Conflict in adoption serves no one. Not the adoptive parents, not the first parents, and certainly not the adoptee. Adoption can pit people against each other, create winners and losers, and present impossible-to-span rifts.
Who suffers most? The adoptee is the rope in any deliberate or accidental tug of war.
Tony Hynes, an interracial adoptee, was at the center of a case that reached the US Supreme Court in the 1990s. While his case was knocked down to a lower court, Tony Hynes’ adoption ended up in a rare arrangement – joint custody between his Black birth grandmother and his two white adoptive moms.
I felt uncomfortability around the idea of me and who I belong to most, who I could be most loyal to.
I discovered a 1 star review of Adoption: The Long View on a popular podcast platform. It was left the same day as Dominic’s funeral (a date which has nothing to do with this and yet everything to do with everything).
Doesn’t click I don’t know what it is, but this podcast does not click for me. As someone hoping to become a parent through adoption, I find the tone of this podcast to be…honestly, depressing and discouraging. Somehow the podcasts make me feel like I’m a bad person for wanting to adopt. Adoptive parents are selfish, they cause trauma. I am eager to grow my family through adoption, and I’m eager to learn how to do it the right way, but it’s hard being made to feel like a villain for everything I’m going through to try to give a loving home to a child who needs one.
The Wait for a baby is such an adoption roller coaster. It can rapidly alternate between the highs of hope and the lows of despair. Statistics range from at least 40 and as many as 100 families waiting for every newborn placed for adoption. And don’t expect the recent US Supreme Court decision to change the availability of infants dramatically.*
Clearly, the odds are not in everyone’s favor. At least some of the people hoping to adopt a newborn will just not be able to. That’s a hard truth. What happens if and when you stop waiting to adopt? How do you get off the adoption roller coaster?
* According to researcher and sociologist Gretchen Sisson, only 9% of women denied a legal abortion will choose adoption for their baby; the rest will choose to parent. Therefore, the bulk of the increase of children available for adoption will likely be through the foster care system, for cases in which parenting a child they knew they weren’t prepared to parent becomes overwhelming or undoable.
