The Illusion of Adoption is Over

When people ask me about adoption, I tell them the truth. The best conversations start with what they know and believe about adoption. These days, people bring up the abandonment and loss issues, the human rights violations, or the moral dilemmas of how children are being taken from their parents and given to others willing to pay for them. Many others also ask me what the solution is for children in need and for people who want to raise a family. Let’s first understand what the word “adoption” means as we believe it to be today. As an adoption trauma therapist and educator I help people arrive at this realization about adoption. My trainings and presentations address three main issues aimed at getting to the truth.

Deprogramming

For years, I’ve written about connecting the right dots in framing our experiences and the issues common among those impacted by the adoption industry. At this point, there’s no denying an industry exists that drives the process of adoption. Defined as “the act or fact of legally taking another’s child and bring it up as one’s own”—Oxford Languages, adoption has been readily accepted as such by people around the world for generations. I admit I didn’t question it until a few colleagues presented a different definition. Thanks to Arun Dohle, executive director of Against Child Trafficking, and Janine Myung Ja and Jenette Vance, aka The Vance Twins, who have authored and curated books, most notably Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists, and Adoption: What You Should Know, I now ask people what does “legally taking” mean? That’s when the topic of the industry comes up in the conversation. The issues of supply and demand, costs, policies that legalize the practices of taking children from their parents and families then monopolize our minds for the next hour. By the end, we’re left scratching our heads—“are we even talking about adoption anymore?” This is how we deprogram ourselves from the industry’s propaganda. Coming to the realization that we have effectively been brainwashed all the while industry leaders maintain and profit from a child supply market. The question remains, where are these children coming from? And perhaps more accurately, how are they being sourced?

A key part of the deprogramming process is learning of how the industry has conflated the act of taking children (in questionably criminal ways) and calling it a child welfare solution. Social justice advocates have been saying adoption is “legalized child trafficking.” Today, there are a number of investigations, documentaries such as One Child Nation and Geographies of Kinship, along with testimonies of victims that are providing such evidence of children (and their mothers) being trafficked through adoption (TTA). How can this be considered an acceptable child welfare solution? It presents a conundrum, a moral dilemma that needs immediate rectification and redress. To start, trafficking mothers and their children needs to stop. Their rights must be protected. Child trafficking is not a child welfare solution.

Victimization

The trauma of adoption has become widely understood as a traumatic loss. The mental health field has been on a trauma-informed movement for more than a decade thanks to the ACES study in 1997 and top professionals like Nadine Burke Harris, Bessel van der Kolk, and Gabor Matè, among others. Worth noting are Robyn Gobbel and Paul Sunderland, who have helped bring attention to the layers of attachment trauma experienced in adoption. With the continuous efforts from adoption trauma survivors, people more readily acknowledge the trauma of relinquishment, abandonment, being “given up for adoption.” Mental health professionals are now more accepting of Complex PTSD (C-PTSD). However, victims of the industry still push for the truth of what has happened to them. What they are finding goes beyond the concerns of attachment trauma and being wrongfully pathologized.

The truth is that the trauma comes from being victimized, dehumanized, and commodified by this industry. The trauma is intergenerational, systemic, and globalized. From a neurodevelopmental perspective, victims aren’t born with a pre-trauma state they can return to. The industry targets, recruits, and victimizes women and mothers. They are coerced, stigmatized, and exploited. In essence they are trafficked. The violence and abuse (moral or otherwise) in such innocuous statements as “adoption is an option” causes stress and trauma that are passed along during pregnancy, at the critical stages of the child’s brain development. Such statements and practices of grooming and brainwashing have been in place for centuries. Women are born into and now grow up in this globalized “culture of coercion.” Where can they turn to if the whole world is in on this scheme? One organization they can turn to is Saving Our Sisters  where preserving families and educating women is their mission.

Restoration

Restoration not reunification. Preservation not separation. As I have learned from anti-trafficking organizations, restoration is their goal. A wraparound approach is implemented when victims are identified and their traffickers are brought to justice. Services, resources, and systems of care are provided to restore the victim back to their life before they were trafficked. Anti-trafficking professionals know that the majority of victims don’t realize what happened to them until it’s been identified as trafficking. In fact, many victims want to remain with their traffickers, especially when they are well cared for. Because we understand trafficking as a known crime, family, friends, and loved ones of the victims are desperate to find them. This is a process of restoration and not reunification. However, the “adoption” industry has so effectively blurred and conflated these issues, that many reunifications from adoptions fail. It’s been debated whether reunification should happen at all. Victims of the adoption industry share the desire to stay with the people who bought them, which some have referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. Those who express gratitude for “saving them” demonstrate the power of the propaganda and brainwashing.

As adoptees, aka victims and commodities, seeking the truth of what has happened to us must be the first step. Identifying the problem is necessary in deprogramming ourselves from the industry’s propaganda. Having gone through this process myself, I no longer accept this “illusion of adoption.” It’s time that we all see the industry which has built a multibillion-dollar trafficking scheme. What is often lost and rarely mentioned in such conversations is the fact that this industry has been responsible for thousands—if not tens of thousands—of deaths, suicides, and murders of mothers and their children. The industry has left a legacy of genocide and war crimes. These are crimes against humanity that go far beyond the issues of loss, abandonment, and relinquishment. We must not allow this legacy to continue. War is war. Death is death. Crime is not care. Trafficking is not welfare. This “illusion of adoption” is over.