Children belong with their family of origin. Discuss.

I hadn’t heard of family preservation until I listened to the podcast AdopteesOn and starting following Haley Radke on social media. Haley doesn’t describe herself as anti-adoption, but ‘for family preservation’.

At first glance it seems like something that would apply more to the North American system, where many babies are given up for adoption before they are born, and thousands of pounds are exchanged between adoptive parents and adoption agencies. For many of us in the UK, the film Juno was our first introduction to how things tend to work in the US and Canada.

One argument of family preservation is that if couples are able to raise $50,000 to adopt a baby, that money could instead be used to support the birth parent/s to raise the baby themselves if they choose to.

If anyone has read Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere you will be aware of how some prospective adopters feel about this idea, and how there is an entrenched bias against working class single mothers (and particularly mothers of colour). This bias against unwed mothers and assumption that a financially comfortable two-parent family trumps biology was why many of us older adoptees from the UK’s closed system were relinquished.

The UK adoption system differs significantly from the US, with the majority of children being removed from their birth families at an older age, usually between one and three, due to issues around addiction, neglect, poverty and – less often – abuse. I worked at the British Association for Adoption & Fostering on their Be My Parent website and magazine, yet family preservation did not occur to me as I edited profile after profile of children waiting to be matched with their ‘forever family’. I was most definitely in the fog!

After listening to a powerful talk from Brid Featherstone and Anna Gupta at The Open Nest conference 2017, I began to think about family preservation from a UK-perspective. As you may know, my sister had her children removed and, although there were some services offered to try to prevent things reaching that tragic conclusion, I believe more could have been done. For example, in some countries a struggling mother has a support worker living with her for a year or more, and in others the mother and her children move in with a family for support. So a bit like the children going into foster care, but mum comes too. I am aware this would not be appropriate in some circumstances, but relevant for all or not, it’s food for thought.

These initiatives led me to think about my own story in this blog piece Better than the alternative. I don’t necessarily advocate spending a lot of time dwelling on what might have been, but – for me - it has been an important element of coming out of the fog. I’ve found it useful to challenge the narrative that my birth mother “had no choice”, my birth father “had no responsibility” and I was “destined” to be with my adoptive family. 

Image: Edi Libedinsky

Better than the alternative?

Don’t tell me I should be grateful I wasn’t aborted. Just button your mouth and listen to adoptees.

This week I had an adoptive parent suggest that being adopted was “better than the alternative”. She didn’t use the word abortion but given my age we can assume that is what she was referring to.

As this person knows nothing about my life or the circumstances of my adoption, I can only assume this is the chosen narrative she lives by. To pit adoption and abortion against one another as the only two options when faced with an unwanted* pregnancy is to deliberately not see the full picture. There are always other alternatives, from family preservation, to kinship care to a more open, humane way of raising someone else’s child.

Let’s break down the other “alternatives” to my adoption shall we?

1. My birth parents raised me together with the support of both sets of parents.
2. My birth mother raised me with the support of her parents.
3. My birth father raised me with the support of his parents.
4. My birth mother’s parents raised me.
5. My birth father’s parents raised me.
6. My adoptive parents raised me without the secrecy and shame of a closed adoption.
7. My adoptive parents raised me as a team with my biological parents and their wider families.

This list makes me cry, because as unlikely as some of the alternatives seem, they were still possible. There are at least seven ghost versions of me out there whose life was very different. None of those ghost versions of me feel half as much shame as I do for existing. And if you wonder why adoptees are angry, the reason that many of these alternatives didn’t happen was a mix of selfishness and a lack of education around the impact on the child. It was easier for both sets of parents if there was a “clean slate”. It was not easier for me – although I have to believe they thought it was, or where would I be? When adoptees speak up about this stuff, use it as an opportunity to educate yourself.

Being adopted is not easy. That is what I was saying when the “better than the alternative” comment came in. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough when I said being adopted is not easy. Let me be clear about the depths it has taken me to. I say this not to elicit sympathy but to be as truthful as possible in the hope that my truth may help others feel less alone: there have been times when I have felt so utterly desperate that I wished I had been aborted. On bad days, the recurring thought that goes back and forth in my brain is: “You shouldn’t be here.” “You shouldn’t be here.” “You shouldn’t be here.” When I was asked by a health professional whether I had thought about suicide, I said “No, but I have thought that my husband and children would be better off without me.”

Imagine if you will, a very large, very grand restaurant with hundreds of demanding diners calling the waiting staff over to place an order, complain about a dish, ask a question, or pay the bill. Now imagine in this vast, incredibly noisy restaurant there is only one waitress rushing back and forth, trying to please every customer and almost fainting on her feet. That is how I experience life, this is a normal day in my brain – and even more acutely since my reunion with both biological parents. 

So unless you have a lived a “shift” in my head, please refrain from intimating that I should be grateful I wasn’t aborted. It’s one of the most dangerous and damaging narratives for an adoptee to hear.

Of course I am grateful to be alive and on this planet with my wonderful friends and family, but that does not negate my struggles.

Further reading:

Adoption Is Not a Universal Alternative to Abortion, No Matter What Anti-Choicers Say, Randie Bencanann

*I know many of the pregnancies in the 50s and 60s were very much wanted, but society made it impossible for the mothers to keep their babies. My own situation is that I wasn’t planned (read: wanted).