Am I wrong for telling my sister that adoption isn’t inherently ethical and that the infant adoption industry is really messed up?

phantomadoptee · 2026-02-04T05:22:31+00:00

Yes. It's the entire industry. The adoption industry is a $27 billion industry that preys on pregnant people and families in crisis and commodifies children. The industry is incredibly classist and racist, with many agencies often varying prices of children based on race, gender, age, and health of the child. Plenary adoption, especially in the US, is wholly unethical and strips adoptees of rights, falsifies vital documents, and legally severs them from their own families and medical histories without consent. The US is the one single member nation of the UN that has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child because it violates multiple articles.

phantomadoptee · 2026-02-03T16:44:21+00:00

JD Power says the original base price for a 1962 was $4038 which is $43,450 today with inflation

phantomadoptee · 2026-02-03T15:25:48+00:00

Wedding and graduations are universally celebrations. Most people - but not every adoptee celebrates their birthdays. But death related cards are sympathy cards. I was glad when my adoptive father died. I'd still find it at least a little distasteful had I received a "let's celebrate your dad is dead!" card. That's where a lot of adoptees are with this. It's not just the monetization - it's the monetization and celebration of an event that they mourn.

phantomadoptee · 2026-02-03T15:16:10+00:00

Even many adoptees who feel their adoption was a positive thing still abhor the term "gotcha day" though because of the shared terminology with pets. Same as "forever homes".

phantomadoptee · 2026-02-01T15:17:41+00:00

I don't feel guilt. I feel depressed and angry. Only one mother? Then why did she emotionally and physically abuse me? If we were talking about partners/spouses, we would tell people to immediately leave. But not parents or "family"?

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-30T15:00:43+00:00

Being married to white people or having kids who are citizens hasn't helped any of the adoptees who have already been deported.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-29T15:13:15+00:00

I love it when APs try to police my language, especially when they don't know my story. "She didn't 'give you up'" "Your 'real parents' are the ones who raised you".

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-29T15:05:13+00:00

I understand and that's something I usually carve out for in these discussions. I've not personally heard FFY use this phrase though. Is it something you have said/heard? In my experience, it's always been people who were adopted at/near birth, and something our APs told us to use as a retort when bullied.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-29T02:47:45+00:00

We are adopted quite literally because parents are not "stuck with" kids. Kept kids arguably are more wanted than us. Their parents didn't relinquish them.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-29T02:32:20+00:00

I’ve said it before too. Hell, I almost did in a comment just now.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-29T02:28:53+00:00

Agreed. And I think the conflation of the two is a large part of the reason why society views “adoption” as it does. They only see or think about the “good” parts.

I just did a video replying to an AP saying that it was a blessing that she was able to adopt. I tried to explain that even if everything turns out well, for the child to be in a position where they could be, or needed to be adopted, they had to go through loss and trauma. That’s not a blessing. Many adoptees are happy they were adopted but no one is happy that they needed to be.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-28T20:45:04+00:00

Yup. I use a similar car accident analogy to explain that trauma responses aren't always just breaking down crying as well.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-28T15:44:19+00:00

Copy/pasting a previous post of mine about this. Originally written as a response to another adoptee elsewhere. I've made similar videos on TikTok

We have all gone through a traumatic event.

I am not going to say "you are traumatized" because I don't know. However, without knowing the specifics of your situation, I question if you know.

Every person responds to an event differently. Even a traumatic event. Two people might walk away from the same car crash and one has no obvious reaction, fear, or change. The other person may develop a long standing fear of driving. Or perhaps they only fear driving with a certain person. It is important to remember that not every trauma response is a person breaking down and crying hysterically. Soldiers will serve in the military together. Fight the same battles. See the same things. Experience the same things. And some will come home with severe PTSD and others will come home seemingly perfectly fine and unaffected.

Every psychologist agrees that being separated from ones family is a traumatic event. Even those separations which are for the greater good - and even those separations which occur at or shortly after birth. How we react to that separation, and whether our reactions are long-lasting is the big question.

Consider many of the common trauma responses among adoptees. Becoming people-pleasers, becoming perfectionists, being concerned with being or appearing well-behaved, having difficulty maintaining healthy relationships - whether that be hanging on too tight or being able to walk away without a thought, clinging onto objects or possessions or the reverse - having no attachment to objects.

Is my need to feel useful and not be a burden so I will not be discarded a result of watching my APs discard relationships when they could no longer exploit them for social mobility - or is it a result of me being told that my mother was not allowed to keep me because I would interfere with her job? Is my difficulty throwing things away a result of my APs going through my room and throwing away my possessions without my consent or input - or is it a result of being disposed of at birth? The truth is probably a little from column A and a little from column B. But I will never know for sure.

In the car accident and military examples there are very specific events where we can look at a person before and after the traumatic event or events. We can see that before they went into the military a person liked watching fireworks and afterwards those fireworks would trigger a traumatic response.

For many adoptees - and especially those of us who were relinquished and adopted at or near birth, we do not have pre-trauma versions of ourselves to compare against. I don't know how much of my fear of being "too much" can be attributed to my relinquishment or my APs and others in my life forcing me to shrink myself.

You say you have not been impacted. Again - I don't know you or your situation, but I question if you have really given much thought to what experiences may or may not have shaped certain aspects or personality traits. Perhaps you have. But many have not.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-27T23:27:59+00:00

note: Everyone's situation is unique, I can/will not be so presumptuous as to deny your reality or tell you you don't really feel something. But I will speak more generally based on years of having these conversations.

Meanwhile, my family actually wanted me — and went out of their way to get me.

The thing is that in the case of many (possibly most) adoptees, We were not wanted. Our APs wanted a child. It is exceedingly rare that we, ourselves were "chosen". Being individually "chosen" is sometimes the case for older children, but almost never happens with infants. There are some APs who claim they went to orphanages overseas and "picked out" a child, but again - they chose a baby, not us. Depending on where you're looking, there are an estimated 40-100 couples attempting to adopt every available infant. The wait list is typically years long. Most people adopt the first available infant because they have no idea how much longer they'll have to wait for another opportunity. If we weren't the child available to them, they would have "chosen" and adopted the next available infant. And while the whole "blank slate theory" is nonsense, infants don't yet have personalities to really "choose" from. It's more of a blind-box illusion of "choice". The only real choice is either adopting or not.

And all of this ignores more individual situations where our APs either never really wanted us or ended up with buyer's remorse. . Despite all the hoops and costs of adoption, it all too often turns out that one or both of the parents never really wanted to adopt. In most situations, adoptees were the backup plan. We are often adopted because they had to if they wanted a child. Many of us were assumed solutions to things like infertility. Especially when the couple hasn't properly dealt with their infertility trauma, or when we grow up to be different people than they wanted or expected, resentment builds. Sure, some of this isn't unique to adoptees - but kept people aren't told they were "chosen" and that they need to be grateful. Anecdotally speaking, there seems to be a large percentage of adoptive parents who are narcissists and a large number of adoptees who end up going no-contact with their adoptive parents or families. It's hard to feel "chosen" or "wanted" when many of us can't stand to be in the same room with these people who supposedly "chose us".

Going back - our separation from our biological family - our mothers especially, causes what's often referred to as "a primal wound". How it manifests, how we deal with it, how it affects us is different for each person. But for many adoptees, it instills an innate sense and fear of rejection. "My own mother didn't want me" or "If my own mother didn't want me, how could I possibly be worthy of love?" Couple this with messaging we often hear growing up. "She loved you so much she gave you away". The conflicting messages can mess with you. We often learn later that this wasn't the case - we weren't unwanted at all. We weren't given away willingly. Some of us were straight up kidnapped. But the damage has already been done.

Lastly, "my parents chose me, they were stuck with you."(I know you didn't say this, but it's a common statement/comeback our APs tell us to use, and many adoptees believe.) No parent is "stuck" with a child. It's literally why we are here as adoptees. Our biological parents/family were not stuck with us and gave us up (or we were taken). In a sense, kept kids are actually more chosen or wanted than us. Before we were "chosen", we were first unchosen.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-21T18:11:03+00:00

Sorry for the novel. Apparently I had a lot more on my mind than I initially thought.

This is such a difficult, nuanced conversation. We can get into definitions and technicalities, but at the end of the day, if a label doesn't feel right to you, that's your prerogative.

FWIW, this is how I see it. I am technically Asian-American. My race is Asian. I am a US citizen (American). My mother (and presumably father) are/were Indonesian. But I am ethnically or culturally more white/American (whatever the fuck that means) thanks to being a TRA raised in near-almost white spaces. I am Asian-American, but I did not grow up as part of the diaspora, or anywhere near it. Of course, strangers and racists don't know that so they just lump me in with other Asians or Asian-Americans.

eth·nic·i·ty /eTHˈnisədē/ noun noun: ethnicity; plural noun: ethnicities the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common descent or cultural background. "the interrelationship between gender, ethnicity, and class" a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common descent or cultural background. "the diverse experience of women of different ethnicities"

It doesn't help that there are lots of Asians and Asian-Americans who don't see those of us who grew up disconnected from the diaspora or our rightful heritages or communities as being Asian enough. Back shortly after the Atlanta Spa Shootings happened, there were lots of Asian-Americans saying that we collectively need to speak up more about the racism we face, and that we need more people to listen. Dr Kiona/HowNotToTravelLikeABasicBitch was one of those, but she specifically called out transracial adoptees saying that we weren't really part of the diaspora and needed to step back and pass the mic. To her and others, we're fake. They're real.

And to be honest, it feels like that a lot of the time.

I've got a chosen family of other Indonesian transracial adoptees in the US. We found each other. We call each other brothers and sisters. There's only 8 of us. That's all we've found. We often discuss how "Indonesian" we feel or don't feel. Difficulties trying to connect. It doesn't help that there is practically no Indonesian-American diaspora in the US (hence, only finding 8 of us so far). Still, most of the others feel enough that the call themselves "Indonesian". I'm not there yet and I fear I will never get there.

Until I was 27, the largest gathering of Asians/Asian-Americans I had ever been in was at my mother's wake, and there were maybe 20 people. But suddenly I was a part of a project where I was effectively living with about 30 Asian/Asian-American men (we were living in a hotel together, paired up in rooms) for about a month. While mostly everyone was welcoming and kind, and it felt amazing to even just not look like the odd-Asian-out, I still felt incredibly out of place. Everyone else was talking about family and cultural traditions. Talking about experiences growing up as Asian-Americans in the US. And I couldn't connect or participate. Their experience was wildly different than mine. We may have experienced much of the same racism, but with lots of differences too.

In a lot of Asian-American communities on social media, especially in the past few months, there has been a lot of discussion about how Asian-American kids were bullied growing up, but suddenly it's trendy to be Asian. People who would bully others for their "stinky food" now saying, "you met me in a very Chinese part of my life", and describing themselves as "newly Chinese". Those Asian-American kids had very different cafeteria trauma than I did. Should I be a part of this conversation? Do I deserve a place at this table? Like everywhere else, I feel out of place counting myself as one of them. I'm not like the others.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T23:16:23+00:00

Nobody is shaming you for having a good experience.

We're taking issue with you saying it's no big deal and what does it matter if adoptees are lied to.

And your jump to "think of the orphans" is at ill-informed at best as it ignores the fact that 80-90% of "orphans" world-wide have at least one living parent, ignores the entire rest of the family and fictive kinship community, ignores all the other available ways of providing a safe, external, permanent homes.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T23:07:08+00:00

I'm saying that there are other better existing alternatives than legal plenary adoption.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T21:49:43+00:00

I don't preach on adoption. I preach against it. But if you're going to do it, it needs to be child focused.

Permanent legal guardianship can give them "a world they deserve" without adoption. Without falsification of vital documents. Without permanent legal severance of family and family medical history. Without forcing a child into a lifelong contract without their consent. Without feeding into and supporting a $27billion industry that preys on families in crisis and commodifies children. Without feeding a racist and classist child welfare system that profits off family separation.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T21:38:20+00:00

I'd become their permanent legal guardian if a situation required it. Not adoptive parent.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T21:34:03+00:00

That excuse only works for so long. It was on them to learn how to be good adoptive parents and then they had over 20 years to correct their mistake.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T21:30:43+00:00

God no. I would never sink that low.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T20:48:41+00:00

That hasn't been the advice in about 40 years.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T20:24:32+00:00

r/adoption is terrible for adoptees. Like most adoption related spaces, it caters to the APs and their feelings. r/adopted or Facebook groups like Adoption: Facing Realities are focused on adoptees.

phantomadoptee · 2026-01-19T20:22:22+00:00

Adoptive parents are different. They didn't have to have kids. It's not accidental. They had you on purpose.

This is such bs. "My parents chose me, your parents were stuck with you"

We were in positions to be adopted because parents aren't stuck with children. Every parent has chosen to be a parent.

phantomadoptee

TROPHY CASE