Adoption, Abortion, and Nonpersons

Abstract

As of late summer 2022, adopted adults in only ten of the fifty US states hold the right to obtain a copy of their original birth certificate, an example of what Daniel Heller-Roazen historicizes as forms of nonpersonhood. In its cynically transactional embrace of adoption, the Dobbs decision smugly ignores the vexed history of adoption and personhood rights. In its warm embrace of common law precedent to criminalize abortion, Dobbs cavalierly offers adoption as a pat solution, oblivious to the irony that adoption did not exist in common law. Dobbs adoptees will too often face lives shadowed historically by forms of legal, social, and civil diminishment.