Adoption Is Not An Alternative To Abortion

Stop weaponizing adoptees for political gain

Have you ever vented to a friend about how your parents’ divorce fucked you up, and the friend said something like, “at least you have a roof over your head” or “no one else I know is fucked up from divorce?”

Probably not.

Most people understand why adults divorce, and that even when it’s for the best, there can be negative, unintended consequences for their children. Some people stay together to avoid that. Some people split up despite that. Some divorces fuck the kids up. Some don’t.

Society recognizes the pain, nuance, and ambiguity inherent in ending a marriage and breaking up a family. Do people ask the angry kids if they’d prefer their parents killed them?

Yikes, right? I know. I’m asked it all the time.

My mother, a well-educated, sophisticated 23-year-old debutante, did not know she was pregnant when one freezing January day in 1968, an ambulance rushed her to New York Hospital. Agonizing, debilitating stomach pains made her think she was dying. After eleven hours of labor, metal forceps pulled me out.

I spent my first three weeks of life in the NICU because of an eye infection, chlamydia contracted through the birth canal. For the next three months, I lived in foster care. At three and a half months old, my parents adopted me.

I learned all of this at age 31. The notorious Louise Wise Agency for Families and Children had lied to my parents and told them my mother kept me for three months.

My mother did not tell anyone she gave birth. She told friends and family she had surgery “to remove an intestinal blockage.” After “surgery,” she spent a few weeks recovering at her parents’ home in Memphis. She returned to New York as if nothing happened. She began a career, met a man, married him. He wanted kids, she didn’t; they had no kids. After 23 years of marriage, at 50, she died of colon cancer. An intestinal blockage killed her. She died one day before my 27th birthday.

She died before I found her.

Does it surprise you I have some issues around trust and abandonment? Does it surprise you that my birth mother had no other children? It’s obvious that we both suffered trauma.

Right?

I had a good childhood. The best camps and schools, vacations around the globe. A ping-pong table and pinball machine in our basement, ice-skating lessons, piano lessons, dance classes. And at 16, after failing my driver’s permit test, I tried to kill myself.

Adoptees are 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted people. The act of relinquishment, the severing of the maternal-child bond (even/especially at birth), imprints pre-verbal trauma on the baby’s neurological system. Trauma that reverberates into adulthood. We arrive at our adoptive parents with a crack in our foundation. Some of us live our lives, never feeling the effects of that crack. Some of us spend a lifetime trying to patch it. Thanks to lots of therapy and a sturdy support system, I have a great life. I also have some issues because my mother surrendered me to strangers.

You can see how those things can co-exist, right? Like how a divorce can be essential and painful?

Like most adoptees, my parents told me they chose me. One day when I was 5, I announced to my pre-school peers I was better than them. “My parents chose me. They forced your parents to keep you.” Can you imagine? I love 5-year-old me.

Unable to conceptualize what ‘chosen’ meant, I imagined a bagel store. Clear bins side by side, a unique flavor in each. Baby Me in one bin, Baby You in another. My parents chose me because I was the cutest (sorry, Baby You). The thing about being a chosen object, a dehumanized commodity, is that they can return you.

You can see how being told you were chosen can be good and bad, right?

Can you see how a child told “your mother loved you so much she gave you away,” might equate love with leaving? That she might — even if it’s so deep down inside she can’t express it— fear her new mother will leave too. Adoptees aged 8 to 18 are twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety than children raised with biological parents. It’s easy to understand why.

Right?

Like many adoptees, I longed to know who I looked like. People often compliment my blue eyes. My parents and brother (also adopted) have dark brown eyes. Throughout my childhood, friends and strangers would comment upon my eyes, look at my family and ask, “where did you get those gorgeous eyes?” The fuck if I know. Looking like your family is something non-adopted people take for granted. For most adoptees, it is a point of huge curiosity and angst. It’s the reason most adoptees search. Imagine what it’s like for adoptees of color adopted by white people. Looking like no one else is fucking weird, at times painful, often confusing.

Not all adoptees share these feelings, we are not a monolith. But those who do often keep it to themselves. Out of loyalty to their parents, not wanting to sound ungrateful, not wanting to complain. Not wanting to be dismissed by a society invested in maintaining the fairy-tale narrative. Do you know that some adoptive parents suck? Like really suck. That there are adoptees who absolutely did not have a better life. Do you know that at any time adoptive parents can re-home their adopted child? You can legally return the kid you adopted. There are websites for it, sort of like CarMax. Do you know that many birth mothers are forced or coerced to surrender their babies?

We do not base the assumption that adoption provides a better life on fact. We base it on hope.

Does anything I’ve described sound unreasonable? You can understand the nuance, that all this can coexist, right? That relinquishment and adoption can be for the best and the adoptee, and mother, can have issues because of it.

Still want to ask if we’d rather have been aborted? Horrified by that question?

Me too.

But when we speak about the downside of life as an adoptee, that’s the question we get. Don’t believe me? Read the Twitter responses to Elizabeth Spiers’s op-ed in the New York Times.

Abortion is not the opposite of adoption.

Abortion is an alternative to carrying a pregnancy to term. Adoption is an alternative to parenting. I understand that if you believe life begins at conception, abortion is repugnant. I want you to understand, adoption has nothing to do with abortion. Their outcomes bear no resemblance. I know. I’m an adoptee who had an abortion.

Adoption means a human being has been born and legally severed from their biological kin and culture. It means a woman birthed a baby whom, we hope, grows up to be an adult, well raised by someone else. Adoption is not a one-time event. I am an adoptee for life. My mother was a mother until the day she died.

So instead of asking us about being aborted, or dismissing us as ungrateful, ask why it’s hard for society to see adoption holistically. As a lifelong experience, that can be many contradictory things at once. Because for adoption to form one family, it had to break another.