I know there are a lot of adoptive parents here (myself included). I have followed many of the adoptees quoted in the article over the years and have met some of them in person. Shared with my daughter who is now 27.
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Thank you for posting this article. As the mother of 4 internationally and transracially adopted children, it really helped me to understand more fully the trauma of adoption. Hopefully this will help me open deeper conversations with them, especially my youngest daughter, who has struggled with many of the feelings expressed by the people in the article.
What a fascinating read. Although I know many people who have been adopted, I have never thought particularly hard about what that must be like from their point of view. Really eye opening.
Thank you for sharing this link. I am finding this quite an emotional ‘read’. Our daughter was adopted at birth, and the first sixteen years of our lives together were smooth sailing - the past six years have not been so smooth! We had an open adoption that, as our daughter entered her teens, became quite tricky, and inflicted enormous damage and trauma on our daughter, which in turn, has created trauma for all of our family. We continue to work our way through it, day by day.
Thanks for posting. Looks like a good read. Adoption is often on my mind even if not fully consciously. Especially around birthdays and milestone events.
I just finished reading American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Secret History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser that covers many of the issues (and more) mentioned in the article illustrated through the story of one woman’s search for the son she was forced to give up and the son who struggled all his life with his identity. Anyone interested in the emotional damage of some types of adoption and how our system created and fed adoption abuse will find this book hard to put down.
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Watch One Child Nation, available on Amazon prime. It will forever change your view of the wave of adoptions from China.
Having read the New Yorker article, which should have been entitled, “A Few Women’s Experience of Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath”, I’d like to point out a few things. First of all, this is the experience of only a few women, and cannot be generalized to all adopted children, or all those who have given up children for adoption. Second, through my long professional career, I have seen that children now given up domestically for adoption, and essentially, ever since abortion became widely available, and since it became socially much more acceptable to be a single mother, are largely children who come from a strong family history of mental illness and addiction on both sides, going back often three generations and extending out to the uncles, aunts, and adult cousins. The reason I say this is that it has been my experience, in a profession with broad exposure to adopted children and to the social services that dictate which children cannot be safely placed with extended family, that social services DO search extensively for relatives who can safely take the children, and will even pay relatives what the state would have had to pay in the foster system, so that poor relatives can afford to take the children, and that this has been the standard for several decades. The children who wind up going up for adoption are those who have no relatives close enough, meaning no aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, even young enough great grandparents, who are not mentally ill, drug/alcohol addicts, or criminals. Believe it or not, personality is largely inherited. Mental illness is inherited. Criminal behavior can be inherited (despite having been removed at birth from a poor environment replete with criminal behavior). Time after time, I have seen sweet children, placed even the day they were born, into wonderful families of the same race, given every possible advantage, and when puberty hits, the time bomb of inherited mental illness explodes. So it is not necessarily that adoption CAUSES mental illness, addiction, and criminal behavior. It is far more likely to be that for over 45 years now, many of the children given up for adoption in the US have come from parents with mental health issues and addiction, and it’s no surprise that this is inherited, just as many other aspects of personality can be inherited.
When it comes to adoption from overseas, there is no question that in virtually every country, there was money to be made for those facilitating the adoption. In China, after the one child policy was decreed, people were abandoning female infants to die of starvation and exposure, and no one dared to save them. It was only once middlemen realized that there was money to be made by essentially selling these infants to desperate Western families, that the infants were put into warehouse orphanages awaiting sale. Some were in fact kidnapped for sale to the West. The process went on until China realized that these almost exclusively female infants who were being sold to the West would be needed in the future as factory workers (destined to work essentially for the price of their daily food and a bunk in a workers’ dormitory) and as future wives for the men who might otherwise not be able to find a wife, due to the missing females in the one-child generation, when families aborted, exposed, or gave away for adoption their female infants in order to try again for a male. I cannot imagine how the families who adopted Chinese girls must feel now, realizing that it’s even worse than what they thought, that they were not simply taking unwanted girls, they may in fact may have been paying for and taking children who were kidnapped for sale.
But what infuriated me the most about this article was the inability of some angry adoptees who were raised anti-abortion, who want to and are now succeeding to deny women the choice to NOT continue a pregnancy, to see the connection between banning abortion and their own pain. They see only their own pain at being adopted, not the pain of girls and women who are forced to bear children they did not want to bear. They refuse to see that this is in fact the very root cause of that which has caused them so much pain! They would like to deny girls and women not only the right to choose to abort, but also the right to give up the baby anonymously and move on with their lives, safe from ever being contacted from the child that they gave up for adoption, who they may have been forced to bear (let alone forced to conceive). All they can see their own need to know who their genetic forbears were, their own pain, which they suppose was caused by having been given up and adopted. They cannot see that their pain of being adopted is inextricably linked to the lack of access to quick, easy, and free abortion, for those girls and women who choose to abort.
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@parentologist that’s quite a broad attack!
As a person who adopted a 2-year-old from China and with broad knowledge among friends and colleagues and clients of all kinds of adoption, it’s a lot more nuanced, IMHO, than you are saying. I have a friend who “adopted” (one adoption was never formalized because her son was so traumatized by his childhood in the “system”) two young men, now in their early 30s. She was running an agency in Brooklyn that specializes in doing what you say is commonplace:
Alas, this is A LOT of work and not commonplace at all, at least in NY. My friend spent six months as a consultant to child protective services in NYC working with them to develop protocols. I went to social work school/have friends/work with people who work/worked for ACS, the NYC agency. Their work is hard, hard, hard. I don’t see the agency having the resources to do this for every kid in a group home in NYC.
As for the nature/nurture argument, in my humble opinion your statements are way, way too extreme. In my work as a therapist in a community mental health clinic, I have clients who had terrible, terrible upbringings and have raised healthy happy children to successful and productive adulthood. The chain can be broken.
In my humble opinion. I know (some personally) some of the adoptees in the story. They speak their experiences, as we all do.
In my very humble opinion.
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I know people who’ve adopted kids both internationally and within the US. For most of them, from what I’ve heard and seen it’s gone well. Granted, I don’t know everything that goes on and I don’t know the whole ins and outs of their family dynamics.
My cousin has an adopted daughter and she is a smart, well adjusted teenager who is off to college next year. I am close to my cousin, so I did hear about some of the details. I do wonder if it makes a difference if you’re adopted as infant, as my cousin’s daughter was? (she wasn’t even 1). I also imagine that in many cases, the situation with the birth parents makes a difference?
That said, it’s easy to make a generalizations on adoption, when you haven’t done it before. And there are so many different scenarios.
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Of course the chain can be broken. Of course there are people who are the biological children of drug addicts, alcoholics, and criminals, who become healthy productive members of society, even though they were not adopted out of that environment. And there are many, many people who have been adopted who can only say, “Thank God for my adoptive parents, and thank God I was adopted!” And of course there are domestically adopted children that don’t have mental health problems show up. That doesn’t change the fact that since elective abortion was legalized, many of the children who are up for adoption come from circumstances that involve mental illness, addiction, and criminal behavior, and that these conditions can and do show up in these children when adolescence hits. The era of the college girl who “made a mistake” (and somehow, no one ever spoke of the college boy who was just as involved in making the mistake), who went away to give birth in secret, and then gave up the child for adoption, hoping to just continue on with her life as if the “mistake” never happened, ended with the legalization of abortion in the early '70s.
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There is not always a direct inheritance of mental illness within a family. Obviously, anecdotes don’t prove anything but in many families one child may have mental health issues and several others with no such problems. Also, kids can be mentally ill with no mental health challenges known among parents, or their siblings, and/or grandparents. Same with addiction. There are unfortunately plenty of young people that become addicts that don’t have a family history of addiction.
It is an impossible situation in many ways. A kid that would chose not to have a baby if they had that option, choosing to either keep the baby and in many cases ending up deeper in poverty than if they did not have a child so young, or giving away their baby with the emotional turmoil that brings. Certainly, a girl that has a stable, supportive, not poor family is more likely to be able to keep and raise a child in a healthy way.
Hmm. I hit the reply button, then found myself lost for words! What do I want to say? I don’t know, much of it feels too personal - I will say that in the weeks leading up to my daughter’s birth, H and I moved to the birthmother’s state. We became acquainted with the birthmother and her family (mother, father, siblings), in all, spending abut six weeks pre-and post birth. Once the baby was born, we didn’t just snatch and leave, we spent eighteen years nurturing the ‘open’ adoption, with frequent visits by us and them, a lot of communication through letters, phone calls, cards and gifts - other families of adoption envied and admired our perfect adoption scenario. It wasn’t until around about our daughter’s 16th birthday that things started to go south; it took me another two years to figure out the birthmother was meddling and filling our daughter’s head with lies and deceptions. Until then, as I said, it was all perfect - rainbows and butterflies! The family had no known history of mental illness; no history of drug or alcohol abuse; no extended family (cousins, aunts uncles, grandparents) with issues - we met many of them over the years, all solid, educated, upstanding citizens; yet, the birthmother had to meddle, lie, divide and conquer. Perhaps she did have some untreated mental illness, we will never know.
As I said in an earlier post, we are still dealing with the aftermath of what she did - I cannot and will never forgive her for that. All that said, I am a big proponent of ‘my body, my choice’ and pro-abortion in any chosen (not forced) circumstance, and I am very grateful the birthmother ‘chose’ our daughter, thereby choosing us.
This is probably a long, incoherent ramble, but some things I simply need to get out without overthinking!
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Mom of an internationally adopted child. At almost 16 she has her moments. She has never voiced anger over being adopted but has wished that I did more about finding more diversity for her. She attends a mostly white school in a suburban area. She wishes she felt more connected to her culture.
Diversity will play a major factor in her college decision process.
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I don’t think the article shared is just “a few angry adoptees” or “adoptions gone wrong”, or a “sign of mental illness”.
There is a pretty large body of research conducted over decades that show adoption has its own unique challenges and pretty wide variety of outcomes. These issues were/are present with birth moms and adoptees from our infamous baby scoop era (pre- Roe v Wade).
Transracial and/or International adoption bring additional complexities to an already complex situation.
My views on adoption have undergone a sea change over the past couple decades.
I think there are far too many unprepared families looking into adoption without having grieved and processed the infertility that often led them to the idea of adoption in the first place. Adoption is not a solution for infertility. It is a completely different thing altogether.
I think most adoption agencies are perversely incentivized to place the adoptive parents higher on the priority chain (over both birth parents and prospective adoptee) because they are ones with the money. When it comes to children’s welfare, it shouldn’t be “He who pays the piper call the tune.” But it often is. When you discover how little money it would take often times to allow birth families to stay together, it calls into question the purpose of many adoptions.
I very much wish their were far more constraints on transracial adoptions (domestic and international). I think there are a lot of families who still believe they can adopt a child of a different race and raise them in a non-diverse area without issues. As if, “Love will be enough”. Having meaningful interactions with people who look like you, who are culturally like you is really important. Vitally important I would argue.
Adopting a child is a profoundly selfish act (not using the word selfish pejoratively here, just descriptively). Parents choose to do so because they want a child, or they want to “live their Evangelical faith”, or for a multitude of reasons. But it is a choice on the part of the parents, not the child. How a child reacts to adoption, how they may or may not process it, how they ‘turn out’…those are all risks in building a family through adoption.
I wish more adoptive families understood the risks, and also understood that they chose to take that on when they signed up for being an adoptive parent.
Being able to parent a child is an awesome responsibility (and privilege). I think it is even more so when you choose to be an adoptive parent.
I have a close friend who was an adoption caseworker for 25 years until she couldn’t do it anymore. Her experience: “Adoption work is full of joy and sorrow. And the joy never outweighs the sorrow.”
Lots of trauma for everyone that doesn’t cease to exist if we ignore it or think of adoption as the solution to a problem.
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I am reading along and appreciate everyone sharing their perspective. It is certainly a complicated issue and there are many facets from which to view it.
Although I realize that racial issues are not the main thrust of this thread, I did want to comment on this.
I was not adopted, but I am the only child from an interracial (black/white) relationship. My half-siblings, from my parents’ first marriages, are monoracial (as much as anyone is "mono"racial). My father was an immigrant from a majority-black country and, as many know, the African-American experience and perspective is often very different from those who immigrate to the U.S. from black-majority countries.
My family moved around a great deal, and when picking where to live in the new location, the question was always, “What are the best schools?” Thus, that is where my parents would move. The vast majority of the time, even if there were other people of color (and/or same color) in the locale, there were not many in the neighborhood/school that my family lived in. My parents did not choose where to live based on race, but based on what they felt were the best educational opportunities for their children. We generally attended church near our house, which meant that our family was one of the few integrators of the 11:00 hour.
It wasn’t until I was at my current employer, well into my adult years, that I am regularly in an environment where people that look like me make up a very large part of my environment. (I am excluding church, as I have been blessed to find some racially integrated churches over the years…not an easy feat.) There is a certain level of comfort or ease that I feel at my current employer that I haven’t felt elsewhere.
If, however, having a sizable percentage of people who “look like you” is important, or vitally important, then that does not bode well for many integration movements. And for people that have been historically disadvantaged and live in areas where the educational systems reflect that disadvantage, it can be very damaging to future outcomes.
I’d be interested in hearing about the experiences of racial minorities who live with families who look like them and in neighborhoods where there are many who look like them who then end up in a school where they are one of a small number, particularly if they previously attended a school where they had a strong plurality (or majority) of students who looked like them. (I’m thinking of scholarship kids at private day schools, etc). I wonder what light those experiences would shed on the experiences of those who may remain in educationally disadvantaged locations vs. having the othering experience of being a small minority.
And yes, the optimal choice would be nicely integrated schools available to all that all provide great educational outcomes, but unfortunately, most of the U.S. is far from that.
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True. But in some cases, it’s not a good idea to keep kids with their birth families. And don’t some women give their babies up for adoption because they are unequipped to raise their child or they want their child to have a better future…
Having children that you can’t afford is selfish too. So, is having children and being abusive to them.
I do think we need better sex education and access to contraception among other things…
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My adopted daughter recently met many of her biological siblings. One of the young women asked her, “So what mental health issues do you have?” She then started listing what each of them had. My daughter thought she was the only one placed for adoption, only to find out that two of 8 were placed and one had always lived with his biological father. I was nervous about her contact with them, but most were very nice and more importantly, truthful about experiences they’d had growing up.
Intentionally having a child is a profoundly selfish act. I also am not using the word pejoratively. Deciding to become a parent has been one of the most wonderful decisions that I’ve made. However, I don’t think a particular method of becoming a parent (adoption or birth) makes the choice any more or less selfish.
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