As an adoptee how do you feel about the issue of abortion?
I am very much pro-choice.
How do you feel being adopted has affected your opinion on abortion?
I grew up never really caring about my adoption, and I never wanted kids from an early age myself, even though everyone told me I would change my mind and I was always pro-choice.
Many adoptees have been asked "Aren't you glad you weren't aborted?", what is your response to that?
I am an atheist and have a very logical thought process. My opinion is that if I was aborted, I wouldn’t have existed, so it wouldn’t have made any difference.
A bit bleak, but I have struggled with mental health problems all my life and spent many years dealing with suicidal ideation. Part of me wishes I had been aborted, not so much because I want to be dead, but I would never have existed in the first place.
My less logical partner finds this thought process a bit upsetting because she wouldn’t have met me, but she can’t quite grasp that I wouldn’t have existed, so she wouldn’t know any differently.
Have you ever felt like your experience of being an adoptee has been misrepresented or used to advance a certain rhetoric? How does this make you feel?
Yes/No – I grew up not caring about my adoption, but it is only in the past year or two that I have become aware of how my adoption is likely linked to my mental health problems.
I don’t think it was deliberately manipulative, but I think I was conditioned from an early age to think adoption is good. My adoptive parents told me about my adoption at a young age and always said I could look for my mother if I wanted, but my adoptive mother was always clearly visibly upset at the thought of this, so I think it conditioned me to never want to find my biological parents. It is only recently that I have become more aware of the problems associated with adoption. So yeah, I was a compliant child who went along with the rhetoric of adoption being good. I think most people have been conditioned to think adoption is wonderful, so they are a bit confused as to why I now have problems with it, especially as I had a “good” adoption with great adoptive parents.
Can you talk about a time when you felt pressured to have an opinion on abortion?
No not really. It has always been more people pressuring me into having children. I think, as a man, I am not always that vocal about my willingness to abort a child, as I realise it is not my choice. I would never pressure a partner into an abortion if she wanted to keep a child (thankfully, that situation has never happened).
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