Joan Heifetz Hollinger, Visiting Professor of Law, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-7200. However well intentioned, this question can unnerve adopted children and their adoptive parents. One answer lies in the widely shared belief that personal identity and family are inextricably associated with the capacity to reproduce ourselves biogenetically. Adoptive families are the product of law, not blood. The adoptive family replaces and becomes the legal equivalent of the biogenetic family.
Adoption entails psychosocial as well as legal consequences.
It provides children for adults who are infertile or who want to extend the boundaries of their otherwise biologically connected families. It allows states to shift the high public costs of caring for dependent children to the private realm. A substantial body of research testifies to the successful outcomes for children raised by adoptive parents, especially in contrast to the lives they would have had if they had not been adopted. Love and nurture do indeed temper nature and mitigate the effects of any preadoptive history of maltreatment. Despite the high financial and emotional costs and uncertain outcome of technologically assisted reproduction, many childless adults would rather pursue this route toward parenthood than take on what they fear will be the onerous burden of raising someone else's child.