#adoptee

going to ruffle a few feathers with this one

"You're adopted" jokes are harmful. Insisting adoption is always a good thing/nice and rosy is harmful. Using words like "fake" and "real" family is harmful. We are people with complex lives and most, if not all of us, develop some kind of trauma due to being adopted (whether it worked out for us or not).

I understand Victor the way I understand my own birth mother. With both empathy and some degree of hatred. The Creature didn't choose to be born, neither did I. We had life forced upon us when, from the start, we were unwanted. And like my adoptive parents, Victor didn't understand what came after. Yes, my adoptive parents were adopting a 'baby' but that baby would grow up to be her own person, just as The Creature would grow and do the same. I see myself in every aspect of this story and it's so incredibly validating.

You don’t have to be grateful for someone adopting you, or for “GIVING YOU A BETTER LIFE”. You can just exist like anyone else and process your traumas, if you have any, like anyone else. You don’t have to do any of that if you don’t want to.

Adoption is a HUGE life-altering thing for both the new parent(s) AND the child being adopted. But people seem to only be talking about the adults involved and not the children.

The children who are being stripped away from everything they’ve ever known and being placed with strangers. And I’m not even going to get into what that involves for older kids right now, I’m only speaking about babies.

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For the first 6 months of their lives babies fully believe that they are an extension of their mother. Their mother walking out of the room can feel like the equivalent of a severed limb.

But people will still prefer for a baby to be born and figuratively amputated, rather than have an unwillingly pregnant person remove a non-sentient clump of cells from their bodies?

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Adoption is a long, hard, and painful process for everybody involved. The newborn can be removed from their bio-parent’s custody before the umbilical cord is even clipped, but still not be in permanent custody of their new parents until they are a year old.

Imagine spending the first year of your life being passed around different strangers houses. How difficult would it be to form attachments? How would that affect learning how to speak? How to walk?

How would you be able to learn the basics of infant and toddler-hood, such as “mama” and “dada” if you don’t even have one? A baby’s entire sense of self is tied to their parents, does this meant that a baby with no parents doesn’t even have that?

But of course, that is still better than removing a clump of non-sentient cells from a person’s body, right?

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No matter how or when it happens, adoption is a TRAUMA, not an answer. It is a wonderful thing for many children, who need better support than they have been dealt from their biological families. But bringing a child into the world for the soul purpose of placing them into foster care is cruel.

Adoption does not exist to ease your religious guilt against abortion.

Adoption does not exist to place a band-aid over another person’s infertility trauma.

Adoption does NOT exist to heal adults.

Adoption is for the CHILDREN.

The children who need help. The children who need a safe home to grow. The children who need THEIR trauma to be top priority. Not yours.

People need to stop using adoption as an alternative to abortion. Adoption involves real living children, not the non-sentient clump of cells that are removed during abortion.