"You can always adopt if you change your mind about having kids," I've said

I don't say that, anymore

Photo by Sep on Unsplash

As someone who never wanted children, I was always more open to the idea of taking in an existing child in a way I never was to motherhood. Having my own baby and raising it felt like an unreasonable burden; caring for a child who had no one else, who desperately needed a family, seemed like a kindness. I’ve even said to fence-sitters, “Don’t have kids if you don’t desperately want them. If you change your mind later and it’s too late biologically, you can always adopt.”

Adoption, as I saw it, was a simple win-win: there are adults who want kids and kids who need parents—and adoption addresses both concerns.

I believed that without question until I came across an exchange on X that challenged my surface-level understanding of the complex world of adoption. One user, in response to an adoptive parent who’d asked whether adopted children would be better off dead than adopted, wrote, Those kids would not be dead if you hadn’t adopted them. The next vultures in line behind you would have bought them.

I was already familiar with the dead vs. adopted rhetoric by that time, but “vultures” and “bought” were new to someone like me who’d thought adoption was a loving act that saved children from languishing in orphanages or foster care. I’d soon learn—from adoptees and others in the adoption world—that there was a reason for my uncomplicated opinion of the industry: effective marketing.

Adoption Industry Language

“Adoption is framed as though it’s beautiful, it’s noble, it’s a good deed, it’s charitable,” adoptee Mila Konomos told me. “You’re ‘saving’ these children, you’re ‘giving them better lives.’ You’re ‘showing them real love.’ It’s all of this language. It really is propaganda.” A writer, performer, and activist, Mila was six months old when a White military couple adopted her from a Christian agency in Seoul, South Korea. Mila’s LinkdIn profile reads, Poet, writer, artist, and creator. Her profile on Instagram, where as @the_empress_han she offers support to adoptees while advocating to abolish adoption, reads, Adoption Survivor, Mail Order Daughter, Poet.

Mail Order Daughter

“Mail order daughter” would have been jarring had I not recently read the X thread. It’s rare to come across words and phrases like that in popular media—likely because they’re unpopular. A 2021 Wired magazine article about an adoptive mother battling online anti-adoption groups dismisses adoptees using such language (and in other ways inviting conflict with adopters) as trolls.

 “When we want to speak our language, it becomes this not appropriate thing,” adoptee Lina Vanegas, MSW, explained in our conversation over Zoom. Lina is a trained social worker specializing in adoption trauma, mental health, suicide, and transracial and transnational displacement who uses her Instagram account @LinaLeadsWithLove to advocate for adoptees. She was six weeks old when she was, as she would say, bought in Colombia by a White Jewish Midwestern couple who took her to America. “If I’m using adoption industry language, it’s going to be a much different conversation than if I use factual information,” Lina told me. “The language we use creates a foundation for our conversation. I refer to the people who procured me and purchased me as buyers because that is the relationship.”

Mila, on the other hand, who joked that her parents got her at a discount because adoption was less expensive in the ’70s, will identify as adopted because, she said, adoption is its own unique oppression. She also uses words like “adoption survivor” and “trafficking,” which has led some to accuse her of radicalizing the language. Her stance is that the existence of positive examples within a system (such as happy/successful adoptions) doesn't mean the system itself is good, and that the industry’s spin on adoption is reminiscent of George Orwell’s government brainwashing language in his novel 1984. “But when you pare it down,” she said, “it’s literally the buying and selling of children. Those are just the facts.”

Lina, to show me an example of the transactional nature of the industry, directed me to Everlasting Adoptions’ Programs & Fees web page (the site has since been revamped). There, available baby types priced in order from most to least expensive, adoption fee-wise, fell under program tiers: Exclusive Program (Full Caucasian baby only); Conventional Program (Choose any race but full Caucasian); and Full African American Program (adopt a full African American baby). Asked whether adoption fees could fairly be considered the same as a purchase price, Lina said, “My question is, did you exchange the money? If you say yes, you bought something.”

Screenshot of the page as it was the day I visited in March, 2024.

But “buy” and “sell” aren’t considered polite words to use when talking about adoption, and in fact the industry has an approved vocabulary. “Positive adoption language” was popularized in the 1980s to boost the industry, investigative journalist and author Kathryn Joyce writes in The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, and it’s still encouraged today. Many adoption agency websites feature a menu item for Positive Adoption Language; for example, Don’t say “natural mother”; do say “first mother.”

The intentional framing of language goes beyond the more official function of identifying involved parties in an industry-approved way. It’s also seemingly crafted to coax women to surrender their children, whether by exploiting their vulnerability, withholding critical information, or both.

For instance, as if to appease the guilt a mother might feel about parting with her child, Lifelong Adoptions’ online pamphlet tells expectant mothers, Nothing compares to the love, bravery, and selflessness of a mother who chooses to bless a waiting family with the gift of her child. Everlasting Adoptions’ online pamphlet appears to target a mother’s protective instinct with, A woman who chooses adoption may…go on living her own life knowing she put her child’s needs above her own. The same agency’s Considering Adoption? page invites expectant mothers to complete a nearly blank list numbered 1-12 of what they can provide as a parent (the first spot is pre-filled in with “love”), while a completed companion list identifies the many benefits adoptive parents can provide, including “stability” and “a two-parent household.” The implied challenge—Can you compete?—likely intensifies the overwhelming anxieties already plaguing someone considering adoption.

Renee Gelin, founder of the nonprofit family preservation organization Saving Our Sisters (SOS), was once one of those anxious people, newly pregnant and panicking. She already had one child, her business had recently collapsed, she was working ten-hour days with an hour commute each way, was about $130k in debt, and her private insurance company had said it wouldn’t cover her recommended C-section. “I cannot explain that crisis to people,” she said in our Zoom conversation. “I can’t even explain it to myself today. How did I mentally freak out, thinking to give my kid to strangers? It’s just mind boggling.”

No one at the agency tried to help her imagine how she might keep her child, but instead eased her forward with the adoption until 72 hours after she gave birth, when they brought her the papers to sign at the earliest legally-allowed opportunity. To go through with it, she had to disassociate, she said. “I was there, but if I try to remember actually signing my name on the lines, I can’t. I remember the sun was shining in my eyes and I was bawling my eyes out through the whole thing.”

At SOS, Renee said, she does exactly what adoption agencies do—takes information, listens to “the good, the bad, and the ugly”—but rather than hold that information against expectant mothers, she uses it to address their (mostly financial) needs. In fourteen years of operation, only eight of the mothers who went to SOS for support followed through with adoption.

Renee said that when she was pregnant, she simply reached for the wrong help. “I had no idea who I was tangling with. These people are not there to help you. These people are there to keep the lights on and collect a paycheck.”

“[M]any single mothers who ultimately made the choice to give their child up for adoption shared one feeling in common: pressure” from both social workers and adoption agencies, Daniella Cohensedgh writes in The Pressure for Birth Mothers Facing Poverty To Give Their Child Up for Adoption.

For Amy Seek, author of the memoir God and Jetfire: Confessions of a Birth Mother, the agency’s pressure was subtle. They gave her a workbook to fill out and asked her to create a budget. “I was just like, ‘My budget is I have no money. I can’t make an argument for keeping him.’ They put you in this position of justifying why you should keep your kid, and they normalize the idea that it would belong to somebody else.” Society’s embrace of adoption also persuaded her that it was a good idea, she said, and she emphasized that while she did consciously choose adoption, it was within a very specific context. “There's a whole culture that says adoption is fabulous. We do not share the trauma connected to adoption. You give them up, you make somebody else happy, and you move on with your life.”

“Moving on” is something Renee, Amy, and many other birth mothers weren’t told they would have such difficulty doing. In the vein of making adoption sound as appealing as possible to the parties considering it, industry language often skirts or fully ignores the topic of birth-mother grief. For example, Open Arms Adoption Agency’s 10 Virtues of Adoption has no sister list of 10 risks, where grief might appear. And Everlasting Adoptions’ list of “Adoption Myths” even identifies post-adoption depression as a myth, saying, At first, your feelings about the adoption of your child may be painful. However, grieving is … a good sign of emotional health. The language simultaneously paints a mother’s sadness as evidence of her superior character and contradicts available research into birth-mother grief. A 1978-2007 series of studies compiled by the federal nonprofit adoption support organization Origins Canada found that ~50 percent mothers who surrender their children to adoption experience grief reactions “unique to the relinquishing mother” that “persist and often lead to chronic, unresolved grief” that, for many of the surveyed women, increased over time.

Video testimonials on the Concerned United Birth Parents (CUBP) Instagram account give a current face to the studies’ numbers. Managed by Amy Seek, the page provides a space for regretful birth mothers to share what they wish they’d have been told by industry professionals before they decided to surrender their children. In her own testimonial, Amy says informed consent would have meant knowing that in the years after surrendering her son she would try in vain to build a life that was full enough and successful enough to make having given him up make sense. “It could not be better with my adoption, and I still want to kill myself half of the time,” she told me.

Amy’s adoption story is unique because of its seeming perfection: it’s an open adoption; she loves her son’s adoptive family; and the adoptive parents have never refused contact between Amy and her son. (Renee, whose open adoption abruptly closed at the direction of the adoptive parents when her son was nineteen months old, is—like many others sharing the experience—not so fortunate.) That it appears idyllic from the outside is the core of Amy’s warning: even the “perfect” adoption can cause lasting trauma. When I asked whether she’d truly considered suicide, Amy said she doesn’t think she’s someone who would do it—she loves her family—but she added that when she turned 35, she celebrated the fact that she was almost halfway through her life. “It’s just like, it’s not going to be forever. I don’t have to live forever.”

That the adoption appears idyllic from the outside is the core of Amy’s warning: even the “perfect” adoption can cause lasting trauma.

Renee said she’d contemplated suicide more than once before creating Saving Our Sisters. And Lina’s mother, whose life Lina said “was not better” for having lost Lina to adoption, died by suicide.

Early data from the Preliminary Exploration into Adoption Reunions Survey, conducted by Lynn Roche Zubov, PhD, Professor of Special Education at Winston Salem University, shows birth mothers are at increased risk. “I have data that suggests 3.59% of first mothers die by suicide,” Dr. Zubov told me in a private Facebook message. “Which makes them over 500 times more likely to die by suicide than women who did not lose their child to adoption.”

Adoptees are also overrepresented in this area. Everlasting Adoptions’ “Common Adoption Myths” claims it’s a myth that adopted children suffer psychological problems, but a 2013 Pediatrics journal study found that reported suicide attempts were ∼4 times greater in adoptees than in non-adoptees. Additional research published in Current Directions in Psychological Science shows mother-child separation early in a child’s life “can result in a series of traumatic emotional reactions…that may contribute to a complex, changing pattern of vulnerability over the life span.”

Would it be different for us?

It’s tempting for me to rationalize that the negative effects of adoption wouldn’t apply to us or to our adopted children if my husband ever decided he desperately wanted to experience parenthood. I’ll admit that, until recently, I could read an adoption horror story like Amy’s or Renee’s and think, “It would be different for us. We’d make sure the child was an orphan.” But what is an orphan? The dictionary definition is “a child whose parents are dead”; however, Joyce writes in The Child Catchers that estimates of numbers of orphans outside of America are often exaggerated and include “vulnerable” children who still have a living parent, or who have lost both parents but still live with family. The numbers are similarly exaggerated within the US. The Christian website Backyard Orphans, which proclaims “The Church is Mandated to Care for the Orphan,” explains that “orphan” no longer applies only to a child with no living family but is “much more vast,” now including those in foster care and those who have one parent.

*Diana, who adopted her child from a Russian orphanage, told me, “Technically adoption should be for orphaned children, and we can confidently say that most of our children aren’t orphans, and most of our children’s files contain lies.”

Lina said that where she was adopted, some orphanages would prey on vulnerable women by offering to care for mothers’ children while the mothers found work, only to sell the children as “orphans” before the mothers returned to collect them. Lina’s been told too many lies about her adoption to know the precise details of the transaction, but she does know she wasn’t an orphan. At 38 she reconnected with her Colombian family, “family that wanted me,” she said, over Skype.

Mila wasn’t an orphan, either. Her fabricated file said she was abandoned in a Korean clinic at five days old; the truth was that her Korean parents—who’d met in middle school and had later fallen in love—had very much wanted her, but a minor crime had sent Mila’s father to prison a month before she was born, leaving his wife alone with a baby in a country where women had few rights or opportunities. “I found out that I was in the hospital with my Omma [mother] for about five days. I had to be born by C-section, and she nursed me and took care of me for that first week,” Mila said. “Then my Imo [aunt] took me forcibly from her and brought me to this Christian agency.” Mila said she thinks her aunt, who so regrets what she did that she can barely look Mila in the face, was doing what she believed she had to do to save Mila and her mother.

“It’s a matter of knowing that you can swoop in, and instead of offering solutions you can just abscond with [people’s] kids and sell them to people like me, who are willing to participate,” Diana told me. She said that as much as she benefited from it—she adores her daughter and can’t imagine life without her—she regrets having participated in a system she calls oppressive, anti-feminist, and anti-family. At the time, however, she very much wanted to be a parent, and she was able to put aside her hesitation because, she said, “I wanted what I wanted.”

“Dear adopters,” Mila recites in Adoption Lie #2: God’s Plan, an episode of her podcast Everything You Think You Knew about Adoption Is a Lie, “my birth is not your ‘gift.’ My pain is not for your gain. …Please do not refer to my traumatic birth and forced separation from my mother as a gift to you from your god. I was not born for you. My mother did not give birth for you.”

*Name changed by request.

Read more from the interviews that informed this story

Mila Konomos

Lina Vanegas

Renee Gelin

Amy Seek

Diana

Originally appeared in the Medium publication Fourth Wave.