Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering

Maternal Subjects

Sheila Lintott, Maureen Sander-Staudt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136511226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phénoménologie en philosophie

Philosophical inquiry into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering is a growing area of interest to academic philosophers. This volume brings together a diverse group of philosophers to speak about topics in this reemerging area of philosophical inquiry, taking up new themes, such as maternal aesthetics, and pursuing old ones in new ways, such as investigating stepmothering as it might inform and ground an ethics of care. The theoretical foci of the book include feminist, existential, ethical, aesthetic, phenomenological, social and political theories. These perspectives are then employed to consider many dimensions of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, which are of central importance to human existence, but are only rarely discussed in philosophical cannons. Topics include pregnancy and embodiment, breast-feeding, representations – or the lack thereof – of pregnant and birthing women, adoption, and post-partum motherhood.

Part I

Maternal Norms, Practices,
and Insights

1 Sara Ruddick, Transracial
Adoption, and the Goals of
Maternal Practice

Jean Keller

INTRODUCTION

Sara Ruddick uses adoption as a guiding metaphor in her groundbreaking book, Maternal Thinking. She declares “all mothers are adoptive” as a way to convey her conviction that one becomes a mother by choosing to engage in the work of caring for children, rather than through the physical act of becoming pregnant and giving birth. Despite using this metaphor, Ruddick fails to consider actual adoptive maternal practice when constructing her theory. In this chapter, I explore what we can learn about mothering, both adoptive and biological, if we use actual adoption as the starting point for thinking about the goals that guide transracial adoptive maternal practice.

In Maternal Thinking, Ruddick argues that successful mothering is the outcome of careful and deliberate maternal thinking and practice. She defines practices as

collective human activities distinguished by the aims that identify them and by the consequent demands made on practitioners committed to those aims. The aims or goals that define a practice are so central or “constitutive” that in the absence of the goal you would not have that practice. (1989, 13–14; emphasis added)

Ruddick then argues that preservative love, the protective work mothers engage in to ensure their children's survival; fostering growth, the work done to nurture “a child's developing spirit” including his or her “emotional, cognitive, sexual and social development” (1989, 82–83); and socialization for acceptance, “training a child to be the kind of person whom others accept and whom the mothers themselves can actively appreciate” (104) are three goals constitutive of maternal practice. Mothers pursue these goals to secure their children's physical, emotional, and intellectual development and social well-being.

The Korean adoption literature demonstrates that Ruddick's three goals do not adequately capture the goals that guide transracial adoptive maternal practice. When Americans first began adopting Korean War orphans fifty years ago, they were told to treat their adopted Korean children as they would American birth children. In a society trying to be color-blind and in which closed adoptions were the norm, discussions of race, birth parents, and birth country/birth culture were avoided by well-meaning adoptive parents. The adoption literature is rife with stories told by adult Korean and other transracial adoptees of the psychic costs that resulted from such well-meaning but misguided advice. These include feeling lonely and isolated when their loss and grief were left unacknowledged and unaddressed within their adoptive families and a sense of shame and/or alienation for being a racial/ethnic minority within a white family and white majority culture. Adult transracial adoptees also report that their adoptive families often didn't prepare them for the racism they would encounter and that they were left to address discrimination, and the damage it inflicts, on their own (Trenka 2005; Trenka, Oparah, and Shin 2006; Wilkinson and Fox 2002; Freundlich and Lieberthal 2000). As a result of these struggles, some adoptees report relationship difficulties and trust issues into adulthood. (Freundlich and Lieberthal 2000, 26; the adoptees surveyed in this study are a self-selected group and may not represent Korean adoptees overall). Thus, the Korean adoption literature suggests that adoptive parents who raise their minority children only with the goals elucidated by Sara Ruddick in mind endanger their children's well-being. Moreover, adoptees who struggle with feelings of shame, self-acceptance, isolation, and grief without familial or social support are not well equipped to achieve the personal growth that Ruddick sees as fundamental to maternal practice.

I have previously argued that three types of goals are constitutive of maternal practice (2010). Each is evident in transracial adoptive maternal practice:

1. Some maternal goals are universal but are interpreted in culturally specific ways. Teaching transracial adoptees to anticipate and deal with racism as a means to ensure their survival is an example of this type of goal. It is a culturally specific manifestation of Ruddick's goal of preservative love.

2. Some goals are universal but only become reflective and intentional, and hence visible, for some groups of mothers. The goals of kinning and helping transracial adoptees develop their racial-ethnic identity are examples.

3. A third set of goals are specific only to some mothers. Consider, for example, adoptive parents’ efforts to help their children deal with adoption related grief and loss.

In this chapter I will discuss two examples of the second type of goal, namely, kinning and helping children cultivate their racial-ethnic identity. Striving for these ends requires explicitly strategizing about aspects of motherhood that most mothers take for granted. They require that transracially adoptive parents be ready to become a different kind of person and to create and follow a new model of the family. Yet if the following goals are constitutive of and thus necessary for successful transracial adoptive maternal practice, then prospective adoptive parents who cannot commit themselves to these goals and to the personal and familial transformation they require should reconsider whether transracial adoption is appropriate for them.

KINNING: THE CREATION OF FAMILY AND
CULTIVATION OF FAMILY IDENTITY

The first goal of adoptive maternal practice is kinning, the work of creating family. Signe Howell describes the process of kinning as typically beginning when adoptive parents begin to share with friends and family the referral photo of their new child and continues as parents legally change their child's name, get a new birth certificate, and sign the formal adoption papers (Howell 2006, 63–64). This primarily legal dimension of kinning creates the scaffolding for the dimension I'm most concerned with, helping the child develop a strong sense of herself as a unique and irreplaceable member of this family.

Family identity is created daily through the work of taking care of the child's physical, emotional, social, and psychological needs. By learning that she can trust these people to take care of her and tend to her personal needs, the child learns that these are her people, her family. Confidence in her family relations creates a safe place to work through her feelings of loss and abandonment; the cultivation of trust and attachment within the family also makes it possible to establish loving and trusting relationships throughout life. Through physical caretaking, adoptive families sometimes go to enormous lengths to cultivate attachment, trust, and a strong sense of family. For example, some parents engage in the “baby wearing” and family bed practices favored by attachment parenting guru Dr. Sears to provide children with ongoing physical reminders of family presence. This emergent family identity, cultivated through physical caretaking, is often supported and reinforced through family stories.

Both biological and adoptive families use storytelling as one strategy to help their children know who they are and where they come from. Parents help children find their place in the family, and so find one small and secure corner of the world, by looking for family resemblances. Sometimes these family relations are biological, for example, looking to see who inherited Grandpa's prodigious nose. Other times they focus more on social attributes, such as tracing a family lineage of assertive women back through the generations. Philosopher Charlotte Witt describes family resemblances as “part of a family's mythology”; they don't capture facts about the world but are observations interpreted to a given end. She describes them as serving “several purposes: bonding family members, explaining behavior, assigning blame” (2005, 139). Stories tracing family resemblances are also strategies to achieve the maternal goal of kinning—to reinforce children's adoptive family membership by integrating them into extended family networks, while helping them make sense of their biological families and its relation to their adoptive family.

Within adoptive families, the strategy of telling attachment-inducing and identity-conferring stories is typically more conscious, explicit, and intentional than in biological families. Transracially adoptive families in communities where mixed-race families are rare cannot presume their family connection will always be evident to their children or the broader society. (I'm thinking of such commonly asked questions as, “Are they ‘real’ brother and sister?”) They must intentionally make this connection and be prepared to explain it to others, thereby actively constructing their family identity.¹ Adoptive parents create a narrative structure that explains to their children who “their” people (adoptive and biological) are. Thus, the work of kinning isn't restricted to creating strong adoptive family bonds. Adoptive families also work to help their children make sense of their relation to their birth families. Here I focus on this work within the international adoption context; this work would surely look different within the context of open domestic adoption.

Large portions of the pre-adoption stories of internationally adopted children remain unknown. This is particularly true for children adopted from China. From fragments, adoptive parents engage in the work of narrative repair,² trying to help their children make sense of the events that led to their placement. Parents may try to explain the decision to relinquish them for adoption as a responsible and loving act, not the result of children's misbehavior or inherent unlovability. Parental narratives can serve as a kind of counterstory to the societal image of the irresponsible, uneducated mother from an undeveloped country who abandons her child. And they can reject the trope that adoptees owe a debt of gratitude to the adoptive parents and adoptive country. Through counterstories, parents try to inoculate their children from the harm done by such culturally dominant adoption narratives. They can lay the groundwork for understanding their birth mothers, rather than feeling anger or embarrassment; valuing and appreciating their birth countries rather than feeling shame or ignorance; and mutual love and respect between adoptive parents and adoptees versus adoptee gratitude for a nonrepayable debt.

Through counterstories, adoptive parents try to provide their children the necessary tools for achieving a positive understanding of their adoption stories and for constructing positive self-identities. Research supports the value of such maternal work: adoptees with more positive views of adoption have higher levels of self-acceptance, self-esteem, and more positive relationships (Basow et al. 2008, 478).

This reflective and intentional form of narrative is fraught with ethical risk. It's easy for adoptive parents, in framing the outlines of their child's adoption story, to construct it in self-serving ways—for example, to highlight the dysfunction of the birth family, the neediness of the child, and the virtues of the adoptive parents. Alternately, adoptive parents may create such a distorted sense of the birth parents, either by overromanticizing or by denigrating them, that the family adoption story makes eventual reconciliation with the birth family near impossible. Parents may also tell the family story in such a way that it emphasizes the parents’ joy at adoption while minimizing the loss and grief or other complex feelings of the adoptee. These cautionary tales illustrate that adoptive parents must exercise caution in creating narratives and that they need to think carefully about the ethics of the stories they tell. It is easy for an adult to do more talking than listening, to interpret their children's stories for them, making adoptees passive recipients of their own life stories (Honig 2005, 218).

The tendency within philosophy in recent years has been to embrace a view of the self as socially constituted and to understand autonomy in relational terms. Yet if we're still to meaningfully talk about self-identity, self-definition, and personal autonomy, well-intentioned parents must provide a narrative framework that will help their children make sense of the various pieces of their life story, while still leaving room for them to construct their own identities; otherwise, parents take on a project that rightly belongs to their children, and autonomy is undermined.

The account of family identity I've articulated thus far emphasizes the importance of fostering family connection through detecting similarities and making connections among family members. For adoptive families in general, and transracial adoptive families in particular, it is just as important to acknowledge differences (Eldridge 1999, ch. 15; Howell 2006, 64). Ignoring obvious differences isolates children by making difference that is so evident and palpable to them unspeakable; familial silence suggests difference constitutes a threat to family unity or that there is something bad about the birth family (or the adoptee; see Eldridge 1999, 145, on this last point). Thus, stories must acknowledge and articulate both similarities and differences among family members. Social-scientific research supports this view, indicating that parents’ acceptance of their children's differences correlates positively with children's mental health, whereas both denial and overemphasis of difference is negatively correlated with mental health (Lee 2003, 724).

THE CULTIVATION OF RACIAL-ETHNIC IDENTITY³

The second goal of transracial adoptive maternal practice is concerned with helping transracially and transnationally adopted children develop a positive sense of racial-ethnic identity, one that integrates aspects of their birth and adoptive cultures. Developing a positive sense of racial-ethnic identity is already difficult for children of color in a still racist society. It is especially challenging for children of color raised in predominantly white communities with limited exposure to people of their heritage and who may be raised by white parents who have not thought deeply or well about issues of race and identity or may harbor racist views themselves.

In her essay “Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character,” Alison Bailey describes race, like gender, as being performed in accordance with socially constructed scripts, as being contingently connected with physical bodies, and as being internalized at an early age (1998, 34). The challenge for transracial adoptees is that they typically don't know what scripts to perform, as within their families they've only rehearsed white scripts and they may have only witnessed two-dimensional and distorted media representations of persons of their own race or ethnicity. In a highly racialized society like ours, this becomes problematic: children of color who identify with and feel most at home with “white” people, culture, and values—who identify as white or with white norms—are unlikely, once they become adults and venture forth on their own, to be embraced as white by whites.⁴ Likewise, Asian, African, and Latino communities may find perplexing, if not unintelligible, persons who look like they should belong, but who don't know appropriate forms of eye contact or physical distance between bodies, don't know the traditions, don't speak the language, don't like the food—in short—who don't know the culture. Thus, transracial adoptees often struggle to find a community in which they can feel at home.⁵ Given that self-identity arises in the interaction between an individual's sense of self and how others perceive and respond to that self, it is highly desirable that adoptees of color find or create a community that will grant them intersubjective recognition to help solidify their identity. For members of racial minority groups, this identity includes their sense of racial-ethnic identity (Basow et al. 2008, 474). As transracial adoptee and multicultural educator John Raible points out, “transracial adoptees will live adult lives self-identifying as people of color in a race-conscious, sometimes hostile society” (2006, 183). Thus it is imperative that transracial adoptees find their place in the relevant communities of color, in addition to the white families and communities of which they have been a part. They need to forge a racial-ethnic self-identity that makes sense to them and is intelligible to others.

The social scientific data on ethnic identity confirms that a positive sense of racial-ethnic identity...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Maternal Norms, Practices, and Insights
• Part II Maternal Roles and Relations
• Part III Maternal Phenomena, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics
• Contributors
• Index