As an adoptee how do you feel about the issue of abortion?
I feel outrage that adoption is believed to be an alternative for abortion. Adoption is a parenting decision, while abortion is a health decision. I feel deep concern for Justice Barrett's children, as during the arguments for the Dobbs decision, she expressed the belief that (to paraphrase) "adoption absolves the responsibilities of parenting for the mother." This is simply not true. Abortion ends parenting responsibility. Adoption reduces it. The idea that adoption ends parental responsibility is rooted in closed adoption, which is not healthy for the child, and I worry for her adopted children that that is her attitude, as I worry for the children of many who share that belief.
How do you feel being adopted has affected your opinion on abortion?
It has influenced my opinion to the greatest degree. While I have been adopted my entire life, I would consider my consciousness of my identity as an adoptee to have begun at 18, when I entered reunion. While I was pro-choice before reunion, that was more of a libertarian "it's not my problem" opinion, whereas my experiences since reunion have made me adamantly pro-choice.
Many adoptees have been asked "Aren't you glad you weren't aborted?", what is your response to that?
I should have been aborted. I'm happy to be here, but the right choice for my biological mother would have been to abort me. Placing me for adoption had a huge negative impact on her, and led to her making a lot of other choices that have made her life more difficult. She would not agree with me, for the record. But that is my opinion.
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. It is infuriating, because it often advances the viewpoint of what I would call the "missionary adoptive parent," the parent who adopts because he or she feels they are doing a great thing for an underprivileged child. By adopting, that parent feels that he or she is magically solving all the problems of the child. It is utter ignorance of the experience of adoptees, and it is sickening. We are not pawns of a belief. We are people who have experienced a specific trauma that there is not enough representation of in the zeitgeist, and so we are not recognized.
Can you talk about a time when you felt pressured to have an opinion on abortion?
I've always been rather opinionated myself, so no.
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