ABSTRACT
There are a number of controversies in the United States surrounding adoptive parenting, ones that show that there is what is sometimes called a "master narrative" of kinship, namely, the belief that kinship is strongest where there are genetic connections between parent and child. For example, when surrogate motherhood became technically possible, the media and legal furor pitted the "rights" of the sperm donor or adoptive father against those of the egg donor or gestator or birth mother (see Ragone 1996). The Baby M case, where the birth mother had signed a surrogacy contract with an
adoptive couple but then sought to rescind the contract once the child was born, resulted eventually in the courts upholding her claim, because a "bond" had developed between her and the child during the pregnancy (see Pollitt 1987) . In that highly contested case, the class issues were prominent, as the surrogate mother was working-class and the adoptive parents were prosperous professionals. The only rationale the courts could invoke that was more powerful than class and sperm-connection claims of the adoptive couple was the notion of maternal bonding. Notably in this case and other surrogacy situations, the primary players were the two genetic parents, with the adoptive mother decidedly in the background. Indeed, in the Baby M case the adoptive mother was vilified for not having been proven infertile before deciding to adopt through surrogacy. So the dominant narrative was supported: (1) those with genetic ties have greater claims to a child than others (nature over nurture); (2) women who can bear children should try by all means financially possible to do so before "resorting" to adoption; and (3) in infancy, at least, maternal bonding is stronger than paternal bonding because of pregnancy and birth. Although this essay will not address gestational surrogacy, I would add only that in the cases where a woman contracts to carry a fertilized ovum from a couple, her legal claims to the child are much diminished, pointing out an inherent set of priorities to that "master narrative." The adoptive mother is foregrounded in these cases only because it is her egg involved along with her husband's sperm.
