THE BROKEN CORD
Michael Dorris
New York, Harper and Row, 1989
288 pp., $18.95
In the sixteen years since Roe v. Wade, America's debate about the ethics of pregnancy has hardened into two opposing, fortified positions. A woman's body is her own, intone the prochoicers; adoption is the answer, drone the prolifers. But now Michael Dorris lobs into the discussion a book that blasts all that entrenched argumentation to smithereens. Such destruction was not his primary intention, but in this single volume he has written several books, not all of them intended--but each of them illuminating, important, and unutterably sad.
At the simplest level, he recounts his life with his adopted son, Adam. At the profoundest, he lays bare a social and moral dilemma more complex than any our society has yet been able to resolve, or even to face intelligently. It is the very sort of issue we handle worst: It has innocent victims; grave, irreversible consequences; and no apparent, or even imaginable, solution that fits our institutions, traditions, or self-image. It pits hope against freedom, right against right. It brings to mind the one refrain that neither side in the debate wants to hear, the one that denies our national credo of the simple solution and the clean slate. The sins of the fathers, Dorris sorrowfully reminds us, are visited, irreparably and without justice or remorse, upon the sons.
Or, as in this case, the sins of the mothers. Adam is a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), a set of birth defects caused by his mother's drinking. He is, in fact, one of the 7,500 or more Americans born each year with "full" FAS; many more start life with the milder mental and physical deficiencies known as fetal alcohol effect (FAE).
But Michael didn't know any of this when he adopted Adam; to be fair, no one did. The adoption agency duly warned him that the boy was undersized and retarded, the abused son of an American Indian mother who had drunk herself to death. But these drawbacks only cemented Michael's resolve. Half Indian himself, deeply identified with his tribal background, an anthropologist and a rising academic, he longed to shower on a small victim of racism and poverty all the advantages that enlightened, loving, attentive, and prosperous nurturance could provide. "Look", he told the social worker who had gingerly broached the possibility of adopting Adam, "who knows whether that prognosis is correct? I believe in the positive impact of environment, and with me he'll catch up."
And Adam was an extraordinarily winning child, skinny and small for his age, open and sweet-tempered, with enormous dark eyes in a thin face. The very first time he ever saw Michael, at the social-service office in North Dakota, the three-year-old looked up from his toy cars and selected from his tiny vocabulary the very words likeliest to win the man's heart forever: "Hi, Daddy."
Facing The Truth
Each of those endearing traits, Michael was to learn long, painful years later, and each of the apparently mysterious and idiosyncratic problems that dogged his son--seizures, scoliosis, distractibility, low IQ,
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