This Is What No One Tells You About Adoption

Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images I was adopted at three weeks of age and grew up in a loving family. Yet much of society gives adopted people subtle and not-so-subtle messages that we have been saved from a terrible fate, and that we should feel lucky to have been “rescued.” Perhaps it’s easier for people to understand adoption if they vilify the birth mother; after all, only a “bad woman” would “give away” her child. They grew up hearing things such as, “I’m sure you have a better life than you would have if your birth mom had kept you.” The racism of this message would be harmful to anyone on its receiving end, but it is devastating to someone who has lost not only their birth parents but their connection to their culture and ethnicity to adoption. In her book “American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption”, veteran journalist Gabrielle Glaser works doggedly to expose truths about adoption, including the fact that adopted people often experience lifelong effects of the trauma caused by being removed from their original family, and that our society mostly ignores or denies such trauma. As adoption researcher and psychologist Nancy Verrier explains in her book “The Primal Wound,” “Many doctors and psychologists now understand that bonding doesn’t begin at birth, but is a continuum of physiological, psychological and spiritual events that begin in utero and continue throughout the postnatal bonding period.