Why It's Not Helpful To Tell Adoptees To Be Grateful They Weren't Aborted (Part Two)

This post is the second in the , Why It’s Never Helpful to Tell Adoptees to Be Grateful They Weren’t Aborted series.  

 After exploring this subject and bringing some enlightenment to those who had no clue of this fact, I’d now like to move on to bring some of my adoptee and first mother friends to talk about another related issue in response to this question. That is, the fact that adoption and abortion are not the same issue. After they share, I’ll wrap things up.

Deanna: Adoptee friends, why is it not helpful to tell  adoptees to just be grateful they weren't aborted?

“It is no more appropriate to tell an adoptee to be grateful they were not aborted than it would be to tell a non-adoptee that. ALL of our mothers made the same choice to give birth, whether they were married, single, rich, poor, young, old, whatever. Any of them could have aborted but did not. We need not be any more grateful for being alive than anyone else who is breathing. Adoption is not the opposite of abortion, giving birth is. The opposite of adoption is being raised within your own family.” 

 Julie J., Adoptee 

Why It's NOT Helpful to Tell Adoptees to Be Grateful They Weren't Aborted (Part One)

I asked some of my adoptee friends why it’s not helpful when people tell them to be grateful they weren't aborted. Yes, believe it or not, that's really common for adoptees to hear.    Today I’ve taken a sampling of their answers and am addressing just one reason why. Keep in mind, it’s not the only reason – just one that I will be addressing in this series.  

Once I share a few of their comments, I'm going to weigh in...

Deanna: Adoptee friends, why isn’t it helpful when people tell adoptees to be grateful they weren't aborted?

 “To be completely frank and politically incorrect, in the decades it has taken me to gain access to my siblings and birth family as well as deal with the circumstances into which I was relinquished, there have been many times I wished I were aborted. Those days have passed, but it is not lost on me that the quandry into which falsified birth certificates and denial of grief deliver a child, can result in a terrible waste of "life time." As for me, I'm pro "real life."  Clayton Shaw, Adoptee

Am I a Success Because of Adoption?

“Adoption is the reason you are a success today.”

I have heard this, a lot.

Many adoptee friends have shared with me that they hear this quite a bit too, as the reason for their successes in life.

Photo Credit: Mirimcfly, FlickR

 

Since I started this blog I have been contacted by everyone from attorneys to professors to extremely wealthy people...adoptees who, no matter how many material possessions they have or what they have achieved, are hurting.   They long for peace. All the while, many in their lives say, "Look at all that adoption made possible for you! You would have no success, were it not for adoption."

When Adoptees Want to Die

 I was born in 1966.

Even if it would have been legal, my mother told me the night we reunited that aborting me was never even a thought in her mind.   

This nullifies the notion that was proposed to me on quite a number of occasions: “Just be grateful your mother didn’t abort you.”  Or, “aren’t you so glad your mother chose life?” 

 I was so in the fog that I even used to get up and testify in church, thanking God that my mother chose life.

But, abortion was never even a factor in my adoption. 

So thanking her for letting me live was a moot point. 

Photo Credit: Markoz46, FlickR

This realization was one of the things that accelerated my journey out of the fog.