5 Comments
Nov 20, 2022Liked by Lisa Munro

"It allows them the freedom to do nothing" perfectly encapsulates the assumptions of so many people whose default response to any big, systemic problem is to throw their hands up and declare it is inherently unsolvable, thus any ideas or actions toward solving it are pointless. It's the ultimate cop-out. Thanks for putting it so plainly, Lisa. I'm proud of you for pushing back in the face of these folks who uphold oppressive systems like adoption.

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As someone who has adopted 6 children, I am well versed in managing their own individual trauma as they progress through their lives - it never goes away. The trauma just resurfaces in unexpected ways.

So I would wish these 6 children who came into our home never had these experiences, but the reason the came to us is because of the trauma and lack of support within their community to manage the traumatic events they lived through.

I’m all for finding paths to eliminate adoption as a solution, but that task is something that would require a lot more upstream work on resolving the issues in the community that produce childhood trauma in the first place, which I have absolutely no idea how that would be done.

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Last night at a meeting I inadvertently sat next to a neighbor whose daughter adopted a baby boy. The neighbor had told me this with excitement and pride, and when I told her that I was generally against adoption, she turned fierce, and said they were rescuing that boy from a "terrible situation" and her expectation was that, when he got old enough to understand, he would be SO grateful. She added that her daughter, born with ovaries but no uterus, was also having another baby via surrogate, and I had the horrifying image of the adopted baby growing up competing with the biological child....

She did not want to hear my thoughts about why adoption is such a traumatic thing, the pain of it moving like stinging tentacles through broken family systems, even after I admitted to her my "birth" mother status.

But I applaud you for trying, and hope that your Tweets might find at least a few thoughtful minds. Change can happen, even if it's a slow and often agonizing process.

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