An Ethical Adoption?

What is adoption, really? What purpose does it serve in our society?

Your answers depend on where you stand: as a mother or father who lost a child, as an adopter, a legislator, a bureaucrat, a relative or friend affected by adoption, or as one of more than 100,000 New Zealanders and tens of millions worldwide who were adopted as infants.

The idea of adoption as altruism and of adopted people as recipients of largesse lies at the heart of the social contract. A 2016 encyclopaedia chapter, “Function of Adoption”, which examines adoption from an evolutionary perspective, describes it as altruistic parental substitution:

The most widely familiar modern function of adoption is as an altruistic substitution for biological children, typically due to infertility or child mortality.... Under these circumstances, parents are strongly motivated by a (potentially innate) desire to raise children but do not have any biological children of their own to whom they can apply this motivation.1

References are behind the paywall

The author’s synonyms for adoption include adaptation and nepotism. He describes the adoption of an unrelated child as an attempt to replace biological parenting with socially equivalent parenting:

The adaptive function of this behaviour is questionable as it typically does not translate into the transmission of one’s genes. Instead, it may represent a mismatch between an adaptive, evolved desire to have a biological child and the inability to do so. Interestingly, parents who adopt unrelated children are often keenly motivated to create the social and psychological impressions of relatedness and incorporation into their kinship circle.

Intent on viewing human adoption as a positive force, the author bestows the crown of altruism in place of genetic continuity:

Yet it is perhaps the most socially altruistic expression of the evolved human desire to protect, care for, and spend enormous time and energy raising biologically unrelated, relatively helpless infants and children.

Underpinning this idea of human adoption as an altruistic behaviour is the bestowal of the (usually) male adopter’s name and his legitimising identity; without which, the child would remain outside society.

Looking back at mid-century studies, such as An Exploration Into Some of the Attitudes in the Community Surrounding the Adoptive Family, a Canadian master’s thesis from 1957, and other early international research showed that insidious attitudes towards infertility are associated with invidious attitudes towards adoption: “The central hypothesis … is that people who consider lineage as being important will tend to consider adoption to be a deviant pattern”.

According to the thesis’s joint authors:

“[I]n the adoptive family, where these [biological] ties do not exist, mutual identification must arise and develop between the child and parents through social interaction alone”.

This single sentence is essential to understanding the experience of being an adopted person.

The authors discuss this contention in the context of a society that values family identification through blood ties. They cite an earlier study from 1952 that asks:

“Can the adoptive parent have the same narcissistic identification with the child not of their own flesh and blood as with their own child?”2

I am struck by the timing. As the New Zealand Adoption Act 1955 was being implemented, there was serious international academic disquiet about the role, purpose, and effects of human adoption. None of those ideas appeared to reach New Zealand legislators, then or now.

It has taken years of refinement to transform the idea of the deployability of children from a vendable commodity into a humanitarian practice in the child’s best interests.

But no matter how you frame it (in sentimental or benevolent terms), adoption functions primarily to meet adult needs: for parenthood, for emotional fulfilment, for a family. The state facilitates this transfer by authorising one group of adults to claim exclusive rights over another human being, including naming rights, cultural affiliation, inheritance, and historical narrative.

This is not ethically neutral.

It is the use of state power to permanently reassign a human being to new ownership, without provision for revocation, renegotiation, withdrawal, or annulment of the arrangement, by the person most affected.

In any ethical framework that values autonomy, personhood, and consent, adoption must be seen as deeply problematic.

It is a foundational breach of autonomy, made possible by the legal system’s willingness to treat children as transferable.

Moreover, the permanence of adoption contrasts sharply with other forms of non-parental care, such as guardianship, custodianship, or kinship care, prioritising continuity and autonomy by preserving a person’s identity and family ties.

Adoption crosses a line: from responding to a child’s needs to satisfying adult desires.

It formalises disconnection, not protection.

It replaces a non-consenting person’s story with the state’s version, sealed and inaccessible in many jurisdictions, forcing adopted individuals to live inside an identity crafted for them by strangers.

This is not ethical care. It is, by any reasonable philosophical standard, a form of ownership masked as welfare.

To call adoption a form of child welfare is to ignore that it is a coercive and irreversible contract between adults about the life of a third non-consenting party. It must be understood ethically not as care but as the socially sanctioned ownership of another human being.

This is not a temporary guardianship or a protective measure subject to review or termination; it is the creation of a lifelong legal fiction that severs biological and historical continuity in favour of manufactured kinship.

True child welfare supports, protects, and empowers the child—without erasing their past, identity, or right to self-determination. But adoption has never met this standard.

Meanwhile, the narrative of adoption as a social good has become so entrenched, so lacking in nuance, and so well-formulated that expressing an alternative view places anyone who voices it outside respectable & academic society.

On Human Adoption available here

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