Adoption Awareness Month: What Adoptees Want You to Know

Part One of a four-part series in which adoptees tell our side of the adoption narrative.

November is National Adoption Awareness Month, a time when agencies will promote adoption and adoptive families will celebrate their journeys. Surprising to many, while adoption is being celebrated and promoted, many adult adoptees choose not to participate. In fact, many actively speak out critically on adoption and against the traditional narrative that deems it a universal positive. Sadly, instead of listening to the very ones adoption was intended to help, the ones most affected by it, adoptee voices are overwhelmingly silenced. 

The adoptee experience is largely misunderstood by non-adoptees, as we are often spoken for by others without our lived experience. For various reasons, any adoptee experience that goes against the rainbows and unicorns narrative is rarely acknowledged as valid. Sadly, this disbelief stifles any advancement in the realms of adoptee healing and child-centered adoption reform. 

For Adoption Awareness Month, I wanted to give adoptees a voice in countering the narrative. The mainstream narrative would have the world believe adoption is a universal good, but most adoptees see things differently. In a recent survey, I asked a group of adoptees what they want the world to know about adoption. Here's what they had to say:

• It's like a hand grenade was thrown into my life when I was a baby. - Anonymous

• Adoption isn’t all sunshine and roses. - Payton

• It’s hard and full of lies. - Robin

• It’s not the perfect thing you see advertised by adoption agencies, adoptees hurt. - Sarah

• It falls into the “both” category. There’s both good and bad to it; gains and losses. - Elena

• Adoption law treats us as property, not human beings. We are not possessions and our fake birth certificates shouldn't be ownership papers. - Jodi

• Adoption doesn’t automatically fix the problem of children who need families. There is so much that the children and the families need that is not provided. - Claire

• Babies grow up. It's like how the animal rights people advertise to not get a puppy at Christmas because puppies grow up, the world needs to understand adopted babies grow up too. - Kate

• It's the adoptee that needs to be focused on. The adoptee has a right to know self heritage, have access to all family medical history and to know who the birth parents were. - Marcelle

• Adopters are not saviors or even necessarily good people. Narcissists and abusers adopt too. - Jillian 

• Adoption is painful. It has fractured my soul. I appreciate and love my adoptive parents, this is nothing against them. But my wound is deep, caused by my first parents. I just don’t understand how nobody in my first family wanted me. - Anonymous

• The only guarantee is that the adoptee will have a different life, not a better one. For the most part my story is an adoption "success story" but I feel like being adopted ruined my life, and no one can really relate to that with me. It's lonely. - Anonymous

• We are not pawns or propaganda in the abortion debate. Adoption and abortion are two separate issues. - Becky

• It is so wrong and unnecessary in most cases. There is no need to change the identity of a child to ensure they are cared for. - Anonymous

• Two completely polar opposite things can be true simultaneously. Ie:  Adoption is trauma and I had a good adoption.  These are seemingly polar opposite statements, but they are both absolutely true. - Ann

• To bring a child up giving it no information about its past is incredibly damaging. - Hannah

• The secrecy needs to stop.  It’s damaging enough. Do not withhold truth. - Melodee

• I’m not a dirty little secret! I have a right to be here. - Pat

• That great disservice has been done to adoptees, and natural and adopted parents; needed resources for appropriate education and mental health support are grossly lacking. - Deirdre

• It is not a fairytale for most of us. Even in the best situation it is still a very sad thing for an adoptee to be relinquished and lose their family. Even though we learn to live with it, we will grieve it the rest of our lives. Closed adoption is mentally abusive. It is better to know the truth of your family and your birth story than to be told a lie or just be left in the dark. It is a form of societal gaslighting to expect adoptees to be grateful for their circumstances.  - Val

• How it feels to never hear your own mother’s voice. To have your Mother not want contact with her own child even though the child is a good, honest and successful person that she should be proud of. There’s so much, I wish there was a way to make others understand how it all feels. - Anonymous

• Adoption, if it exists in any shape at all, which I am not certain that it should even exist, needs to center the needs of the child. Period. No one else’s needs are more important than a child.  No one “needs” to be a parent. No one “deserves” to be a parent.” If you choose to be a parent, it’s not your needs that need to be met, it needs to be the child that takes priority. And that is more true in adoption than anywhere else. - Ann

• No adoptee is unscathed by adoption. I’m tired of people saying, “but my husband, wife, friend etc. has no emotional issues, they had a wonderful adoption.” They aren't telling you about their insecurities because we keep our emotions in a locked box, never to be opened. From the outside my life was great too. - Kathie

By far, the single most important thing that adoptees wanted the world to know is that the adoption experience is traumatic. While individuals can react differently to the same traumatic events, the events themselves are still considered traumatic. Every adoptee experiences the trauma of being separated from their natural family, but most experience related traumas, such as looking different or not fitting in with their adoptive family, hurtful or hateful comments from others, lack of medical history, and loss of heritage and culture, among many others. 

One adoptee, Stompin77, described his trauma as, "the most painful and inner destructive force I've ever known. It cannot be stopped, prevented, or even avoided." Yet, society and many adoptive parents dismiss adoptee accounts of trauma, to the adoptee's detriment. But, as Jen says, "if we don’t acknowledge this, it cannot be addressed."

Part Two of this series will dive deeper into adoption-related trauma, how it affects adoptees, and what adoptees say they need to feel supported.