Adoption: Altruism versus Selfishness

 Tyler Cowen, in response to a post from Bryan Caplan, argues:

Bryan writes:

On adoption: I think that adoption is a noble, generous act, and admire those who do it.  But I personally don't want to adopt.

I can't disagree with any word in that first sentence, but it leaves me uneasy.  Bryan's forthcoming book -- Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids -- is about...selfish reasons to have kids.  (It will, I promise you, be very interesting and make a splash.)  So here is my challenge to Bryan: write down the ten most important selfish reasons to have kids and then ask how many of them apply to adopted children.  Most of them will.  Which isn't to say those are the only reasons to adopt (or have) kids, but they are real nonetheless.  So why do the adopting parents seemingly get described as selfless martyrs?  It's almost as if the selfishness, without the replication angle, has to be stuffed into a box somewhere.  Do all those selfish reasons for having kids require replication as a kind of amplifying mechanism, without with we are left with the slightly underwhelming purely altruistic motives?

From the remainder of the post, I gather that Cowen does not necessarily agree that the primary reasons to have (or adopt) children are selfish ones, though he leaves this aside for the sake of argument.  Instead, the point is that both biological and adoptive parents become parents for similar reasons – selfish ones, under Caplan’s definition -- yet Caplan believes the reasons of the biological parent are primarily selfish, whereas those of the adoptive parent are depicted as primarily generous. 

This is to me a quite fascinating post, as the (ir)relevance of motive is a topic I cover at length in both teaching and research (See, for example, prior posts here and here).   And I’ve frequently wondered why one transaction is routinely characterized as at least partially altruistic (e.g. egg donation, blood donation, surrogacy), whereas reasonably similar transactions are assumed to be largely or wholly selfish (e.g. sperm and plasma donation).  

But this difference in the presumed motives of adoptive versus biological parents is not one that had occurred to me before.  In prior work, I’ve theorized that characterizing particular transactions as selfless or altruistic is a means of normalizing otherwise jarring events – for example, mothers are supposed to love their children, not sell them for profit.  Thus the characterization of commercial surrogacy and oocyte donation as primarily altruistic, selfless acts may reduce the dissonance associated with cash-for-motherhood transactions. 

Is it possible that a similar move is at work with adoption?  And, if so, what is the discord that must be normalized?

Adoption is no longer particularly unusual in this day and age, of course – many of us adopt children ourselves or know others who have done so.  But, as Viviana Zelizer documents, the sentimental value of children (the economically “worthless,” but sentimentally “priceless” child, as she puts it) is a relatively recent development.  Historically, children who were not genetic offspring (thus serving no evolutionary impulse) were valued primarily for their ability to contribute to household income.  (I discuss this social transformation and its impact on the baby market in more depth here).

Today’s adoptive “priceless” children provide neither gene survival nor economic contribution.  This would, it seems, make today’s adoptions selfless acts, as judged by historical standards.