In New York, I imagine it’s Christmastime. My uncle hunched over the counter making homemade pasta noodles for lasagna, my aunt stealing a few slices of salami of her freshly made antipasto, and the smell of penne alla vodka permeating throughout the air. I was nostalgic for my aunt’s famous rainbow cookies, and not just because they were better than any bakery, but because I had learned how to make them with her, side by side with my little cousin.

I am not Italian. But my family is.

In Honduras, I wake up slowly to lazy roosters singing their morning anthem. I spend a good part of the day cleaning and then I go across the street to have lunch. Suyapa is in her beachfront restaurant listening to the news on her radio. Her two girls are sharing a hammock. One is reading, the other is vigorously texting. I greet everyone and then I order my usual: pescado frito con tajadas. I sit at my favorite table where the sand meets the sea and wait for my order to be ready.

I am Honduran; they are not my family. But they look like they could be.

My earliest memory of food is eating oatmeal and drinking agua de sandía (watermelon water). With legs sprawled out on the hotel couch and curious eyes, I anxiously awaited each morning for room service to bring my breakfast. I ate a variation of this meal for the next 40 days. My mom and I were in Tegucigalpa waiting in a hotel across the park from where our lawyer was finalizing the adoption papers. At two and a half years old I didn’t know that my life was about to dramatically change, but I knew that this woman was taking care of me and I felt loved.

My second earliest memory of food is hiding it. When I got to my new home in the United States, I still hadn’t kicked the habit I’d picked up in the orphanage of hiding leftovers to make sure I had enough to eat. It didn’t take long to see that this behavior wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t afraid my mom wasn’t going to feed me.

As I grew up, my mom made sure I maintained a relationship to the food of my birth country. She learned how to make arroz con pollo, enchiladas, and other different kinds of Latin American food. I didn’t know that she wouldn’t always use the exact ingredients and would improvise. Later, when I traveled in Honduras, I could taste the difference from my mom’s arroz con pollo. But at the time, I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.

I grew up with homemade meals, meticulously customized birthday cakes (as per my request), and I learned how to cook early. I felt at home in the kitchen. Each recipe either came from the Joy of Cooking or my mom’s treasured wooden box of family recipes. Each night I would roll up my sleeves and stand side by side with my mom, making lasagna, stuffed mushrooms, and minestrone soup and meatballs (my mom put raisins in hers and marked them with X’s with a knife so I didn’t accidentally eat any. Raisins weren’t my favorite.) This was my food.

I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.
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It wasn’t until I was told I was different from classmates (in less than nice words) that I felt different. How could I tell my mom that kids at school told me that she wasn’t my real mom and my family wasn’t my real family and my real family didn’t want me?

Instead, I spent the majority of my childhood feeling bad and embarrassed for being adopted.

Each time I looked at a family picture, I could see I looked different than everyone else. I hid them all. I even shoved the screen printed pillow cover of my three cousins and I in the back of my closet. I loved that pillowcase; I loved my cousins; we had gotten it done when we went to Storyland one summer. I only kept my yearbook photos and one of me and my mom hung up on the wall above my piano. At least when I was in a picture with just my mom, I could have a reason as to why I looked different. It would be a lot easier than explaining why all of my family members were white and I wasn’t.

Our family tradition was to go to New York for Christmas. I was always so excited to go to New York because I grew up in Maine and never had experienced seeing so many people of color. In grocery stores, I’d trail behind Spanish speaking families and wish they knew me somehow. I’d peer into their carts, searching for Latin American food, in hopes that would give me a clue as to who I was and where I came from.

In high school I asked my mom if we could eat food from Central America. I wasn’t expecting to find Honduran food where I grew up, but to our amazement we found an authentic El Salvadorian restaurant in downtown Portland, Maine. They welcomed me with warm eyes, but when they caught a glimpse of my mom trailing behind me they treated me less warmly and didn’t give my mom the time of day. I didn’t ask to go again.

Finally, I graduated high school early and left to study abroad. Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.

I did not travel to Honduras at first. I wasn’t ready. I spent time in Costa Rica through an exchange program but I wanted to experience more. My mom’s best friend hosted a Peruvian woman and asked if I could stay with her family once she returned to Peru. I didn’t end up staying with that host family, but instead found a girl in my class whose family hosted students regularly. They had two daughters around my age and a son who was a few years younger. Our connection was instantaneous. We enjoyed the same music, laughed at the same things and found joy in each other’s company. I grew up as an only child and I found something I had always wanted: Siblings and a family that looked like me. Well, kinda. And food that I would have eaten if I grew up in my own country. Well, kinda.

I learned how to cook la comida de la selva side by side with my Mamita, a woman I met through a girl I went to school with, whose family would become my family. I remember one morning waking up to the smell of juane de arroz. The kitchen was joyfully flooded with rows and rows of hojas de bijao (banana leaves), waiting to be filled with rice and tied with string. I tied for hours with my brothers and sisters. I had never been so happy to do such a monotonous task.

I am not Peruvian. But they are more than my host family. They are my family.

After graduating from college I traveled to Asia. I learned how to order food in each country I lived in. I devoured the sizzling street food of Bangkok. I eagerly awaited to have Pad Thai in On Nut Market and finished my meal with mango sticky rice. In Seoul, I shared Korean BBQ with coworkers and filled up on pork buns at least three times a week. On visa runs I would go to Vietnam and eat fresh Bánh mì in a trance and have the same expression on my face when I had my daily serving of Bai Sach Chrouk in Cambodia.

I didn’t grow up with any of these foods. I am not Thai. I am not Korean. I am not Vietnamese or Cambodian, but I saw how food brought people together. I felt how I was welcomed into their culture, and into their homes. I was gracefully cocooned within a culture of food and with people who shared the love of food and people.

Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.
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Eventually I made it back to Honduras. I wanted to remember the food of my motherland. I wanted to smell baleadas from blocks away and instinctively know that that was the food of my homeland; that it was mine. That I belonged to Honduras and Honduras belonged to me. I had seen first hand how food seamlessly brought a culture together—I wanted to be woven back into my own culture.

But unfortunately, I didn’t have a magical moment. I didn’t taste something that flooded my brain with memories of my birth family and culture.

Nothing tasted familiar.

My taste buds didn’t invite me to dance or throw a homecoming party for me.

I didn’t even like baleadas.

That was until I saw on the menu that they served agua de sandia and arroz con pollo.

In that moment I was not Honduran or Italian. In that moment I was me. A collection of my lived experiences.

My feeling of home comes from the people I surround myself with and the food that unites us. Home is not a place on a map, where I grew up, or even where I was born. Home is a feeling.

And food, was another language of love.

Michelle Bender grew up in the same town as her Native American family, but never met them as a child. When her adoptive mother would take her to the local store in Seminole, Oklahoma, an older man, who often sat outside, would tell her she looked familiar.

As a baby, Michelle was adopted by a non-Native family who created what she describes as a safe and happy home. Yet, Michelle always felt like a part of her was missing. “I felt like I was a child with nowhere to belong,” she says. “I was a person who was wandering through this world without an identity.”

When Michelle finally connected with her family as an adult, she met the man who she had seen outside the store all those years ago; he was her great uncle. He told her that years ago, when he learned that his baby niece was up for adoption, he contacted Tulsa County DHS and told them he wanted to raise the child. The county would not even give him an application.

Today, Michelle works for her tribe, Seminole Nation, and helps place Native children who are up for adoption with family members or in other Native homes in accordance with federal statute. “I had a family member that would have raised me. I would have known my culture, I would have known my heritage. And I would have known my family. I would have had a sense of belonging. But the workers here in Oklahoma didn’t adhere to ICWA,” says Michelle.

I was a person who was wandering through this world without an identity.
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Michelle’s adoption out of her tribe and away from her family happened in violation of federal law. When the Indian Childhood Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed in 1978, Congress admitted that 25-35% of Native children had been adopted out of their homes, families and tribes by White and non-Native families. Indian Country lost an entire third of one generation of children. According to the law, when a Native child’s home is deemed unfit, family members, other tribal members, and then other Native homes are to be prioritized for placement. ICWA has been praised by national child advocacy organizations as the gold standard for child welfare.

Yet today, ICWA, the only law protecting Native families, is under threat by a conservative-backed legal campaign to have it struck down by the Supreme Court. Four cases challenging the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act are currently in U.S. appellate court, including one case brought by the state of Texas.

As Trump’s inhumane policy of separating immigrant families made headlines this month, media outlets and social media posts have drawn parallels to the U.S. government’s long history of separating families of color. While Native American families are still recovering from the U.S. policies of both Indian Boarding School and forced adoption, this tragic chapter of U.S. history is far from over.

Inside The Racist Push To Make English The United States’ Official Language
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Even with ICWA in place, more than half of U.S. states are out of compliance. In South Dakota, Native Americans are less than 15% of the state’s population, but Native kids represent 50% of all children in foster care, with almost 90% of them being raised in non-Native homes. In Minnesota, Natives Americans are only 1.4% of the population, but Native kids represent 23.9% of the kids in the state foster care system.

From reporting to placement, racist and implicit bias put Native families at greater risk of losing their children. Compared to their White counterparts, Native families are twice as likely to be investigated when abuse is reported, twice as likely to have allegations of abuse substantiated, and four times more likely to have their children taken away. While some states have worked to remedy this inequity, this statistical disparity is actually growing, and the gap has nearly doubled since 2008.

While Native advocates say that the federal government needs to act to strengthen ICWA, a powerful conservative think tank is fighting to have the entire law declared unconstitutional.

Several national organizations are fighting to overturn ICWA, but the most well known and well-resourced is the Goldwater Institute. Goldwater is funded by Trump’s biggest campaign donor, the Mercer family, and other powerful political influencers including the Koch Brothers and the Devos Family. Over the past five years, Goldwater has relentlessly represented foster parents who want to illegally adopt Native children in violation of federal law with the hope that someday one of these White families will win their case in the United States Supreme Court. According to Goldwater’s website, ICWA violates the equal protection clause of the constitution by treating Native children “differently,” and the Supreme Court should “agree that this codification of substandard treatment should not stand.”

While Goldwater postures as promoting racial equity, the language they use to describe Native children and families is deeply racist. Deliberately drawing on stereotypes, they argue that Native children with low blood quantum or who haven’t lived on a reservation are not Native enough for the law to apply. Sadly, this argument is working. In the most famous ICWA case to date, the media and the court were obsessed with a Cherokee baby’s blood quantum. While blood quantum was factually irrelevant to the legal questions raised in the “Baby Veronica” case, the first sentence of the majority opinion of the Supreme Court reads, “This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2 percent (3/256) Cherokee.”

While Goldwater postures as promoting racial equity, the language they use to describe Native children and families is deeply racist.
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The type of litigation that the Goldwater Institute mounts is extremely expensive. To say that a conservative advocacy organization—that has shown no other interest in either child welfare nor Native rights—is making this investment based solely on the concern for the wellbeing of Native children is highly skeptical. Many legal experts in Indian Country see the end goal of Goldwater’s attack on ICWA as a back door route to undoing the legal structure that currently protects tribal sovereignty.

“When you look at the complaints you can see that they are attacking, in a very aggressive way, not just ICWA’s application under the constitution, but tribal sovereignty and tribal federal trust responsibility,” explains David Simmons, Government Affairs and Advocacy Director at the National Indian Child Welfare Association. “They are not just gungho about trying to push ICWA out of the way, they are also trying to undermine all of the precedent, all the federal law, all the court cases that have established tribal sovereignty and govern Native rights today.”

American Indian reservations comprise only 2% of all land in the United States but hold an estimated 20% of oil and gas reserves, 50% of uranium reserves, and 30% of all coal west of the Mississippi. In 2009, The Council of Energy Resource Tribes estimated energy resources on tribal land were worth about $1.5 trillion. A possible and convenient side effect of the Supreme Court striking down ICWA is that the decision could also gut the legal precedent holding minerally rich lands in trust for tribes—opening the floodgates not only for predatory adoption of Native babies, but also resource extraction on tribal land.

A possible and convenient side effect of the Supreme Court striking down ICWA is that the decision could also gut the legal precedent holding minerally rich lands in trust for tribes.
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Sandy White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) was born before ICWA was signed into law. Of her mother’s nine children, eight were taken away. White missionaries got Sandy and, among other physical and emotional abuses, they told her that her Native family never wanted her. As an adult she reconnected with her tribe and became a staunch advocate for ICWA. Today, she helps organize gatherings and healing spaces for other Native children who were adopted out.

When I ask Sandy what would happen to Native families if ICWA was declared unconstitutional she goes silent. After a long pause she says, “I guess it would be just like it was before ICWA was passed. We would become targets again… It would be another collective wound.”

The fanfiction genre is a tangled wreckage of bleeding hearts, ludicrous sexual encounters, and tear-jerking tales of abuse. Though people of all ages write fanfic, it definitely began as a teenage endeavor, and is still mostly seen as a youthful hobby. Teenagers write their favorite celebrities into strange and sordid narratives: One Direction’s Harry Styles is heavily pregnant with band mate Louis Tomlinson’s baby. The Jonas Brothers have incestuous sex on a beach under a shimmering red sunset. Harry Potter snorts cocaine to deal with the suffocating pressure of professional wizardry. But no stories are quite as extreme as #adoption fantasies.

This sub-genre produces narratives of celebrities taking fans in as their own children. The chosen star could be anyone from Simon Cowell to Camila Cabello. But each time the stories follow a similar formula: A kid endures a troubled upbringing — unloved by vodka-swigging parents, pushed around by schoolyard bullies, starving hungry and weak with loneliness. Then one day a celebrity whisks them off their feet, adopts them, and they live happily ever after. For the protagonists, this usually means indulging in everything fame and wealth has to offer: riding around in slick red Ferraris, eating pizza for breakfast, and falling asleep in soft, silky bedsheets. Now their only problem is how heavy the shopping bags get.

There are thousands of these adoption fantasies swarming the internet. But why are so many teenagers dreaming about an evening with their mom Cardi B? Or getting tucked asleep each night by Chris Evans?

For many of these teenagers, yet to have kissed anyone, adoption fantasies are a pre-sexual way to physically relate to celebrities, and to explore intimacy. We don’t just want to be around celebrities, we want to have the devoted love of a parent, cooking you breakfast in the mornings and bringing you Lemsip when you are ill.

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Now their only problem is how heavy the shopping bags get.
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Constance Penely, professor of Film & Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, and fan of slash fiction, attributes adoption fantasies to Freud’s theory of Family Romance. “The child believes that their parents are not their real parents but people far superior, even aristocratic,” she says. “You can get rid of one or both parents and substitute them for better ones.” And in a society that worships celebrity, famous people are often the best people we can think of. We don’t just love them, we want them to love us back.

We look to celebrities for moral guidance. We see this in the spiritual voyages people go on to dead celebrities’ graves, trekking to the site of Michael Jackson or Elvis’ burial much like a religious pilgrimage. It is unsurprising then that fan fictionists write stars into surrogate parents. We feed off the way celebrities lavish themselves in highlighter like glazed crispy crèmes, their jokes that make chat show hosts shake with laughter, their charitable endeavours and gleaming smiles. We try to copy them, much like a child does when they see their Mom and Dad navigating through the world.

Adoption Is A Feminist Issue, But Not For The Reasons You Think

This social aspiration for a higher class of parent suggests itself in the way adoption fantasies often focus on material wealth. In ERICA03GON’s “Adopted by Lauren Jauregui,” a character called Jacob is taken from his cramped orphanage bedroom to a lush palace, complete with a swimming pool, hot tub, and plasma screen TV:

“It was hugeeee.i. thinky jaw droped because some one whispered ‘close ur mouth or ya’ll catch flies’in my ear.” The first thing Fifth Harmony does is take Jacob to the mall where they buy him an “iphone,ipad,air,mac,computer,6paires of jeans,10 shirts 5 beanies,2leather jackets,and 7 pairs of jordans.”

No matter how you were raised, capitalist society teaches us that more is better. Even if your parents are rich, you can always imagine being richer. These Fan Fictioners’ dream of superior Mums and Dads, ones who drape them in flashy snapbacks and PS4s.

But for other users struggling with violently fractured parent/child relations, adoption fantasies are a lifeline to a different world. Writing stories where glistening, white-toothed celebrities care for you fulfills an almost necessary function of mental escape. This was the case for Wattpad user Mikey_fucking_way_ (he chose to remain anonymous so I will call him Will), who has written two adoption fantasies, one in which a teenager is adopted by Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, and another featuring Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy. “My parents divorced when I was young, right around my birthday. Both of them are severe alcoholics,” he says. “They never looked after me and I grew up by myself for a long time. It was fun to imagine a nicer life somewhere else. Belonging to a different family was a fantasy of mine, but I knew I couldn’t have it. So I made up a kid who got to live out my own dream for me.”

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‘Belonging to a different family was a fantasy of mine, but I knew I couldn’t have it. So I made up a kid who got to live out my own dream for me.’
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Will’s story “Adopted by Gerard Way” reflects these aspects of his troubled upbringing. His protagonist, Charlie, was abused from a young age. Staff members at the orphanage forced her to smoke and drink alcohol, and they physically attacked her. “I had about 20 little scars from having lit cigarettes pushed against my skin,” says Charlie. But new parents Gerard Way and Lin-Z lavish Charlie with love and support. When she sobs in her bedroom, her new Dad comes to console her:

“‘I know this is a lot for you right now but I hope you don’t feel too uncomfortable here’ he smiled at me. This inclined me to do something I didn’t think I’d do. I walked up and hugged him and he hugged me back.”

Taking one’s negative circumstances and morphing them into happy scenarios leaves writers with a cathartic feeling of release. “For one moment I am not in this house,” says Will. “I become Charlie on a bed being cuddled by Gerard.”

This transformative moment in adoption fantasies, where circumstances change from painful to positive, is referred to in the fanfiction community as the “hurt/comfort” affect. A FanLore entry explains the hurt/comfort mechanism as “the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character. The injury, sickness or other kind of hurt allows an exploration of the characters and their relationship.”

The release of psychological wound and emotional tension leaves characters feeling healed. Wattpad user Jenkins300, who has written multiple fanfiction stories on Ant & Dec and Simon Cowell, explains, “I like reading and writing about somebody innocent being harmed or wounded, then finally getting the loving childhood they dreamed of. It is immensely satisfying.”

What If All Adults Took Responsibility For All Children?

There is a sensual element dormant in hurt/comfort stories. In Queering Popular Culture, author Mirna Cicioni characterizes hurt/comfort as an “eroticization of nurturance,” with one partner satisfying a basic need of the other — warmth, food, or emotional reassurance. “Although not specifically sexual in themselves. . . [stories] are eroticised because they give a physical dimension to the closeness of the bond between the partners and lead to, or become a part of, an intimacy that also has a sexual component,” they write. Though adoption fantasies are about familial bonds and thus are not explicitly sexual, their place in the hurt/comfort genre means they involve physically intimate moments.

Whether the stories are a pure fantasy of being rich, or serve as an emotional outlet for the author’s complicated familial relationships, there is a physical aspect to these stories. For many of these teenagers, yet to have kissed anyone, adoption fantasies are a pre-sexual way to physically relate to celebrities, and to explore intimacy.

Stories draw attention to the tactile nature of their bond: teasing hands through hair, play fighting, pushing each other around. Zoning in on alluring aspects of the body: the long curvature of the back, big oceanic blue eyes, and thick arms. I spoke to Martha Ahrens, who used to write adoption fantasies as a child. “I was totally in love with Orlando Bloom, but I was 13 at the time and I had no idea about sex or anything,” she says. “I used to write stories about him looking after me; it was paternal but only because I was working out my feelings. In a few years I wasn’t thinking about him making me sausages and beans for tea, let’s just put it that way.”

Deep within these celebrities, fans can find home. A warm womb-like enclosure far removed from the niggling, “don’t bring your muddy shoes in here,” “you take all my money” moms and dads. Bringing its fans into a gleaming, no-rules fantasy land where you can turn up the TV loud and leave your clothes all over the floor.

But most importantly, they let fans, and authors, understand the importance of that sort of warmth, wherever it comes from.

In their efforts to cure what they see as a moral crisis infecting our nation, the anti-choice movement has historically thrown their power, money, and influence behind their two favorite antidotes to abortion: abstinence-only education and adoption. In any era when reproductive rights are being rolled back, as they are now, feminists need to get stronger and clearer about where we stand and what we’re fighting for. We all know, both from data and from common sense, that abstinence education is not only a failure but wildly detrimental to the health and safety of young people. But there doesn’t yet seem to be a broader understanding, even in the mainstream feminist and pro-choice movements, that promoting adoption has its problems too.

Mainstream feminism — feminism by and for middle and upper-middle-class white women — has historically gotten behind adoption. Feminists have supported the rights of single people and same-gendered families to adopt, the rights of adoptive families in contested adoptions, and policies intended to get children into adoptive homes faster. What’s missing from mainstream feminism is any explicit support for families of origin: the parents who have to lose their children, the families that must be dismantled in order for adoptive families to be built.

When I was growing up, my parents always told me how brave and smart my birth mother was. How she loved me so much that she made the selfless choice to give me up because she wanted me to have a better life — because as an unwed 17-year-old, a high school senior, she knew she couldn’t be a good parent to me. She had made this choice, they said, selflessly and graciously, with the support of everyone around her, so that I could have the life I truly deserved. My parents did not invent this language, of course; it was given to them by adoption professionals, adoption books, and support groups, and they repeated it, lovingly, insistently, until we all believed it was true. Like so many adoptees, however, the truths of my beginnings are infinitely more complicated, more painful, and have nothing whatsoever to do with choice.

What’s missing from mainstream feminism is any explicit support for the families that must be dismantled in order for adoptive families to be built.
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After finding my family of origin in my early twenties, I was able to piece together a more accurate, nuanced story of my beginnings. A story of a white, working-class girl who benefitted from racial privilege, but lacked any real financial resources or power of her own. A terrified girl. A girl who was pressured, demonized, and ostracized, by her own family and community. A girl who was told by loved ones and professionals that she was unfit to be a mother because she was young and unmarried, because she wouldn’t be able to give me the things I needed, like food or love or a moral compass. Though she wanted to keep me, her parents sent her away to one of those homes where they hid pregnant girls and shamed them into compliance — the kind of place people say didn’t exist after Roe v. Wade. Except this was 1978, half a decade after people who could get pregnant had theoretically won the ability to make more uninhibited choices about whether or not to become parents. My mother, in reality, did not have the ability to make a real, authentic choice. And many pregnant people still do not have this ability. Because a choice made in the absence of other choices has nothing to do with choice.

The fact is, most people who relinquish their children for adoption or have their children taken away from them, both in the U.S. and internationally, do so as a result of economic and racial injustice. In a recent study published by The Donaldson Adoption Institute, only a third of first mothers (often the preferred term instead of “birth mothers”) who were interviewed reported that the decision to relinquish their parental rights was largely based on their own wishes. The number one reason first mothers relinquish their parental rights, according to the DAI report, is lack of financial resources (82%), followed by the absence of social support, and isolation. In addition, most cases of children removed from their families by state intervention and adopted through foster care are reported as cases of neglect, which are typically a result of poverty and the classist and racist biases embedded in the fabric of the child welfare system that deem poor, mostly Black and brown parents as immoral and unfit.

In the case of an unwanted pregnancy, a pregnant person seeking options counseling is ideally given thorough, unbiased, non-judgmental information about their three options: abortion, adoption, and parenting. If a person is even considering adoption, they are typically referred to a local adoption agency by their health-care provider, or they find one on their own. Unfortunately, according to the National Pro-Choice Adoption Collaborative, over 95% of adoption agencies in this country are religiously affiliated. You likely won’t be surprised to hear that adoption professionals are often not giving thorough information about abortion as an option in their counseling practices — 40% of the mothers in the DAI study said it was never mentioned. But they’re also not presenting parenthood as a viable option, either.

The Body From Which I Was Born
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According to the DAI study, most first mothers interviewed reported little to no access to information about parenting from adoption professionals. And yet, the vast majority — 87% of first mothers in the study — said their preferred option was in fact to parent their child. It’s just that no one ever told them they had a right to do so, or offered resources to help. Many first mothers report they were already considered “birth mothers” the minute they walked through the agency doors, instead of pregnant people contemplating their options, and that the professionals they worked with unequivocally considered a positive outcome to be a signed and sealed adoption. And these are just some of your standard, run-of-the-mill American adoption agencies; we haven’t even talked about the often criminally coercive crisis pregnancy centers which routinely pressure vulnerable people into relinquishing their children. Or the fact that many private adoptions are facilitated through lawyers as solely financial and legal transactions with zero social services attached to help anyone through this life-altering experience.

As reproductive rights are rolled back, timelines in which people can legally get abortions, should they have the resources and power to access them, are shrinking. This means more people could be left to decide between adoption and parenting as their only viable options. If already abysmal social services are also being rolled back, parenting becomes less of an option. And if adoption is being promoted by the very people who are rolling back our rights, what kind of promotion, what kind of agencies, and what kinds of counseling do we really think will be at the forefront of these efforts?

Here’s a truth that can be hard to hear: Adoption is a trauma. The separation of parents and children, the dismantling of families, even at birth, is very often traumatic and can result in enormous amounts of suffering and lifelong consequences for first parents and adoptees, as well as the families and communities to which they belong. The majority of first parents surveyed say they were never truthfully informed about the potential for trauma, to themselves or their children. They are often told they might feel a little sad for a while and then they’ll get over it — but many don’t. And many parents say they regret their decision, even if they feel like it was probably the right one to make at the time.

Here’s an even harder truth: The adoption industry is a business. It generates billions of dollars each year and requires other people’s children in order to stay profitable.

The adoption industry is a business. It generates billions of dollars each year and requires other people’s children in order to stay profitable.
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Here’s the toughest truth yet: Those children are almost always the children of poor and working class people, people of color, native and indigenous people, and young people. The people who adopt them, who directly benefit from the economic and racial oppression of these groups, are most often middle and upper-middle-class people and are primarily white.

The mainstream feminist movement has been, by and large, pro-adoption and has resisted an explicitly intersectional position on the inequities and injustices that typically bring adoptive families together. There are many reasons for this, but here are the two I think about the most:

1. Mainstream feminism has historically assumed that the decision to relinquish a child for adoption is a choice that people make freely, and that the people who choose it do so because they don’t believe in abortion.
2. Mainstream white feminists are part of the primary demographic that stands to benefit the most from adoption.

There will likely always be children who need to be adopted into loving families and held tightly by those families, their communities, and high quality support services across a lifetime. But if, as feminists, we believe that all people should have the ability to make informed and supported choices about becoming parents or not, then we should work to make these instances rare. That means, of course, there will be fewer adoptable children, but we must understand that families are not interchangeable and that the desire to become a parent through adoption does not make anyone entitled to someone else’s child. As it stands in this country, market forces in adoption, coupled with racist and classist state interventions and a reductive societal narrative that sees adoption as a fairy-tale ending where everybody wins, mean that people who have class and race privilege will continue to build their own families through the constrained choices, coercion, and loss of those who do not. This is a feminist issue.

The Reproductive Justice movement, pioneered and led by Black feminists and women of color, teaches us that all people should have “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” If we think about adoption through this lens, and in particular, the right to parent the children we have, we see that we must ask something very different of mainstream feminism. Committing ourselves to reproductive justice, to human rights, demands that we fight for the economic and racial justice to ensure all pregnant people are able to make informed, authentic decisions for themselves, and that families who want to stay together have the autonomy and support necessary to do so.

Committing ourselves to reproductive justice demands that we fight for families who want to stay together to have the autonomy and support necessary to do so.
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I want to challenge feminist organizations and activists to incorporate an intersectional understanding of and position on adoption as part of their reproductive platforms. Read adoptee and first parent experiences. Listen to adoptee scholars, writers, activists, and artists. Listen to families who have been disrupted or broken through state intervention. Have the hard conversations. From the Women’s March to Planned Parenthood to local grassroots organizing, there is much room for complexity, nuance, and growth around this issue. Feminists have a responsibility to take this on.