The New York Times ran a feature in the magazine section this weekend about adoptive parents searching for their children’s birth mothers. I read it with apprehension, the way I do articles about clinical research or the few other topics I know first-hand that are routinely butchered by the media: How will they get it wrong THIS time?

The author is an adoptive parent herself, of a child from Guatemala, so the article was factual enough, although a little too constrained by her own experience. The thesis seemed to be, “Be careful what you search for, because you might find it!” with attendant horror stories about birth parents who asked the adoptive parents for money or had unsavory personal histories. I’m not sure how necessary that cautionary note was. Very few people emerge from the adoptive process imagining their kid’s birth parents were a king and queen who had to leave their child by a riverbank due to a spell cast by an evil fairy. Yet here was this author, telling people that they might be better off not knowing.

Ridiculous, I thought. It’s always better for a child to know his history than not to know it. That’s one of the basic tenets of modern adoption. Right?

Then I remembered an exchange we had with our social worker.

It was during our first homestudy, the one that resulted in Aitch. The caseworker was asking us if we would consider an open adoption; of course we would. She asked what we would tell our child about his background, and we made appropriate noises about talking about adoption from early childhood on and the revealing the details at the right time, as the child aged.

She persisted. “What if you found out your child was conceived as a result of a rape?”

I had considered it before. I really hoped that we wouldn’t be faced with such a difficult situation, but I was aware of the fact that the child could have been conceived as a result of rape or incest. Husband and I had never discussed it, though.

“Would there be any point in revealing that?” I asked.

Husband said, “At least not until he or she is an adult. If at all.”

The social worker let us know that this was the wrong answer. “You have to be honest with your child above all. What if he found out later? He would know you were lying.”

I said, “If you waited until he was old enough to understand, wouldn’t that be like finding out you had lied? Wouldn’t he be angry then?”

The social worker said that we would have to dole out the details gradually, starting when the child was very young, and I tried to wrap my head around how you would discuss a child’s rape origins in an age-appropriate way with a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, a ten-year-old. Even thirty seems too young to hear that story. We wanted to pass the home study, though, so I told the social worker I could see her point and would think about it. In fact, I did see her point, but I saw my point, too.

Luckily, we did not have to face that situation.

It bothers me, though, that people persist in thinking there is one “right” way to do adoption, and that social workers perpetuate that myth: if you are completely open about the child’s history/put early intervention on speed dial for attachment issues/dress the kid in a hanbok for his first birthday/eat Korean food a few times a year/attend Korean culture class, you’re doing it right (the subtext being that you don’t have to worry about anything else). There’s nothing wrong with any of those actions, of course, but it’s not a formula. In most situations, there could be multiple valid choices, depending on how they are handled. That includes revealing a background of rape or incest.

There’s a pretty good article here that weighs both options without being terribly judgmental. Too bad my social worker could not have taken the same approach.