It wouldn’t take very long, if you immersed yourself in the adoption community, to recognize the complexities involved.
If you dared to dig further, you might even find yourself wishing you hadn’t.
While adoption is beautiful, it is also extremely complex. No other word sums it up better.
Adoption brings together people who, in most cases, have never met before. It is an exchange of emotion, relationships, and life experiences, all with the hope of forming a family. It is deeply personal, and we cannot predict how each person’s mental health will be affected.
How could we?
Adoption places people into an experience they have never navigated before and leaves them to integrate it into their everyday lives. It takes time, and often many different life circumstances, before we can understand how each person will work through that complexity.
Society tends to portray adoption as a win-win exchange of love. The stereotypical picture is of a happy, well-off couple who cannot conceive, a desolate woman experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, and a helpless, adorable child who is portrayed as profoundly lucky that another couple wants to love and care for them.
But the reality is much more complicated. The child had no say in the situation and, in many ways, is the one whose thoughts and feelings are least considered.
If we look at adoption through the lens of each person individually, we see three very different stories and perspectives.
The adoptive parents
There is the adopting couple or individual who wants to bring a child into their lives, love them, grow with them, and finally experience the parenthood they have long hoped for.
They cannot bring this child into their world biologically. Yet, truth be told, as uncomfortable as it is to say, they can, in a sense, purchase one in much the same way they would purchase a home or a car.
Right here is where the problem starts. Children are not commodities like homes and cars. Yet, if we are being completely honest, money changes hands because that is how the adoption industry facilitates the experience.
How could some sense of entitlement not arise when you are paying for an experience? How could we not consider how this transaction affects the mental health of everyone involved?
Yet we blame the couple. They are sometimes called baby snatchers. They may already be dealing with the grief of infertility, and now they are also facing the difficult reality of the situation they have entered.
On one hand, they are happy to become a family and have a child to love. After all, aren’t they also helping a child and a birth mom in need?
On the other hand, they see how this experience affects everyone else. They may feel the grief of knowing that while they hold this baby in their arms, another woman’s arms are empty. To make matters even more complicated, they now have to include this woman in their lives. They know it is best for the child, but it can also challenge their sense of security and identity as parents.
How they cope with that is greatly influenced by the type of support and care they receive.
We send the happy adoptive couple on their way to navigate these uncharted waters and tell them how important it is to maintain relationships with the birth family.
If we believe it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it takes a country to raise an adoptee. An awake, unbiased, and unprejudiced country.
The birth mother
Then we have the birth mom. Through her lens, we see a woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and solely responsible for deciding how that pregnancy will continue. She faces three options: abortion, parenting, or adoption. There is a time limit, and if she chooses parenting or adoption, she knows she needs to have a plan in place by the time the baby is born.
Usually, we plan to have children. We have time to prepare and do the things necessary to provide a stable and healthy life. We may have support systems to help us through it.
Life doesn’t always follow the path we usually expect.
Many women make a lifelong decision during a difficult season in their lives, choosing what they believe is the best option under the circumstances. We call this decision placing a child for adoption.
The birth mom is left to live out a paradox. On one hand, her child is alive, so her grief is often misunderstood or dismissed. On the other hand, she has to find her place in life again after giving birth, seeing, holding, and feeding an extension of herself: her child.
She has to move forward while watching another family experience the joy of that child’s first steps.
Every milestone becomes a secondhand experience. Over and over again, in one way or another, she has to practice the fine art of giving her child up again and again.
Each day, she may have to fight the inner voices that overwhelm her with shame. Then she has to face society, family, and their opinions about what took place. She may look back and wonder, What if? I could have, should have, or would have done this or that.
The cycle continues. It affects how she sees her own self-worth, and that can affect her life personally and professionally. Too often, the birth mom is left with well-wishes to move on and is expected to manage her grief alone.
How she copes with that is greatly influenced by the type of support and care she receives.
The adoptee
Now comes the most excruciatingly difficult lens to look through: the eyes of the child.
The heartbreaking reality is far from the picture of an adorable, lucky child who was chosen or waited for.
The reality is that they were chosen FOR.
The child had NO say, NO choice, and NO control over anything.
As a birth mom, it breaks my heart to know that the reality of my own situation was that I had no say, no choice, and no control. When I brought my child into the world and placed him for adoption, I transferred that experience of powerlessness to him.
Today, thankfully, I can assure my adult son of my undying love and explain the circumstances I was facing. He, too, can understand that there was nothing else I could do within those circumstances.
Yet, regardless, he still has to live with them.
The feelings that come with this experience can be deeply painful. He has to navigate loyalty to the adoptive couple who are his mom and dad, while also making sense of his beginnings, his identity, and where he belongs. He has to find a way to square all of this in his head and understand his place in the world.
How that works itself out is also influenced by the type of care and support received along the journey.
So many adoptees are labeled with ADHD and other diagnoses when perhaps they have questions that need answers or layers of their experience that need healing. As they grow older and become curious, they may reach out to understand their heritage. Instead of listening, we sometimes become fearful, avoid the conversation, or focus on a diagnosis while ignoring their need to know where they came from.
Research has connected adoption experiences with challenges that can include depression, anxiety, grief, and PTSD. These effects can touch all members of the adoption triad.
Time goes on, and the people brought together through adoption must learn how to communicate with one another, establish personal boundaries, and work through their own confusion and grief.
So many voices are sharing the results of this antiquated system. Yet post-adoption care continues to be neglected.
And we wonder why mental health issues are increasing and running rampant!
Isn’t it time to reexamine the structure after all these years and make the necessary repairs?
Adoption is a mental health crisis right now, and it will continue to wreak havoc until we do something about it.
How much better would it be if adoption were examined in today’s light, with today’s wisdom and understanding?
How much better would it be if we established programs to meet the individual needs of every member of the triad? If we listened to what is working and what isn’t? If we recognized that the journey does not end when an adoption is finalized?
How much better would it be if we brought adoption out of the Dark Ages and into the light of the 21st century?