As an adoptee how do you feel about the issue of abortion?
I’m pro-choice. I always have been. I think I would have been pro-choice no matter my adoption status.
How do you feel being adopted has affected your opinion on abortion?
It hasn’t.
Many adoptees have been asked "Aren't you glad you weren't aborted?", what is your response to that?
Yes! I had a physically/emotionally abusive adopted mother and my adopted father was MIA most of my childhood but I’m still happy I am alive. I only wish that I had been adopted into a stable, kind, supportive, non-abusive family. I wouldn’t have wanted to stay with my birth mother because she didn’t want me and that was her choice and she had a right to make that choice. I’ve found her since, when I was 45 years old, finally. She’s lovely and I really like her. We text all the time. I would hate to think of her burdened with a child she didn’t want and resented. She’s a nice lady she deserved happiness.
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?
Eh. People tend to think the adoptive family is always kind but that’s obviously not the case. There are as many bad adoptive parents as there are birth parents. But people like a feel-good story so I understand why that narrative gets told. It doesn’t affect me all that much.
Can you talk about a time when you felt pressured to have an opinion on abortion?
I was forced to have an abortion at 16 by my mother. I felt pressured to have a positive opinion about it because she wanted me to think it was the best thing to do. She manipulated me and told me we’d go broke, her insurance wouldn’t cover it and it was thousands of dollars she would have to pay that she didn’t have. She said even if I put the baby up for adoption she’d still have to pay all the hospital bills. So I had to agree to abort. I wouldn’t have gone along with it had I known she was lying. Even though abortion was wrong for me, it is up to every woman to decide that for herself. So I was always pro-choice, because being forced to have a baby you don’t want seems just as terrible to me as being forced to abort.
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