We have our voices. we are old enough and technologically minded enough to be talking about this is in public, in virtual space, where all you have to do to hear us is click your mouse. and we are saying:
we would not have chosen this, there is too much loss here, we are not grateful, we need to know where we come from, we support women’s rights to keep their children whenever possible.
When it comes to adoption we are the people who both legally and socially had the least power, are the least listened to, none of the choices made were ours, if we stray away from the acceptable, very narrow script about how we were “better off” being adopted about all the “chances” we wouldn’t have got otherwise, about how our mothers were just somehow socially and morally defective we get infantilized, told we are bitter, ungrateful, anomalies, we are still far too often referred to as “adopted child” when we have been adults for years, decades
Stop telling us that our lived experiences are inadmissible because they are “anecdata”. Stop telling us you want to see research proving the things we say. In lots of cases there is no research. Why would there be? we live in a world that doesn’t believe there are any loosing sides to adoption so who’s going to pay for research into what they are? before anybody does any research into what we are saying they have to believe we are telling the truth and they have to not be part of a system that benefits from adoption.
We know that a high percentage of adoptive parents are abusive, we know that adoptive parents often resent us for not being related to them, for not turning out like them, we know that growing up with people you are related to is not the same as growing up with people you are not related to, we know that love isn’t always enough
We have our voices and you should be listening to them even if, in fact especially if, you think adoption is a good idea, a good way of building families. if you are an adoptive parent or a prospective adoptive parent who isn’t going to change their mind you need to be listening to us however much we hurt your feelings or put you on the offensive or blow holes in your carefully constructed worldview that believes adoption is a win-win-win situation.
Communities don't get built... 
October 1, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Is this going to be an ongoing blog?
October 1, 2009 at 7:15 pm
yes it is, I’m hoping to post about twice a week
October 30, 2009 at 4:31 am
I am an adoptive mother who is very much interested in the experience of adopted people.
I don’t see our adoption as a win-win-win situation; more like a triangle of a rock, a hard place, and a position of relative privilege, and there in the middle being tossed around like a hot potato, the child.
There is no one in our life we can talk to about what his experience will be like reflecting on his placement into foster care, his adoption and all that loss growing up. Everyone wants to brush aside or deny the notion that there will always be pain for him: We saved him from foster care! We are so heroic! And so lucky that he doesn’t seem to have been damaged before we got him! He’s the happiest little guy they know!
Come on. That’s all BS. None of it is true even now, let alone will it be true as he grows older and more aware of his losses. But no one IRL will be real with us; they say I’m looking for trouble where there is none.
I’m human, so my first response to your posts and other anti-adoption posts is often to defensively say “well, she’s not talking about ME because:
I didn’t need adoption to make me a parent (already had three kids),
I didn’t adopt internationally or privately,
my son wasn’t put into foster care because of poverty, abuse, or neglect,
I don’t say evil/cheesy things like “forever family”,
Even though those are my first reactions, I keep reading, because I do want to hear what you and others who are critical of adoptive parents have to say. Frankly, I want a how-to manual. How to not lie and cover things up, yet protect him from information that will hurt–if it’s going to hurt forever, does he have to start today?
My interest is in making things as un-sucky as they can be for my son, and I need info from people who’ve been in his shoes to do that. So I’m listening.