Why adoption isn’t the answer to abortion access, from a pro-choice adoptee

I’m all too familiar with being used as a pawn in the abortion debate.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the U.S. earlier this year, the chorus of anti-choicers insisting adoption is an answer to abortion access has grown louder.

But, as a transnational and transracial adoptee, I can say it has never been that simple.

People hold up signs saying, “We’ll adopt your baby,” tell me that as an adoptee I should just be grateful that I wasn’t aborted and offer adoption as an easily swapped alternative to abortion.

When I see anti-choicers who haven’t identified as adoptees speaking about adoption, using us in an attempt to control people’s bodies and take away their agency, it feels like my own agency is taken away; my experience is reduced to a talking point in a harmful agenda that I never agreed to be a part of.

Adoptee voices are constantly talked over in discussions like these. In the pro-choice vs. anti-choice debate, we are listed as stats and used as examples without ever really being listened to. It always seems people arrive to the conversation listening for the answers that align with their preconceived notions.

Adoptees can be pro-choice. In fact, I am. I’ve had anti-choicers assume this is a contradiction and tell me as much. However, as an adoptee who is attuned to my own experience and the experiences of other adoptees, I have a better understanding of why adoption is not a simple “solution” for abortion.

To push adoption as an alternative to abortion, you overlook that the adoption system, and the broader child welfare system is deeply flawed.

Child welfare in this country disproportionately affects Indigenous and Black families and props up, and further entrenches a history of white supremacy and colonialism. And as it relates to class, the system sees impoverished parents lose their children, rather than be afforded the means to raise them. The faults of the system overall are numerous.

Additionally, adoption is traumatic for an adoptee. While each person’s journey with adoption may be different, adoption always begins with one common event: the loss of the adoptee’s first parents. Regardless of the circumstances, being separated from your birth parents, especially as an infant or child, is a traumatic event that experts have found can cause developmental trauma.

If a child or infant’s stress response is repeatedly activated, it can interrupt brain development, researchers have found. This has effects that continue into adulthood and is just one form of trauma adoptees may experience.

Another hardship is the realization and understanding that you are adopted. Many adoptees grow up to one day realize that they were adopted often because their adoptive parents could not have a child biologically, which is a difficult truth to face.

For transnational and transracial adoptees, there are even more barriers to feeling a sense of belonging with their families. As a Chinese adoptee, growing up in so-called Canada with white parents offered some unique challenges to my sense of identity. I felt disconnected from both Canadian and Chinese culture, felt ashamed of my race and ethnicity, confusion over who I really was, and had parents who, through no fault of their own, couldn’t understand my experience.

This adoption relationship can be further complicated by the white saviour complex. When a white person adopts a racialized person, there can be an underlying element of this trope — a belief that they can and must save racialized people, have the skills to do so and implicitly, that racialized people do not.

This notion is extremely present in the way many white folks of the West view other regions of the world. Scholar Edward Said developed the concept orientalism, in which the “orient” — Asia, the Middle East and North Africa — and its citizens are viewed as in need of saving by the people of the West.

For racialized adoptees these issues — white saviour complex and orientalism — can be present in white parents. TSransnational and transracial adoption does not on its own absolve a white parent of racism or xenophobia. It takes work to unlearn those oppressive ideas and it’s entirely possible to have adopted a child from China and still harbour anti-Asian racism. Not only do many adoptees experience the trauma of abandonment and adoption, but also the alienation of growing up in a family that doesn’t reflect them.

Adoption is not the simple answer some make it out to be. No one should ever be forced to carry out a pregnancy and be separated from that child. Every effort should be made to support first parents in raising their child before adoption is even on the table. If a parent does choose adoption and a child can’t remain with their first parents, rehoming them with extended family or with parents of the same cultural background should be prioritized.

It is too harmful of a process to be a “solution” for abortion. It’s too harmful of a process to both first parents and their children to be as common of a phenomenon as it is. Children aren’t commodities. Adoptees do not need to “be grateful.” Within the pro-/anti-choice debate and without, it is time for adoptee voices to be listened to.

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