“Having a baby and can’t take care of it? Don’t worry! Put your baby up for adoption today! The simple solution to not being able to care for a child, but still conform to society norms and not commit murder!”
That’s what I imagine an infomercial for adoption would sound like. In today’s society, it seems that all the strides that women have made for our reproductive rights – with cases such as Roe v. Wade – are being stripped away from us and everyone’s favorite solution to the dawn of strict abortion laws is the “miracle” of adoption. However when expressing my personal experiences as someone who was adopted, I supposedly don’t know best.
As adoptees, our voices are being silenced. After birth (and even in adulthood), we are viewed as “property” – something that can be bought and sold. Our voices don’t matter, because even at birth we didn’t have a voice to choose to stay with our biological families, being aborted, or being adopted.
Many of us adoptees are ashamed and afraid to speak up about how we feel towards adoption, but I’m tired of being silenced. Every day when I talk about why I’m pro-choice, it’s thrown back in my face that I shouldn’t feel the way I do and that I should be grateful to be adopted. Should I though- when as a young child I was already exhibiting severe symptoms of depression and anxiety? When at a young age I already had suicidal tendencies, knowing I didn’t want to be alive, but being too young to understand what that meant?
Even as an adult and having met my birth family, I still grieve everyday over the loss of the life and the heritage that I should have had and dealing with the guilt for “betraying” my adopted family with the love I have for my birth family. Adoption is not something that I want any child to go through, and having young friends who are having children that think the solution to not wanting it is adoption makes my stomach churn.
Living in a red state where pro-lifers stand outside the Planned Parenthood I drive through every day promoting adoption makes my blood boil. When it comes to adoption, the number one voice that should matter and drive the decisions is the adoptees, but how can we have one when even our birth certificates spout lies of who our “parents” are? How can we have a voice when our birth families are sealed behind the states and the adoption agencies who hide them from us?
Adoption is not the answer to an unwanted child, it’s making the best of a shitty situation when society is shouting in your face that abortion is murder. Abortion isn’t murder, it’s protecting a mother from the indescribable pain of having her baby taken from her arms to possibly never be seen again, and protecting an unborn fetus from living a life of feeling unwanted, unloved, guilty, lonely, and confused. Adoption isn’t the cure, it’s the curse.
Signed,
The Unwanted Child
