When Adoptive Parents Take Down Roe v. Wade

It feels as if mayhem is barreling down the pike. For so many adopted people who struggle to stay alive despite the voice in their head that says She didn’t want you. You are worthless. You might as well kill yourself, the overturning of Roe v. Wade feels like a death sentence for the well-being of future generations who will lose their mothers in a world that considers this loss no big deal.

I wrote a book about the complicated and painful issues I have in my mind and body and life as an adult in her fifties who was adopted at ten weeks old, and I have received countless emails saying, in one form or another, Thank you. You said the things I don’t have words for. It is so good to know I’m not alone. I thought I was crazy. I thought it was me.

The book I used for inspiration when I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted was The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. How do you tell a true war story when your memory isn’t reliable and when your audience doesn’t want to hear what really happened, anyway? How do you write from what looks like a nice life: parents who love you, a college education, maybe, a family of your own maybe, children, a dog, when inside you feel like a Martian, when you feel different from everyone around you even when they hold you close and say you are the same?

A baby was not built to go from inside one body to the arms of another who says, I am your mother; I am your father; Your life is with us. The body knows this is not true, and when people pay money to get a baby from a pregnant woman, you end up with a body in conflict, a body that is not anybody, completely.

You have child trafficking.

I came with a price tag. I saw the paper from the adoption agency a long time ago—I think I was about seven hundred dollars in 1964, but I can’t tell you for sure since one day my parents decided to throw away the file “Anne’s adoption” because it made them sad.

A year ago, I finally got my original birth certificate from the state of New York, the one that has the name I was born with, the one that has the name of the mother who made me, the one that has a blank space for father.

So now I have two birth certificates, and both have a mother who says I was hers.

However, the first mother refused to meet me and the second mother could not bear to have me talk about the first. “You’re mine,” my mother would say, running from the room if I mentioned the mother who had created me. When your mother leaves you standing in a room alone because you asked about your roots, dangerous things happen: self-hatred, the inability to focus, the inability to feel or trust intimacy.

You get the idea.

A baby created in the body of a women who does not want it is a baby already in trouble. The baby feeds on stress, swimming in an environment of things are not okay.

In the adoptee retreats I co-lead with the therapist Pam Cordano, we say on the first day that the gathering is probably the only place people can joke about mass murders at malls and everyone will nod their head or laugh, understanding the impulse. If you hate yourself, why would you not want to destroy the world, also? If your own mother didn’t keep you, why would you not potentially be a dangerous force, unsteady, unsafe, unmoored?

Three members of the Supreme Court are adoptive parents: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett. They bought their family, and now they want to make it easier for others to do the same.

My life has been unnecessarily difficult and painful. Why bring a baby into the world when the world has no idea how to properly meet its needs?

I think of Amy Coney Barrett, a woman with a woman’s body, believing that she is doing good by creating a situation where a woman’s body would be told it has to bring to term something it can not. for whatever reason, keep. I try to imagine what part of Amy Coney Barrett’s brain is missing in order for her to believe a woman can create a baby and give it away and not have the giving away cause catastrophic damage to both mother and child. Breath-taking trauma for life. What I come up with is how easily I can convince myself that chocolate cake is a health food when I really, really want to eat it. My brain tells me, It’s okay. You want it. Eat the cake. The fact that my blood sugar will plummet and I will feel like passing out shortly after somehow gets erased by my brain. I eat the cake because I want it. I am able to ignore the consequences because my desire is so sharp.

Love does not fix abandonment. A fancy high chair and cute clothes do not make a wounded child feel safe.

Truth does, or at least it’s a start in the right direction, and babies for sale is not a truth that is in alignment with basic morality.

I’m all worked up. I’m so upset. My country thinks it owns my body.

It’s like I’ve been sold, again.