes into their second season, they’re exploring another classic, Journey of the Adopted Self, by Betty Jean Lifton.

Meet the adoptee friends who pivoted from operating an ice cream truck to hosting a popular podcast.Can you each summarize your adoption journeys?

Sarah: My bio parents met in their first year of college but went their separate ways after the second semester ended; he went back to New Hampshire, and soon after, he was drafted in Vietnam. I’m not sure if he dropped out of college or what the circumstances were that he was drafted, but he never learned of the pregnancy. My bio mom kept it from her parents—weirdly, she was also adopted!—and on a plane from JFK (she was from Queens) to St. Louis where she was to go to nursing school, her water broke. There was no hiding that from her mother. She was not allowed to even hold me. I was immediately taken from her. I was placed with a foster mother for about six weeks and then adopted into my family. A few years later, they adopted a boy, and when he was five months old, they discovered they were pregnant with twins. They divorced when I was seven, and my brothers and I stayed with my dad (who remarried about five years later). My bio mom had four kids after me (and another she carried almost to term but lost after a terrible car accident)—all of whom were kept. My bio father, who died before I was able to meet him, had three kids, one from a second marriage. So I’m the oldest of seven biologically, and three from adoption. I also have three step-siblings. I met my bio mom and siblings in 1998 and stayed in touch with her until she died in 2009. I’m still in reunion with my sisters.

Louise: My biological mom chose to put me up for adoption in September 1968 after leaving college when she became pregnant with me. She was 18 years old. She’d known my biological father in high school in Colorado, where they dated. From what I’ve gathered, they met up again during the holidays and I was the result of that encounter. My biological father was already engaged to his girlfriend at the time who was also pregnant previous to their encounter. My bio mom took on the journey of having me on her own. My bio dad did know about me and signed off on my adoption. I believe that the decision to relinquish me was made by my bio mother “in her right mind” because I have letters from her to family members who had asked her to consider letting them raise me. She was very insistent that I have a father figure who was strong because of her missing some of that in her childhood and she did not want to see me being raised and not be my mother. She had strong convictions on having me be with an intact family. I do think it critically changed her path. From what I know from relatives, she may have regretted it later in life. She passed away at a young age in a drowning incident so I’ve never been able to ask her. I know who my bio dad is and who many of my family members are from knowing his name and having it confirmed on Ancestry. I have not had a reunion with them. I do stay in contact with my bio mom’s sister and cousins. My parents adopted me through an agency several days after I was born in Denver. They had one biological son and had lost a baby girl a few years prior to me in delivery. My mom could not have more children of her own. I then grew up in Littleton, Colorado

How did you meet?

Louise: Our sons were in elementary school together and we met through a mutual friend.

Sarah: Once we discovered we were both adopted, we became instant friends. Ultimately we opened a business together—a gourmet ice-cream truck in Los Angeles.

How did you decide to do a podcast about adoption together and what was your goal at the start?

Sarah: Adoption was what we initially connected over, and we had talked about starting a podcast. We were tossing around ideas and finally we were, “Uh, duh! We should talk about what we both know.”

Louise: Honestly, we didn’t really have a goal except to hear adoption stories and connect with other adoptees.

How did you find and build your audience? Were you already connected with a number of adoptees or with the adoptee community?

Sarah: We were not connected with the adoptee community. In fact, we didn’t even know there was such a thing until a few months in and we found Adoptee Twitter. Our initial audience came from word-of-mouth and friends listening and sharing, and then we started to build a following because people related to the stories and our connection with each other.

Louise: And then it took on a life of its own. People started reaching out to us to thank us, asking to be on the podcast and share their stories.

There are a number of adoptee podcasts – how do you describe The Making of Me?

Louise: I’d describe The Making of Me as more of a conversation around adoption. First we discuss a chapter of an adoption book. in Season One it was The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier, and Season Two is Journey of The Adopted Self by Betty Jean Lifton. After we discuss the book, we bring on a guest to tell their story.

Sarah: I think what draws people to the podcast is that even though it’s a deep topic, we bring levity and honest back-and-forth with our guests.

How and why did you conceive of the idea of linking chapters of books to adoptees’ stories?

Sarah: The chapter discussions are not necessarily linked to the stories. It’s kind of its own thing that we do together before we bring a guest on. But every chapter, every adoptee can relate to.

Do you plan to continue basing the podcast on books about adoption, and if so, do you already have thoughts about books you want to highlight in the future?

Louise: We plan on continuing to base it on books about adoption, at least at this moment. We’ve got a list we’re going through. We’re thinking possibly about a memoir by an adoptee for our next book.

Louise, on your website bio, you write about learning that your birth mother had been killed in an accident, saying “This piece of information proved to be a touchstone between the guiding and protective voice in her head and the events of the past.” Can you say more about that and what you mean by that?

Louise:  My bio mom’s family found me when I was 32 years old due to my bio grandmother being terminally ill. I learned the night that I got the call about them finding me that my bio mom had been killed in an accident when I was in the 2nd grade. This just made sense to me. I was overwhelmed, saddened but not that surprised, strangely. My entire life from around the fourth grade until my late 20s, I felt that I had a voice that protected me. Not my own internal voice, but a voice that would set me on the straight and narrow or give me warning signs when I was going off track too far. I always felt that it was ‘otherworldly’ and I have had many experiences since childhood with sensing people from beyond. When I found out that she was no longer on this earth I wasn’t shocked. I sort of knew this internally. It’s hard to explain. When I found out that she had passed away, I stopped having this sixth sense or voice in my head.

Louise, you’ve said that hosting the podcast has been life changing? In what way?

Louise: The way it has changed my life is that I never really had the experience of community with other adoptees. I have had adopted friends (many in fact), but when we touched on deeper issues about adoption that we all felt, I almost feel like we were scared to broach the topic. We would bond immediately over certain shared experiences that I couldn’t relate to others about, but would be a bit guarded about anything after that. I now have a sense that I can be more open to explore parts of myself that I have kept to myself and haven’t been able to describe or flush out. It is freeing and a bit scary.

Can you both describe your understanding of what is meant by being in the fog or coming out of the fog?

Sarah: How I see it, it’s waking up from the narrative I was told my entire life; I was “lucky,” I was “chosen”—and that was the end of the story. It’s having my eyes opened and understanding that was only the beginning of the story— seeing the deep trauma, how that first relinquishment (and subsequently second from my adopted mom and emotional abandonment from my adopted father) altered the course of my life, affecting almost every decision I’ve made, how I felt about myself, how I relate to people and the world around me. It’s been enlightening and also a grieving process. I’m getting to know myself in a different way. Even though there’s been some grief, it’s also been liberating because I now know I’m not alone, I’m not a freak, and I can begin to heal in a new way.

Louise: The concept of the fog perplexes me somewhat. I do feel I have crossed a line that I hadn’t crossed before in exploration and understanding of what some of my deeper issues are and what caused these issues (where they may have stemmed from). I’m not sure I had the understanding of the deeper core reasons as to why they were there before this. That feels amazing. So, yes, that does feel like coming out of a fog. I understand the fog and how important it is in describing these feelings. I feel I may always be moving through this fog and not just stepping out of it. Or stepping out and then maybe going back in. Maybe it’s a place I may always be in or out of? The way I can best describe it for me is like I am living in it and some days it is sunny and clear and other days it is so thick it may rain. I now feel that I am on a journey that has shifted, and wherever it takes me, I’m excited to have a deep understanding of myself. I feel calmer with this new insight and have developed some grace (for lack of a better word) in looking at the situation from many angles. I am not sure how else to describe it. I hope that makes sense.

What has most surprised you in the course of doing the podcast? What story most affected you?

Sarah: What has been most surprising for me is how far and wide the reach has been, and how many people want to connect, tell their stories, and just tell us how much they relate. And again—the community that I never knew existed!

All the stories have affected me in one way or another, but there are a couple that stand out. Sam, who was an LDA and didn’t find out he was adopted until he was in his early 50s with a life-threatening kidney disease. He had humor in dealing with it. Rachel, whose birth was the result of a violent act, and the grace in which she lives her life. And John, who was part of Operation Baby Lift out of Vietnam! Everyone’s story is so unique and yet the same. I love that.

Louise: I am going to echo Sarah here. I’m blown away daily by those who want to share their stories bravely and connect with us via many means. I feel so honored to have others reach out to us and tell us about their struggles and why they are ready to share their stories. It makes me care greatly about what we are doing and wanting to make sure we let others tell the truth as it is for them. Adoptees and our guests are so resilient, have great humor, and also have such deep souls. I’m grateful I’ve had this time to share with them and to grow in this along with my friend Sarah. Each story is my favorite when it comes out and after our interviews.

From your experience after so many episodes, what do you think is most misunderstood about adoptees by people who are not adopted?

Sarah: People who aren’t adopted don’t understand that it’s a trauma from the start—the “primal wound.” They assume the narrative that we were told—we’re “lucky,” we’re “chosen,” we were “spared a terrible existence.”

Louise: I think they don’t understand that babies carry that trauma on a cellular level. It seems that the mainstream general public hasn’t dug into hearing what adoptees have to say and focuses more on the adopters.

How much were you aware of the adoptee community when you began doing the podcast?

Sarah: How about this—ZERO awareness of the adoptee community! Isn’t that crazy?

Louise: For me, it’s been eye-opening and so informative. We’re really grateful for the community.

As with most communities, the adoptee community isn’t always unified in its beliefs or in its approach to advocacy. Has that ever been an issue for you as you’ve been working on the podcast?

Louise: We had a couple of bumps, mainly to do with being new in the community but because we were open to listening we’ve been welcomed by mostly everyone.

What do you love, if anything, about adoptee Twitter, and what, if anything, do you not love about adoptee Twitter?

Sarah: We love the community, that there are others who have gone through and feel the same as we do—mirrors that we never had, really. We love hearing about issues that we’d never heard in a public forum.

Louise: What can be difficult is that sometimes it feels black and white – not much nuance. If you don’t agree, then you are wrong – no middle-ground. Sometimes legitimate feelings feel dismissed if they’re not the exact same as others.

Why is it important for adoptees to share their stories?

Louise: It’s important to share stories so we can connect as a community, have a safe space to tell your story to people who understand you. We’ve talked to people who have never told their stories and listened to our podcast and found the courage to finally want to talk.

Sarah: It’s liberating to tell your story and be heard with love and compassion.

As advocates for adoptee rights, what do you think is the most significant issue that needs to be addressed?

Sarah: For starters, taking a look at why there are so many infant adoptions. If it’s really about wanting to be a parent, why must it be a baby? Someone else’s baby? Prospective adoptive parents might want to examine—is this about parenting or is this about wanting a baby for our own needs?

Louise: Take profit out of adoption. Resources to birth mothers and families—making keeping that family together the priority. Putting that first, not the needs (or wants!) of the prospective adopters.

Sarah: Legal guardianship rather than adoption (in most cases) is a better option. And NOT changing the child’s name. Why? Just, why is that even a thing anymore?

Jan Beatty’s American Bastard, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award, is a blistering, take no prisoners account of adoption that may leave non-adoptees astonished and many adoptees shaking their heads in recognition.

A domestic adoptee from the Baby Scoop Era, Beatty was born in the Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in Pittsburgh, adopted into a working-class family, and told when she was young that she’d been adopted. She writes about the emotional life of an adopted child—the longing, yearning, the feeling of erasure and brokenness—and her fractured encounters with the birth parents she discovered after years battling the bureaucratic gatekeepers of adoption information.

Beatty’s lyrical prose sparks like a live wire. For anyone taken from a parent, her words will resonate, at times landing like a punch to the gut and other times like a balm. Adoptees will feel seen, and those who were not adopted may see adoptees for the first time after reading the memoir.

American Bastard punctures the rose-colored vision of adoption that poses the practice as a strategy for social betterment. In its place she offers the reality: “I had assembled huge walls of protection over the years as a way to stay alive. An adoptee needs to have a strategy from a young age, whether conscious or not—a way to manage this hole of abandonment, loss, and grief. It’s too much for a child to handle. The loss of identity, the complete erasure of history, the floating in the world without a name. The original loss of being taken from the mother at birth, and then the adoptive parents pretending that they are your parents. The primary lifelong trauma.”

Beatty blasts away the whitewashed fantasy that casts adopters as saviors and children as rescued. She offers an unflinching picture of the damage adoption can inflict, the lifelong pain of abandonment it leaves in its wake, the lies and the effacement of identity.  She shatters the myths from the very first page, slaying every erroneous belief held by those who think they know what adoption is. “Maybe you are saying, ‘I’ve felt that way—I always thought I was adopted.’ Please, let me stop you. You weren’t.” She disintegrates argument after argument, makes sawdust of all the well-meaning responses adoptees hear all their lives, like those from people who think they understand because their mothers died when they were young. To one after another she says, “Please, let me stop you.” And sets the reader straight. “This is not about measuring sorrow. But this one’s about you—how you can’t seem to imagine, not even for a second, how it might be for someone who doesn’t know who they are—without boomeranging back to your own life. Try it. Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby’s entire history. There are these hands that have a different smell, a different DNA—reaching for the baby, calling it theirs. Stay with that for a while. No talking.”

It’s devastating right from the start. And Beatty, in a letter to adopters, offers this brutal assessment—a startling, uncomfortable, and wholly welcome honesty: “What are you thinking? That you could tie it all up with a bow? You’ve erased a baby human to make yourself happy, to fill a hole, to do a good deed—at least own it: it’s for you.”

In no way a traditional memoir, Beatty’s poetic account mixes lyricism, essayistic rambling, fantasy, and stream of consciousness. It drifts back and forth across time and space, circling its subjects, diverting, and circling back. It breaks down, comes apart, and weaves back together. In a structure like no other, it dips and drops readers into the center of scenes and makes them work to get their balance. At times her words seem to dance on a knife’s edge—language that’s painful and raw and beautiful and ugly and insists on every page that you do not look away.—BKJ

By Michelle Talsma Everson

Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation, by Daniel Groll, is a fascinating exploration of attitudes about whether donor offspring are entitled to knowledge of their donors, but the issues and questions it raises are pertinent to adoptees and NPEs/MPEs as well. Comprehensive and academic in approach, it may be challenging to readers not well-versed in philosophical discourse, but it’s key reading for anyone with a stake in the debate over access to genetic knowledge. And although Groll ultimately stands against anonymity in donor conception, some NPEs and MPEs may take exception to some of the arguments that led him there. Therefore, we asked him to address some of those arguments, and he readily agreed.Severance was the target of a critical article last year in a publication called Real Life that accused it of numerous transgressions, including promoting bionormativity. It insisted that the magazine’s content poses genetic family as measured by DNA as “the norm against which all forms of family should be judged.” It further states that if we view the genetic family as something from which one can be severed, non-genetic family “will inevitably be understood as secondary, extraneous, and even pathological.” Additionally, it charges that those of us looking for genetic information are indicating that “biogenetic kinship is the most true, essential, and valid form of family” and that such a belief places queer families in “legally precarious positions but undermines the larger value of ‘love makes a family’ for all families.” The argument rejects the idea that there can be a desire to know one’s genetic history that is apolitical. Clearly, I don’t believe Severance makes any such assertions, and based on having heard hundreds of stories and experiences, it’s obvious that most of us grew up with non-genetic families. I, for example, was raised by a man who was not my father. He was my family. I didn’t wish to have another father, but I did wish to know who my biological father was. I didn’t imagine my biological family would be a better family, or a more real family. I simply wished, as I believe most people who lack this information do, to know from whom I got my genes. My question is, how does simply wanting that information valorize traditional families or diminish nontraditional families?

Before I answer this, I just want to explain my connection to the issue of donor conception since people inevitably wonder about it. I am a known donor to close friends who have two children. The children know both who and what I am in relation to them. Our families are in regular contact. From the get-go, everyone agreed there would be no secrets and that we all need to be open to how their children understand their experience and let that guide us. Maybe the fact that I’m a donor will cause some of your readers to stop reading, but I hope not.

On to your question! One thing I want to make clear is that I think people who create children with donated gametes should not use an anonymous donor. So I am totally with you: I don’t think that wanting genetic knowledge—as I call it—necessarily or always or even usually valorizes traditional families or diminishes nontraditional families. One thing I try to do in my book is to make exactly this case. There are really good reasons for taking people’s desire for genetic knowledge seriously without committing ourselves to the view (which I don’t subscribe to) that biological parents are normally the best parents or that the traditional family form—of a man and woman and children that are genetically related to both parents—is somehow the best kind of family.

Having said that, I think it’s worth taking seriously the idea that an interest in genetic knowledge is not apolitical, if that means that it floats free from, or exists independently of, the contingent cultural norms, practices. and institutions that shape our desires. I want to be really clear: this isn’t a point about the desire for genetic knowledge in particular. Rather, I don’t think we should see any desire as obviously apolitical. Even what we might think of as our most basic desires—for sustenance or for social connection—take the particular forms they do as a result of the culture they are embedded in. We might put it this way: all of our desires are filtered through, or suffused with, the culture (the norms, the values, the practices) they are located in.

As a result, I think it is always worthwhile to ask two questions about our wants, desires. and interests: 1. “In what ways have they been shaped by our cultural milieu?” and 2. “Is that shaping a good or a bad thing?” In the book, I talk about certain gendered desires – like, for example, a boy’s desire to not cry in front of his friends—as examples of desires that are a) clearly shaped by our cultural milieu and b) a bad thing.

Now, I don’t think the desire for genetic knowledge is like that. I’ve already said that I think we should take people’s desire for genetic knowledge seriously and that doing so leads to the conclusion that people shouldn’t use anonymous donors. But I think it’s undeniable that we live in a culture that highly valorizes genetic connectedness and often tells simplistic, reductive stories about family resemblance, genetic ties, the significance of “blood” etc. I think it’s worthwhile for everyone—not just donor conceived people or others who lack genetic knowledge—to interrogate their commitments about the significance of genetic ties in light of the culture we’re in. We should all ask, “Why do I, or do people in general, care about this so much?” and “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” I try to give an account in the book about why many people care about genetic knowledge in a way that shows how it can be a source of meaning. But I also try to show that, oftentimes, people’s reasons for being attached to genetic knowledge are shaped by forces that do unjustifiably valorize the biogenetic conception of the family.

Why can’t I uphold the rights of people who wish to create nontraditional families and still want my genetic information? Why is it an either/or? Why is it not acceptable to honor and uphold nontraditional families and at the same time say that genetic knowledge also matters?

I think it is acceptable! Indeed, that’s the position I try to carve out in the book: we shouldn’t see the interest in genetic knowledge as ineluctably bound up with biogenetic normativity. One can do exactly what you say: honor and uphold nontraditional families and at the same time say that genetic knowledge matters.

A problem emerges, however, when people put an emphasis on the significance of genetic knowledge—and genetic ties— that automatically downgrades the status of non-traditional families to “second best.” I’ve seen this attitude on display in a number of contexts. Sometimes the idea is that someone who isn’t raised by their genetic parents is (usually, though not always) worse off for it. Sometimes the idea is that a life without genetic knowledge is necessarily and seriously deficient. Sometimes the idea is that contributing gametes for the purposes of procreation without the intention of raising the resulting child is, by itself, morally unacceptable (equivalent, perhaps, to abandoning one’s child). I take all of those ideas to downgrade—if not outright reject—non-traditional family forms. So to the extent people’s attachment to genetic knowledge goes through those ideas, then I think there is a tension between caring about genetic knowledge and honoring non-traditional family forms. But again, I have no objections whatsoever to your way of thinking about things.

It seems that the objection to wanting genetic knowledge asserted by some individuals creating nontraditional families has to do with the fear that their children will be somehow less connected or see their parents as somehow less than traditional parents when I believe there’s no research or even anecdotal experience to suggest that is true. Is that right?

I think you’re right. Certainly, parents who do not want their donor conceived children to know that they are donor conceived sometimes cite as the reason that they’re worried the child will be less connected to their non-genetic parent. One thing seems clear: when people find out later in life they are donor conceived, that very often does cause a rupture. But the issue there seems to be mostly about secrecy and deception, and not about the fact of genetic non-relatedness itself. As far as I know, there is no evidence that people who are donor conceived and have never been led to believe otherwise are generally less connected to their non-genetic parent. Part of the issue here, though, is that we would need a better of understanding of what “less connected” even means. One thing I would definitely want to reject is that “being connected” is a zero-sum game so that if a donor conceived person forms a connection to their donor they are thereby less connected to their social parents.

It’s important to note here that it’s only some families that can realistically keep their donor conceived child in the dark, namely heteronormative families that can “pass” as “traditional” families (i.e. families where children are genetically related to both parents). I think doing so is, generally speaking, deceptive and wrong. I think oftentimes a parent’s worry that their child will not connect to them in the same way if they (the child) know they are donor conceived reflects the parent’s own preconceptions about the significance of genetic ties as well as, sometimes, shame about not being able to conceive (particularly for men).

At some point in Conceiving People you say that people can be influenced or educated to believe that genetic history is not as significant as some would have us believe. There seems to be no evidence to assert that genetic information is unimportant. On what basis can that claim be made?

This is a great question. One thing to say up front: clearly genetic information can be super important for medical reasons. I do not want to deny that! Nor do I want to suggest that we should try to “educate” people to believe otherwise. But the medical reasons for wanting genetic knowledge are not—for many donor conceived people—the whole story: if it were possible to get the relevant medical information without knowing who your genetic parents are, many donor conceived people would still want to know who their genetic parents are. So, when I suggest that maybe we can move people toward caring less about genetic knowledge, I don’t mean that people should care less about the medical reasons for wanting genetic knowledge. I mean, rather, that perhaps people can be moved to care less about genetic knowledge for the reasons that go beyond the medical reasons.

What do I mean when I say that perhaps people can be “moved” in this way? To answer this question, let me lay out one key idea I argue for: while genetic knowledge can provide a rich source of meaning in answering the question “Who am I?”, I don’t think it is either the only source or a necessary source. I think there are ways of telling a rich and truly complete story about who you are as a person that doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on genetic lineage. Now combine that thought with one I discussed above, namely that we live in a society that puts a lot of emphasis (in my view, undue emphasis) on the significance of genetic ties. These two thoughts together suggest one way that we might move people—everyone!—to care less about genetic knowledge, namely by working to make society less bionormative overall, where that means we try to change our cultural schema so that lacking genetic knowledge isn’t necessarily seen as having this massive void in one’s life. That’s a tall order (as are all calls to effect change at a societal level). I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about how to go about doing that.

At the individual level, one thing I say in the book is that people have a choice about how to construct their identities, about what parts of their life to treat as important and which to treat as comparatively unimportant. In retrospect, I would have not put things in terms of “choice” because I don’t think it’s really possible to just make up your mind to either care or not care about something. What I was trying to convey is that I don’t think there is a fact of the matter about who we, as individuals, are. There’s not a single answer to the question “Who am I?” out there, waiting to be discovered. Rather, there are many different rich, full answers to that question and not all of the answers require having genetic knowledge. So, it’s not about “educating” people, but rather creating a culture, a climate, where there is less pressure—from all avenues of life —to pursue what I call the “genetic route” to answering the question, “Who am I?”

Crucially, I think one of the ironies here is that insisting that genetic knowledge doesn’t matter at all or withholding information from people is not the way to create that climate. Quite the opposite: I think practices of secrecy and anonymity function to heighten the perceived significance of genetic ties. I think honesty and an openness to what the philosopher Alice MacLachlan calls the “abundant family”—a notion of family that extends beyond the typical notion parents and children—are more likely, over time, to put genetic knowledge in its proper place as a source of identity determination, but not an absolutely necessary source.

What about truth? How can wanting to know truth be dismissed as somehow unethical or immoral? How can truth be immoral? Couldn’t it reasonably be argued that trying to deprive someone of their birthright—of information most other humans have—is deceptive and unethical or immoral?

Let me tackle the second question first! I think it is indeed deceptive and, generally speaking, unethical to not tell a donor conceived person that they are donor conceived. What about not giving people access to genetic knowledge by, for example, using an anonymous donor? The central argument of the book is that that too is, in general, unethical (I wouldn’t call it deceptive, though, unless it’s paired with non-disclosure).

I’ve almost answered your second question, but not quite, because you put things in terms of people having a “birthright” to genetic knowledge and I didn’t use that term in my answer. I don’t use the language of “birthright” for two reasons. First, just as a philosophical matter, I’m not entirely sure what I think about natural rights in general, so my thinking just doesn’t tend to run in the direction of explanations that appeal to natural rights. But even if it did, I think it’s well worth asking what makes something a right in the first place. In other words, I’m not satisfied with saying, “Well, it is my right to have this information and there’s nothing more to be said.” I think rights call for explanations, so even if I did want to put things in terms of rights, I would still want to go on to do all the stuff I do to explain what gives rise to the right.

Your first question—about whether truth, or wanting the truth, can ever be immoral—is super interesting. I don’t think truth, as such, is either moral or immoral. It’s just the truth! Facts are neither moral nor immoral. But I think that wanting the truth can be immoral. Suppose I want to know some embarrassing fact about you so that I can blackmail you. My wanting the truth, in that case, would be immoral.

Now, wanting genetic knowledge is not at all like that. I’m just giving a case where it seems pretty clear that wanting the truth can be immoral. My point is just that if someone wants to defend the right to genetic knowledge, it’s probably not best to make that case by claiming that it is never wrong to want the truth. We need to know why people want the truth…and that returns us to some of what we discussed about interrogating the source of the desire for genetic knowledge.

Who benefits and how do they benefit by wanting to discourage the gaining of this information?

This is a great question, and it’s not one I take up in the book, at least not in detail. I think there are four broad communities that benefit from practices of anonymity. The first community is heteronormative parents who want to pass as a “traditional” family and don’t want anyone—least of all their child—to know that they have a donor conceived child. I think this interest is often born out of a sense of shame about being unable to conceive, combined with the kinds of worries you mentioned above (e.g. that a child who knows they are not genetically related to one of their parents will, as a result, love them less).

The second community is non-heteronormative families—gay and lesbian couples for example—whose status as parents has been, and to some extent still is, legally and socially tenuous. Living with the prospect that the donor might swoop in and claim parental rights—and that the law might side with the donor —is profoundly unsettling. A friend of mine describes it as living with a feeling of “terror,” and recent developments in the legal landscape in the United States—like the recently “Don’t Say Gay” law passed in Florida, the legal attacks across the country on reproductive rights, and the legal attacks in some states on trans people—show that that feeling is not remotely unfounded. I think those of us that have not lived with the prospect of having your family torn asunder—or your whole identity targeted—by the law can have trouble understanding the force of this concern. It’s understandable—to put it mildly—why, in that context, people might care that the donor is anonymous.

The third community, of course, is the fertility industry which has a massive interest in ensuring a supply of donors and avoiding limits on how many offspring can be conceived with the gametes of one donor.

The fourth are prospective donors who donate to make money and also to help people who cannot conceive, but do not want any involvement at all with their genetic offspring.

How much should we care about these interests? Let me start with the fertility industry. I am not an expert on the fertility industry (and, I’ll add, I have absolutely nothing to do with it), but I have little-to-no sympathy with their set of concerns. The same goes for prospective donors who want to be anonymous—I argue in the book if you’re going to donate, you shouldn’t be an anonymous donor. I can understand, of course, why a donor would want to be anonymous. But I argue that those interests really don’t count for much at all.

I am, however, sensitive to the interests and concerns of the first two groups I mentioned. Crucially, I don’t think such concerns win the day. In the book, I consider why prospective parents may prefer to use an anonymous donor and—while I understand where those preferences come from—I find them wanting when compared to a donor conceived person’s interest in having genetic knowledge.

I’ll also add that I think I think the best way to address the legitimate concerns of the first two communities is not by upholding practices of anonymity—which, as we all know, are increasingly impossible to uphold in the world of 23andMe etc.—but rather to transform the cultural norms and beliefs about the nature of families so that, for example, infertility is not a source of shame, the bionormative family is not seen as the “gold standard” (to borrow a phrase from Charlotte Witt) of family forms, and the law provides protections for non-traditional family forms.

You stop short in your book of weighing in on the right to know. Could you look at this and comment not as a philosopher but as a person with curiosity. Reverence for ancestors has been communicated since the beginning of time. Genealogy is the world’s leading hobby. People have always and will continue to want to know where they come from. If the vast majority of people in the world, now and apparently in all time and all cultures, were able to know who their parents are and that knowledge mattered to them, is it reasonable to think it isn’t a problem for those of us who are deprived of that information? Perhaps reduce it to an absurd point. Say, bread isn’t necessary for life, but if 95% of the people in the world want bread and are allowed to have it and you can’t have bread, wouldn’t you be upset, and might you not wonder why you are not entitled to have bread, even if it weren’t vital to your life? Why are all the philosophical arguments you construct necessary if, as the studies you cite suggest, the majority of donor conceived people feel that genetic information matters? Why is their lived experience not enough to demonstrate that, for whatever reason, they feel impoverished by not having the same genetic information others have?

I want to reject the dichotomy between looking at things as a philosopher and looking at them as a person with curiosity! For me, philosophy is all about being curious and trying to get to the heart of things. To be sure, I don’t think it is the only or the best way to be curious or to get at the heart of things: music, poetry, art, fiction, creative non-fiction, not to mention all the other academic fields of study, are also conduits for curiosity and thinking things through. Philosophy is just one way. But it’s a way that speaks to me. There’s not “Philosophy me” and “Here’s what I really think me.” It’s all just me!

So, when I consider your fantastic questions as a person with curiosity, I unavoidably take up a philosophical perspective. And when I do, it seems to me that it’s not enough to note that lots of people want something in order to conclude that they should have it or are entitled to it. Now: it’s definitely relevant. Indeed, my whole argument against anonymity is centered on the fact that the majority of donor conceived people want genetic knowledge. But—at the risk of sounding like a broken record—I think all desires, all wants, are candidates for critical scrutiny. We should scrutinize the forces that generate the wants, desires, interests, and aims that people have. Sometimes we’ll see that the forces are benign or even positive. Other times we’ll discover that they’re not positive. And still other times, we’ll discover that it’s a mix.

The point is just that we shouldn’t treat people’s desires, interests, or aims as beyond scrutiny and as the thing that settles the matter of what people should have or be entitled to. We need an account of what is behind the interests, desires, etc. I try to provide such an account when it comes to the desire for genetic knowledge—among the population at large, not just among donor conceived people. And I try to show that even if certain problematic cultural forces are in play, the desire for genetic knowledge is nonetheless worthwhile and should be respected. Anyway: that’s why I spill so much ink on this topic.Daniel Groll is an associate professor in the philosophy Department at Carleton College in Northfield, MN and an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. He writes on a variety of issues in ethics and is currently spending time thinking about the nature and significance of family resemblance. When he’s not doing philosophy, he’s probably making music for kids with Louis & Dan and the Invisible Band. Get a 30% discount on Conceiving People with the code AAFLYG. Find him on Twitter @dang_pigeon.

By Mark OverbayIn a single afternoon, I experienced both sides of the non-paternity event (NPE) / biological family fence, and it all started with an unexpected phone call from a friend.

I was traveling out of state and three hours from home. Only a few minutes after I transitioned from the backroads of scenic North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains to congested I-40, I received a text from a familiar name. Because I was driving, I called back rather than texted. I knew him as both a friend and professionally from a previous vocation and didn’t find the text unusual. Although the call started with small talk, like many conversations, I perceived some nervousness and hesitancy in his tone, so I encouraged him to “just spit it out.”

He told me that he’d purchased a DNA kit as a Christmas gift for his sister, the family’s historian and amateur genealogist, and she’d discovered something unexpected in her results. The entirety of their father’s side was missing in her DNA matches. Perhaps thinking there was a mistake, she encouraged her brother, my friend, to submit his sample. He found the same results; there were no DNA matches on his dad’s side. Over months of research, she had carefully and painstakingly pieced together a picture that seemed to reveal their biological father. His sister had reached out to this person and he consented to submit a DNA test for confirmation. The results were in. My father was their biological father. My friend told me we were half-brothers.

Life doesn’t equip you for every moment, and this was one of those moments for which I was unprepared. I had no script to follow, no foundations on which to rest or react. While still weaving through increasingly heavy traffic as I slowly edged toward Asheville, I inquired about the ages of my friend and his sister. Quick mental math revealed that the older had been conceived when I was two and the younger three years later. Though my parents later divorced, they were married during the births of both of these individuals. As shocking as it was, this news somehow too comfortably aligned with the mental image I had developed about my father. My father and I were significantly misaligned in nearly every meaningful aspect of personality, temperament, demeanor, and worldview. We have been estranged for years. I chuckled out loud as I processed it all.

There was, however, a certain uneasiness that began forming in the back of my head. I had submitted a sample for DNA analysis several years earlier, primarily because of curiosity about my ethnicity. I had given the DNA matches section little attention. My father, my friend, and his sister, all closely related, should have been recently added to my match list, yet I hadn’t received a single notification from the DNA company that these new persons had been added for my review. As several direct-to-consumer DNA companies offer this kind of service, I first thought my new relatives had used a test from a company different than the one I used, but my new half-brother confirmed that they’d used the same company I had. My next thought was that I was no longer notified when matches appeared. This seemed entirely plausible as I gave very little thought to these matters. I didn’t have the company app on my phone, I had forgotten my password, and I hadn’t brought my laptop. I was several hours from home and unable to further investigate this possibility.

In the continuing awkwardness that this kind of conversation quite naturally brings, my friend blurted out the question: “You’re the adopted one, right?”

“Adopted? Hell no, I wasn’t adopted,” was my immediate and somewhat embarrassingly defensive reply.  I’d seen my birth certificate on many occasions. I had a copy at home. My father was listed as my father. The brother I was raised with couldn’t be adopted either, as he favored dad in both looks and several aspects of disposition. This adoption thing was wholly unexpected and unsettling. I wasn’t chuckling any longer. He was surprised by my reaction and referred me to his sister, as she had supplied him with this bit of information. I called her immediately, and she confirmed the story. My father had told her that mom was pregnant but not by him, and he married her and “adopted” me despite that. Never once in my 58 years had he or mom told me this story. Instead, he decided to reveal this to a stranger, assuming that I already knew. My mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s in her last years, had taken that secret to her grave. The rest of the drive was a blur. When I finally made it home, I rushed to my laptop, opened the DNA app, and checked my matches. There were no new close matches. My father, my friend, and his sister weren’t there. I searched all 80,000+ of my DNA matches for my surname. Not a single match appeared. As a series of waves rushed over me, a realization unfolded. My father wasn’t my father, at least biologically. The brother I was raised with was likely not a full sibling. My friend and his sister weren’t new half-siblings after all. I wasn’t adopted as my father had revealed, at least in the legal definition of the term. My mother was my biological mother. I found several names I recognized from her side of the DNA match list. I had no idea who my biological father was. In just a few hours, my family history unraveled. Fifty percent of my family tree was utterly wrong. I immediately shared all this with my wife and son and then called my brother and friend to inform them of my discovery.

As the reality set in, an unexpected calmness enveloped me. This genetic enlightenment, oddly, was both liberating and validating for me. As I became older, the differences and distance between my father and me grew wider and wider. I struggled to understand how two people could be any more unlike each other. I didn’t want to be anything like him and feared that somehow the pull of his genetic nature, whatever that meant, would slowly invade mine. I was conscious of the possibility and intentional with my thoughts and actions to guard against it. To learn there was no genetic blueprint with his stamp on it inside me was cathartic. A virtual weight had been lifted from my shoulders that I hadn’t realized was there. The change was immediately palpable.

After a fitful night’s sleep, I awoke energized. Although I had no idea how to do so, I was determined to find my biological family. While that’s another story, my “both sides of the fence” experiences helped better prepare me for what was to come.Mark Overbay is a retired physician in his second vocation serving students in higher education. An avid reader, he’s highly interested in exploring the magic and mystery of the human condition. He’s an amateur painter and a novice writer. Overbay believes that writing informs and, hopefully, improves his thinking and processing. He and his wife of more than 30 years have one son and two young, energetic chocolate labs, Whiskey and Yona.

matthew charles is a poet, podcast host, and educator. We talk to him about the experience of being a transracial adoptee (TRA), his emergence as a poet and activist, and the importance of self-expression.

In your bio, you use the phrase “racially marooned.” Can you talk about what that choice of words means to you and how it describes the experience of being a transracial adoptee?

The popular term I’ve heard other transracial adoptees use is “racially isolated” but I coined “racially marooned” because I feel it more viscerally evokes a sense of void in regard to lack of racial mirrors. I have a poem I wrote called “Closed Transracial Adoption is | God’s Gift” where I write, “i’m the first landmass that drifted from Pangea / you don’t understand how alone i feel.”

You’ve written that as a child you experienced life as if a veil covered your eyes. What did you mean by that and what happened to cause the veil to drop?

As a transracial adoptee whose body was raised racially marooned, I was acculturated into whiteness, made to believe that there were my kin, and my allegiances. Yet I was also rejected daily by whiteness through micro and macro aggressions. Realizing that even though my body was literally purchased by whiteness I had no purchase in whiteness was an apocalypse, of sorts. It freed me to practice Sankofa—a Ghanaian symbol that means, “to retrieve.” I had to retrieve the Black essence of who I am in order to reorient myself in the world—not as a(n adopted) child of whiteness but as a doubly displaced African.

Hip-Hop was formative for you as an adolescent and you were a performer. What happened that caused you to shift to poetry?

I’d always practiced writing Haikus to sharpen my ability to say a lot with not many words, so in some senses I was already interdisciplinary. However, at 17 when I was recording music in Saint Louis I lost my voice. I’d end up not able to speak for three years. This vocal disability still affects me to this day. It was in that purgatory that I more consciously altered my craft to poetry because I was afraid I’d never be able to perform or tour again.

When you began to express yourself—first in Hip-Hop and later in poetry—did you immediately take transracial adoption as your subject, or did that happen later?

No, I didn’t use rap to talk about myself. I used rap to project a false image. One of the reasons I shifted to poetry was because how I engaged with the genre of Rap felt constricting. I’d felt like I couldn’t be vulnerable. Themes of adoption began appearing in my work as early as 2018 but I didn’t set out to create a body of work with adoption as the central theme until my newest and as of yet unpublished book of poetry, meet me in the clearing.

Did you ever study formally or was Hip-Hop all the education you needed?

I taught myself all of the forms of Creativity that I practice—poetry, rap, essay, memoir.

Is poetry as much a means of survival as an artistic expression?

I wouldn’t be alive today if I didn’t have my art practice. As i write in “To Pimp An Adopted Butterfly,” art is one of my most enduring and longstanding relationships, and it has helped me know myself, and in the process of knowing myself it has saved my life countless times.

Similarly, are poetry and activism synonymous for you? Do you see your artistry as a form of activism?

While I don’t see them as synonymous, my artistry often is laced with activist intent. But the first goal in my creative process is to create something meaningful to me.

In art and in activism, who are your influences? Who are the most important voices among transracial adoptees—poets or otherwise? Who do you listen to? Who do you admire?

When it comes to art I like Lucille Clifton, Hafiz, Jay Electronica, and Joy Oladukun. But I’m not sure who the most important voices are for TRAs. Voices I’ve been most impacted by are Daniel Drennan ElAwar, Rebecca Carroll, and Hannah Jackson Matthews.

Can you tell us about your first book, You Can Not Burn the Sun, and the series of books you have planned?

You Can Not Burn The Sun is a self-published book of poetry I wrote during the 2020 Uprisings about my involvement in the Movement for Black Lives in Madison, Wisconsin. The follow-up is meet me in the clearing, a collection of poems about my life as a transracial adoptee raised racially marooned in Roseburg, Oregon. And book3 is in the works, it’s a memoir. Can’t tell ya the title yet, tho.

You created a podcast, little did u know, to “center the lived experiences, learned and inherited wisdom of transracial adoptees.”  Can you say more about how this came about? Did you start this to fill a void in the conversation about adoption?

In January 2021, my big homie Charles Payne told me I should do a podcast for You Can Not Burn The Sun but I was too insecure to pursue that. That was the genesis of the idea of me podcasting. Around August 2021, I realized what I would love to do is create a media platform for transracial adoptees because I wasn’t hearing the kinds of conversations I wanted to hear via podcast. My hope is to make more accessible conversations of race, class, gender, colony, and displacement from a critical adoptee lens.

So far, you’ve posted three episodes with fascinating guests, but you haven’t had a new episode recently. Do you plan to continue and if so, do you have new guests lined up?

Yeah, the next guest is Dr. Daniel ElAwar. I’m very excited about that. Hoping to get Susan Devan Harness on the show too, but we’ll see.

In your introduction to one of your podcast guests, identity reclamation coach Hannah Jackson Matthews, you say that as a result of the reaction to a poem you shared on her platform you realized you weren’t alone in your experience and that it was the first place you felt seen in ways “I’d never dared to show myself.” Can you talk about why it’s important for adoptees to share their voices and tell their stories?

As Black people in the US, we have historically had to explain our existence as oppressed peoples living in a racist society. After 2020, this is happening less so. Yet, as adoptees, the truth of our lived experiences is not as ingrained in the public imagination because the public’s imagination of us is shaped by adoption industry propaganda. First and foremost, sharing our voices is a liberatory act for ourselves because as adoptees we’re often taught not to be critical of adoption—bucking off this expectation empowers us to be more honest with ourselves about ourselves and the world around us. In sharing our voices, we find resonance among other displaced and dispersed peoples, and in that way, sharing our voice becomes an act of building radical community. It is invaluable to be seen and known by the communities we partake in.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.

On Venmo @matthewcharlespoet

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critic, and podcast host, was adopted at birth by a white couple and raised in a predominantly white community in rural New Hampshire, where, as the only black resident, she’d see no one who looked like her until she was six years old. Growing up among her white relatives and white townspeople, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she really was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was the character Easy Reader from The Electric Company, whom she fantasized was her father. When she first encountered a black person in real life—her ballet teacher, Mrs. Rowland—she wondered, “Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?” As she grew older, Carroll was aware of being seen by this teacher in a way her parents did not, yet she was also aware of the differences. “I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true.” She was increasingly aware that unlike her teacher, she moved through the world with the “benefits afforded by white stewardship.”

As a transracial adoptee, Carroll had to hurdle barrier after barrier merely to become who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her authentic identity as a black woman was her family—both her adoptive parents and her white birthmother—it was an extraordinarily lonely struggle carried out by a force of one. How, isolated in an overwhelmingly white world, could she know what it meant to be black?

While Carroll’s adoptive parents were largely oblivious to her need to understand, absorb, and assert her racial identity, her birthmother aggressively denied her daughter’s racial and cultural heritage. When they began a relationship, 11-year-old Carroll was curious about and soon enamored of her mother, but learned there was a cost to the relationship. She carried that burden for a long time, making excuses and ignoring her intuition as her birthmother did everything possible to torpedo her growing attempt to construct an understanding of herself as a black woman—gaslighting her, subjecting her to blatantly racist comments, and effectively dispossessing her of the right to her own blackness. She straddled two worlds, ill-fitting in one and made to feel like an imposter in the other.

All adoptees are stripped of their histories and their genetic information, but in her powerful memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, Carroll shines a light on this additional theft of something equally fundamental—racial identity—and details the painful journey to take back what should always have been hers.

When she was writing the memoir, one the few black students she taught at an all-girls private school wrote to tell her what she meant to her. “This,” Carroll writes, “is what black folks are to one another—we are the light that affirms and illuminates ourselves to ourselves. A light that shines in its reflection of unbound blackness, brighter and beyond the white gaze. The path to fully understanding this, and my ultimate arrival at the complicated depths of my own blackness, was a decades-long, self-initiated rite of passage, wherein I both sought out and pushed away my reflection, listened to the wrong people, and harbored an overwhelming sense of convoluted grief—a grief that guided me here, to myself.”

In this moving coming of age story, Carroll illustrates the cost of feeling unseen, of being disregarded, not only by the community but by those closest to her who thwarted her at every turn. She pulls no punches, squarely placing the blame where it belongs, on everyone who failed her again and again. It’s the story of pride and persistence, of hard-won healing and redemption.—BKJ