What is adoption really like? November is Adoption awareness month, here’s my contribution.

“Meena disappeared so I asked about her. My mother said she was sent back…for a second time.”

We often only hear about adoption from a society who romanticizes it, as they pat the adoptive parent on the back for being saints and pity adoptees - telling us how lucky we are that someone would rescue the “unwanted”; a similar response I receive as a married disabled person. This not so subtle message was drilled into me from young: “I should only be grateful for the sacrifice it took to get me”. This, in my little abandoned mind, says I’m a burden who needs to prove I’m not a mistake. 

This message throughout my life helped mold my self-perception.

Much of my time is taken up by disabled advocacy, but if I had more time, I’d like to talk about adoption more. What I realized is no one really asks us adoptees about the experience. We’re “saved” and that’s the end of it, when there’s so much more complexity to the story. 

I’m a Korean American adoptee. So is my husband. In this photo, I’m having my very first birthday party ever. I’m 5 years old, adopted at 4 (right). Next to me is one of the first friends I made who was also a Korean Adoptee (left). Her name was Meena. She was my first and last connection to Korea as a child new to America, and I wouldn’t get to revisit my culture until the freedom of college spread my wings. 

I remember Meena well. Her adoptive parents adopting her is what inspired my parents to adopt. My parents birthed 3 boys but mom wanted a daughter. Also, as I was told much later, my parent’s marriage was struggling and, like many parents (adoption or birth), they thought having another child could save their marriage. Talk about pressure.

One day, Meena disappeared so I asked about her. My mother said she was sent back. This was her second family. “What?! To where? How? Am I next?” were my initial thoughts.

In this post, I want to address a common flippant cure-all solution I hear: “Just adopt it out”. This shows how little people understand the adoptee experience. But I’m here to say, adoption is not a solution.

“adoption is not a solution yet often a window to sociopolitical issues of a society that causes mass abandonment.”

This is not a pro-choice, pro-life discussion so, please, NO fights or attacks. Instead, let’s listen and absorb. My goal in most topics is to have understanding for both sides and discuss the gray. I understand each side genuinely feels they’re doing the right thing, so this post isn’t about convincing, it’s meant to be a nuanced conversation, sharing a perspective you may not be aware of, something society can no longer do as everything has to be polarized. 

“Just adopt it out” as a solution to anti-abortion isn’t as easy as it seems and not without casualties, so this ignorant statement upsets me. 

I support adoption, but adoption is not a solution yet often a window to sociopolitical issues of a society that causes mass abandonment. Adoption is also a major business. 

For example, I’m Korean. Post Korean War, Korea was in deep poverty (please, remember, all wars only affect the innocent) so exporting their own children is thought to be one of the initial reasons for the adoption boom—helping the impoverished economy to become what it is today; a country now rivaling in technology and GDP. 

But with every venture, there is a dark side. Korea boomed in exporting their children, many of them mixed babies bred by western military who came and left, something (western) military has done throughout history as they went around colonizing and raging wars—many times getting locals pregnant, sometimes through rape. Even in the heroic version of war there’s a mix of ill actors who do as they please, as war has no rules or accountability on the field. 

Like many ethnocentric regions, “pure blood” (no such thing actually exists) was and still is a thing revered in Korea, so it was considered shameful to be mixed. The best way not to see this is to export. 

Koreans don’t adopt or care for their own abandoned children, as they see their “own blood” as the only acceptable form of family. This antiquated thinking is slightly changing, and Korea is trying to encourage domestic adoptions, while lessening the availability for international adoption business, but it’s still rare for Koreans to adopt their own.

Then there’s other stigmas, like being a single mom. Since the 1950s, 80-90% of children born to Korean single moms were unnecessarily taken to orphanages or abandoned because of (religious-bred) stigmas. 

These post Korean War orphans, like me, are now adults, and we’ve learned the dark and corrupt side of the adoption system. We found no adequate record system was kept. We found babies and names were switched in files. We found we were lied to by the system and the government. We found it was a thing to take your family’s child and drop it off or abandon them without the mom’s knowledge, because they were single, mixed race or wanted to make money in the adoption boom. Sometimes the mother’s stolen child was told they died at birth. 

Can you imagine learning you were wanted but taken or your forced abandonment was for profit while you were shipped primarily to America and western countries? 

In many countries where adoption is high, trafficking children is a thing. In any supply and demand, there’s exploiters waiting in the shadows. The West was hot for adoption, unknowingly causing a demand in Korea which meant babies and children were sometimes stolen to feed the system. 

Besides a potentially systemically corrupt system, there is the trauma that’s felt as an orphan with no chaperone. My papers said I was abandoned at birth. I was born with a cleft palate, and in a 3 month span post birth, I had many diseases including a deadly kidney disease. I was alone for all of this. My mother left before naming me. The nurses gave me my name, but who knows because we can’t trust records.

It’s also common for abuse to hover in orphanages and foster homes. This makes sense as kids are alone. Sexual abuse is actually very common for orphans, adoptees and foster children. I can’t tell you how many Korean adoptees I know who were sexually abused by their adoptive or foster parent. It’s a real thing. For me, there’s no way to know what happened in my first 4 years of life with no advocate, but I always wonder what I saw and if anything bad happened to me. I came to America with many boils from burns on my body, so who knows.

In California, there was the American Turpin family case where the parents abused, chained and malnourished 13 of their children (not adopted). The state took these abused children and placed them into foster care and some of the sisters were sexually abused by their foster parents. It’s common for abused children to be placed in foster homes who are then abused by them. Then they’re taken out and placed into another home who abuses them too, causing a cycle of never ending horror. 

Being in the system often involves exploitation and neglect, a contributor to why suicide rates among adoptees is FOUR TIMES higher than non adoptees.

Of course even as non adoptees, we can experience abuse, but it’s different when you’re an adoptee because you’re haunted with the fairytale that things could’ve been different.

“I knew I was adopted, I was curious of a mother I never met, but it’s only as an adult my understanding as an adoptee evolved, becoming more complex.”

Then, there’s all the trauma you face because you were abandoned. Just the knowledge someone gave you up (whether they didn’t want you or they couldn’t have you) can be enough contemplation for a lifetime. 

Even in the most ideal adoption circumstance with good loving parents, the experience of being an adoptee can be traumatic with many facing depression, suicide, abandonment issues with lifelong fears of rejection, and confusing and painful identity issues. 

Compared to many, I’m probably considered well-adjusted as an adoptee, but I too sometimes struggle as an adult—realizing the feelings I felt as a child but had no language for. I knew I was adopted, I was curious of a mother I never met, but it’s only as an adult my thinking as an adoptee evolved, becoming more complex.

Perhaps, those struggling to reconcile a past of abandonment, loneliness, lack of love, complex identity issues or families and systems who sexually or physically abused them—turn to negative acts like, addiction, crime, anger, drugs or prostitution to deal with their turmoil.

And then society, the same society who was pro-life BEFORE you breathed the earth’s air into your lungs, calls you a criminal, worthless, thug, loser, druggie, heathen, a burden and drain on the system who should be in jail; a highly profitable corporatized system (and financial drain on taxpayers) that exploits relics of trauma and abuse. This doesn’t excuse those who commit crimes, but we should understand sometimes it’s a symptom of society.

Many orphans age out of the system at 18 and are forced onto the streets because most people want babies. I was adopted at four, and even this was considered old - lowering my chances of getting a family.

The number of children in the U.S. foster care system is around 443,000. Of these are 123,000 children waiting to be adopted. When you think orphans, you think babies and infants, but in the U.S. over 20,000 children age out of the foster care system and onto the streets every year. So I wonder, with 1 million abortions in the U.S. a year—if we can’t handle our current numbers, how do we support 1 million more kids dropped into the system; a system that the pro-life side typically doesn’t support benefits for?

As a Catholic nun famously said about the anti abortion stance and her party, why do we quickly crush this pro life sentiment as soon as that baby enters this world? And those trying to force these personal decisions to be government mandate based, most likely aren’t adopting themselves.

I don’t think anyone likes abortion, it’s a very difficult and personal choice, but I support both  sides in the decisions they make for THEIR body. But I have to wonder how this pro-life sentiment switches; preferring out of sight, out of mind once the baby is out of the womb. It’s not pro-life to say, “just drop the child off” with no support, security, love or protection. 

When my adopted friend, Meena, was sent back at 5 years old, this really affected me. My parents said her adoptive parents couldn’t handle her. Often, I heard from my own parents that I was trouble. I already knew I wasn’t wanted at birth, so what would be my fate now?

In hindsight, I was a child who experienced significant trauma with no sense of family, so of course, I needed a little extra, but was actually no naughtier than typical toddlers testing their limits. But in a marriage that is struggling, it’s a lot and much blame can unintentionally be placed on the child. 

So what am I trying to say? Am I saying don’t adopt? No. I support adoption, but it is not a solution. Adoption can be a very complicated, traumatic and corrupt system, and because of it many adoptees don’t support (transracial) adoption because of their experience. They’ve felt plucked out of their culture, forced to assimilate to whiteness in order to survive and made to feel like an outsider in homogenous surroundings, so it isn’t easy. 

Adoptees potentially struggling isn’t meant to deter adoption, as any child could potentially struggle with their home environment or birth families—but it’s different for us. Sharing is meant to highlight we are in fact different from your genetic children, and adoption is not romantic. It’s real life.

I support adoption. I encourage people to adopt from their own country, too. If every country got involved and adopted their own—imagine. Also, look at and change the origin of why children are being abandoned; whether it’s harmful societal pressures, socio political or religious reasons or social stigmas, so child abandonment can be curbed, because while I support adoption, I support societal efforts to keep families together more (when possible) and reducing the amount of children placed into the system.

Adoption is not a romantic story nor a simple solution. And if we are truly pro life, then we must care about the lives living in this world, and some of this care has to come from relieving our own ignorance and educating ourselves rather than seeing from a simplistic, romanticized lens.

#kamswheelstravel @ Instagram.com/kamredlawsk

*In 2014, I wrote “Adoption Story”. You can read that here.