Do parents have an interest in rearing biologically related children?

Well, your genes cheat. They stack the deck. The biological imperative is very powerful. The nine months of carrying the baby are laden with emotion for both parents, as is childbirth. This exists to prepare the emotional conditions in the parents conducive to caring for the child. As an adoptive parent you don’t get this.

Both my wife and I are adopted children. In our family histories, we can both find examples where our parents were completely mystified by our behavior or characteristics.

At least, with our children, who are biological, when they do wierd stuff, we can trace it back to a familiar characteristic in one of us. Our parents had no such reference for my introversion or her hyperactivity.

In the end, the decision to have children at all doesn’t seem rational. As best I can tell, it’s an act of self-esteem, THE act of self-esteem, saying you want more people in the world like you.

But a biological child is going to be MORE like you than an adopted child, isn’t it?

In the case of a lot of people, who won’t otherwise have genetically related children, cloning actually INCREASES the diversity of the gene pool. Anyway, I find it ironic that many of the same people who’d oppose cloning as a reduction of genetic diversity, would oppose germ line genetic engineering, an obvious way of enhancing genetic diversity.

As father to a child not biologically related to myself or to my wife, I do not see any qualitative differences between my experience of parenting and my friends’ experiences who are adoptive or biological fathers. I don’t think it is a “different experience” to raise a child who is the fruit of your own loins, than to raise a child whom you have invited into your household. Or rather — naturally every parent-child pair is unique and there will be aspects of every parent’s experience that are unique; but there is no line to be drawn between “adoptive parenting” on the one hand and “gestative parenting” on the other.

In “The Truth About Cinderella,” evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found that a child is 100 times more likely to be abused or killed by a stepparent, who has no genetic stake in the child, than by a genetic parent, who does. This statistic is enough to convince me that the benefits of a genetic link between parent and child shouldn’t be ignored.

Joe O – two things — one is that if they are right that gives a child-centered reason for wanting the link, not a parent-centered reason. The potential adoptees, furthermore, simply don’t have the option of being reared by a biological parent.

But, second, my understanding is that a new book about to be published by MIT Press (can’t remember author’s name) decisively refutes the finding. I’ll try to find out more about that though.

Jeremy — I take your comments as friendly to me. I’d like to hear more. All my instincts are on your side of this, not the side I’m looking for.

Joe: It doesn’t make sense to me to take results from studies of stepchildren and apply them to cases of adopted children. In fact (wanders to bookcase) the Daly-Wilson study actually found that adopted children suffered much lower levels of neglect and abuse than children living with both parents, which is a problem for the whole “genetic investment” thesis that they never really dealt with; it appears that even Hackney Social Services does a better job of protecting children than Darwinian adaptation.

One would assume that in order to adequately study the issue, you’d need to control for the parents’ inclinations, and study parents like mine.

My mother suffered secondary infertility after I was born, and subsequently adopted my little sister.

A. On the one hand, my sister has been given at least as much love and attention and resources as I have, and probably more. I am sure that any type of study that studies whatever types of variable would show that there was no statistical indicator that would show which child was biological and which was adopted. But:

B. The reason I say “probably more” resources is that my sister is a “special needs” child (now adult), having been diagnosed somewhere between the ages of 6 and 10 as having “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.” By the time all the resources are taken into account, I’m sure that the additional funds spent on her needs will more than make up for the one-shot expense of paying for my college education. Assumedly, a parent who adopts has a much higher risk of adopting a child with that type of problem, since the parent has no control over the entire gestation process.

I believe that your answer to “Why don’t people want to adopt” will turn out to be identical to the question “Why dno’t people want to buy a used car when it’s so much cheaper than a new one, and only a little older?” When you buy it new, you know everything that happened to it. When you adopt, you don’t.

Harry — I’ve been thinking about this all day and am not sure quite where to go with it. I have no data, am not by instinct a statistician or a scientist. So I’m not sure I have any useful input for you. All I can offer is my observation of myself and other fathers in my social milieu, most of whom are gestative parents — my observation is that there is almost no difference in our experiences which is attributable to my daughter’s not being the product of my and my wife’s gametes. Any such difference is dwarfed by other, easily discerned differences in our situations — age of parents, financial security, amount of free time, etc. So take that for what it’s worth…

Why don’t the sperm banks hold televised deathmatches on cable TV to raise money, the survivor’s prize being the right to make such anonymous donations?

A while back I read of a fertility doctor who had the habit of substuting his own sperm for that of the ostensible donors’. He went to prison and all, but he did manage to sire hundreds of sprogs, so in Darwinian terms he is a raging success.

If I recall the doctor’s photo correctly, he was fat and unattractive, so the sociobiologist in me must conclude that his sleight-of-hand with the vials was adaptive. It would probably be falling into the naturalistic fallacy, though, to encourage such behaviour.

Maybe the argument should rely on the fact that since the government is not going to interfere in some objectionable way (e.g. “redistributing children away from their biological parents to those best suited to rearing them”) there will be an overwhelmingly strong link between having children and having biologically related children. So the acknowledged interest in having children simpliciter gets translated into an interest in having biologically related children, because if the government refused to interpret the former interest as potentially involving the latter, that would constitute illegitimate government interference into private life.

That might seem to beg the question in favour of cloning, but I take it that it’s an essentially liberal idea that governments don’t impose their own conceptions of the good life on people. Whilst there is consensus that there is an interest in having children, there is no consensus in there being an interest in having biological related children. But any attempt by the government to interpret the former interest so as not to recongnise the latter would be to impose a particular conception of the good life. Thus the governments should do what they actually do: allow individuals to interpret their interest in having children themselves, so that it may and may not involve an interest in having biologically related children.

It looks to me that what you’re trying to do is get some kind of moral calculus where you can weigh the satisfactions parents get from alternatives to adopting against the satisfaction the child gets from being adopted. And you’re assuming the parents’ satisfactions arise from their child being biologically related. As you point out, it’s a widespread assumption that such satisfactions are justifiable. You question that assumption, without questioning the underlying assumption that that’s why couples prefer not to adopt. But that may not be the case.

It’s an empirical question which used to be difficult to answer, but now there are a number of “infertility blogs” around, all apparently written by women, many of whom talk through their motivations for embarking on ART or deciding to adopt. What seems clear from these blogs is that for these women, at least, and we have no reason to believe them atypical, biological relatedness is not the most significant factor in their decision, in many not a factor at all.

The fundamental desire is to create a family. Couples look for the most efficient manner of accomplishing this desire. Clearly the simplest and most efficient process is the “natural” process where sex (either as desire prompts or deliberately engaged in at the most propitious time in the woman’s cycle) leads uncomplicatedly to pregnancy. It turns out that adoption is the most costly, both in financial terms and in terms of control, though, for the infertile, it is also the most likely to result in a child. The simpler forms of ART (e.g. IUI) are much cheaper and as much under the couple’s control as sex was. REs regard themselves as empowering their patients. Even IVF is cheaper. It is not until one reaches really complicated forms of ART, for example the use of donor eggs or gestational surrogacy, that financial costs begin to approach the costs of adoption. Even then, although now a third person is involved, the couple retains considerable control over the process. There is no equivalent to the adoption application or, worse, the dreaded homestudy. There is no third person who considers him/herself as representing interests which may be oppposed to the interests of the couple. The total cost of ART from the time one starts it to the time one emerges with a child (if one does) may well be larger than the costs of adoption, but for any given cycle, the previous failures represent a sunk cost. The decision, at any particular time, is based on the cost (financial, emotional, physical–ART takes a physical toll on the woman) of the next cycle. ART is typically abandoned for adoption (or childlessness accepted) when either the next cycle is medically infeasible or the couple decides the emotional costs of another failed cycle will be unbearable.

It is likely that cloning (if it ever becomes feasible) will take its place somewhere in the spectrum of ART, perhaps after IVF with a woman’s own eggs has definitively failed, but before one tries using donor eggs.

So the satisfactions whose moral status needs to be weighed stem from a couple’s desire to create their family at as little expense as possible and to keep creation of their family as private as possible and as much as possible under their own control. Privacy and personal autonomy, at least, have long been regarded as morally justifiable desires. The moral status of wanting to spend as little as possible is more debatable, but there are many who would argue for it.

YEs, jam, very interesting and useful. Could you give some links to the blogs?
thanks, H