Abolition of Identicide: abolitionist framework against the erasure of identity
Abolition of Identicide is an abolitionist development of the concept of identicide. It names the ethical, political and epistemic framework from which the abolition of every institutional form of identity destruction is conceived.
The text begins from a central affirmation: the harm caused by adoption cannot be reformed, only abolished. Wherever a practice is founded on the deliberate destruction of identity, the suppression of origin and the falsification of filiation, the only possible reparation is the cessation of that violence.
To abolish identicide means to restore the right to the truth of origin, dismantle the structures that sustain its erasure and open a horizon of justice that returns to each person their genealogy, their name and their memory.
Quick access
The publication is available on Zenodo in Spanish and English. The main buttons link to the general DOI of each record, following the documentary criterion used across the rest of the website.
Related
This page is part of the Undoing Adoption line of work, devoted to dismantling adoption as an institution of substitution, erasure of origins, identity violence and documentary destruction of filiation.
View the main Undoing Adoption page
Abolition of Identicide develops the ethical and political response to the harm named by the concept of identicide. It should be read together with the other critical texts in the same line:
On this page
- What the abolition of identicide is
- Why it was necessary to name it
- Not reform, but abolition
- Adoption as a device of identicide
- Ethical and political foundations
- Abolition as truth, filiation and restitution
- Restitution against fictitious reparation
- Reorienting law towards truth
- A framework for adoption abolitionism
- Key concepts
- Structure of the text
- Publication, versions and records
- Access to the publication
- Recommended citation
What the abolition of identicide is
The abolition of identicide designates the ethical and political response to the institutional destruction of natal identity. If identicide names the harm, abolition of identicide names the horizon of restitution.
It is not a simple legal opposition to adoption, nor an abstract slogan. It means dismantling the legal, religious, family, documentary and symbolic structures that make the erasure of origin and the substitution of filiation possible.
To abolish identicide means to affirm that no practice founded on the falsification of origin can be morally acceptable, even when it is presented through narratives of protection, charity, destiny or love.
Why it was necessary to name it
The concept arises because naming the harm is not enough if the political horizon of its disappearance is not also named. Identicide makes the violence recognisable. Abolition of identicide formulates the demand to bring it to an end.
For a long time, adoption has been presented as a reformable institution: it would supposedly be enough to improve procedures, guarantee certain rights or add safeguards. This text breaks with that logic.
If an institution needs to erase filiation, replace genealogy and fabricate a new legal identity in order to exist, the problem is not an administrative flaw. The problem is the structure itself.
Naming the abolition of identicide makes it possible to move the debate away from improving harm and towards ending it.
Not reform, but abolition
The central idea of the text is clear: there are structures of violence that cannot coexist with justice. Not every institutional harm can be reformed. Some practices must cease.
Abolition is not understood here as destruction, punishment or emptiness. It is understood as restitution. To abolish is not to erase the past, but to prevent violence from continuing to reproduce itself.
Applied to adoption, this position means rejecting the legitimacy of substituting identity in the name of good. The question is not how to make the substitution of filiation more humane, but why a society accepts that such substitution should be possible at all.
The abolition of identicide does not seek to perfect the adoptive system. It seeks to end the principle that sustains it: the possibility of replacing origin with a legal fiction.
Adoption as a device of identicide
The text situates modern adoption as the central device of institutional identicide. Adoption fabricates fictitious filiations and dissolves biographical truth in the name of good.
This operation is not only legal. It is also moral, affective, religious and cultural. Adoption is legitimised through narratives of salvation, charity, protection and family destiny.
Against that narrative, the abolition of identicide affirms that there can be no justice where origin has been substituted, genealogy erased and identity administered by third parties.
Abolition does not deny the existence of affective bonds. What it questions is the structure of power that imposes those bonds on the basis of a falsification of origin.
Ethical and political foundations
The abolition of identicide begins from the recognition of a moral limit. When a practice is sustained by the negation of being, by the suppression of origin and by the falsification of identity, its continuity cannot be justified.
In its deepest sense, to abolish identicide means to restore truth. Every historical abolition has involved the affirmation of a denied truth: the humanity of the enslaved, the freedom of the body, the equality of the subject.
In this case, the denied truth is natal identity. That is why abolition becomes an act of restitution: returning to each person the possibility of being through their own genealogy, their own name and their own memory.
From a political perspective, the abolition of identicide demands the breaking of the pact of silence that turns identity erasure into a natural fact and documentary falsification into a legal solution.
Abolition as truth, filiation and restitution
Every abolition implies restitution. There can be no end to violence without recognition of what was taken away.
In the case of identicide, what has been stolen is not a material good, but a truth: filiation, name, the memory of belonging and the continuity between being and origin.
Filiation is not a form of property. It is a form of truth. To know one’s lineage does not mean to possess it, but to recognise oneself within it.
The abolition of identicide calls for an ethics of filial truth. Restitution is not a sentimental gesture, but an act of justice.
Restitution against fictitious reparation
The text distinguishes between real reparation and a fictitious restitution of origin. Adoption has often been presented as reparation for a loss, but what it produces is substitution: an administered biography that replaces real bonds with a legal fiction.
To abolish identicide means rejecting that fictitious reparation. Truth cannot be replaced by a narrative of salvation. Filiation cannot be replaced by an administered version of biography.
Restitution means restoring continuity. It means recovering the right to inhabit one’s own history without intermediaries, without erased files, without imposed genealogies and without lies turned into kinship.
There can be no reparation without truth, and no truth without filiation.
Reorienting law towards truth
The abolition of identicide implies a radical reorientation of law. The law that legitimises the substitution of filiation must be replaced by a law of restitution.
Instead of registering new identities, law must guarantee the recovery of real ones. Instead of silencing genealogies, it must protect them. Instead of turning falsification into legal stability, it must recognise truth as the basis of justice.
This demand is not only technical or registry-related. It is ethical. No society can call itself just while falsehood remains a valid form of kinship.
To abolish identicide means to free care, filiation and love from the legal framework that perverts them when it founds them on a falsehood.
A framework for adoption abolitionism
The abolition of identicide provides a framework for adoption abolitionism. It does not merely denounce adoption as individual harm, but places it within a structure of identity erasure.
This framework makes it possible to think of abolition not as loss, but as restitution. Not as the denial of bonds, but as the liberation of bonds from the institutional falsification that produces them.
The abolition of identicide affirms that origin does not belong to administration, but to existence; that identity is not granted, but recognised; and that all justice begins by restoring the right to be who one is.
In this sense, the abolition of adoption as a form of identicide is an act of emancipation, memory and truth.
Key concepts
- Abolition of identicide.
- Identicide.
- Adoption abolitionism.
- Adoption.
- Identity erasure.
- Truth of origin.
- Filiation.
- Genealogy.
- Memory.
- Restitution.
- Structural violence.
- Symbolic violence.
- Decolonisation.
- Right to be.
Structure of the text
The article is organised as an abolitionist proposal. It begins from the conviction that the harm produced by adoption cannot be reformed, only abolished.
It then develops the conceptual framework of abolition, defines the term “Abolition of Identicide (Adoption)”, sets out its ethical and political foundations, and formulates the restitution of truth, filiation and memory as the core of all reparation.
The conclusion argues that abolishing identicide is not merely putting an end to a practice, but transforming the very idea of humanity on which modern adoption has been built.
Publication, versions and records
Access to the publication
The publication is available on Zenodo. The general DOI identifies the full record and its versions, while the version DOI identifies a specific edition of the text.
Recommended citation
Gómez Aldaz, Olmo. Abolition of Identicide (Adoption): a neologism to name the abolitionist framework against the erasure of identity. 2025. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17458108.