To get annoyed when people say “why don’t you just adopt”?

[Jojobears]

Often when people are talking about someone struggling to conceive (especially on online discussions) someone will suggest “why don’t you just adopt”

This just really annoys me:

It’s not a straightforward process. You don’t just get handed a perfect newborn. The days that unmarried women and girls were pressured into giving up their babies are (thankfully) gone.

Most children looking for adoption are not babies. Most children have significant issues due to mistreatment or neglect. Many babies have severe issues due to drug or alcohol abuse by the mother when she was pregnant.

The process for adoption is brutal: every single aspect of your lifestyle, personality and past is held to scrutiny by strangers.

Even when the child comes to live with you there can be issues. Severe behavioural and mental challenges. Having to keep in touch with birth families.

It’s not a walk in the park; i bet you every person who flippantly says “why don’t you just adopt” has never actually adopted or tried to adopt

YANBU at all! Fuck me, if it was that easy to “just adopt” there wouldn’t be a national shortage of foster carers.

My friend and her husband adopted 2 children they are lovely and thankfully have very very few issues that many other children who have been through what they have, but the process was very difficult. I don’t blame anyone for backing out once they’ve started because it got too much (know of 2 couples who that’s happened to).

However to answer one of the points above, ‘being guaranteed a girl’ isn’t as strange as it might sound.

Most adoptive parents want girls. Whether they end up with them or not is another matter of course.

Not to mention the fact that in almost every case the birth parent would have preferred to keep the baby and probably could have and should have with the right support. Adoption is incredibly traumatic for the birth parent, far more than abortion or even miscarriage. Adoption is necessary in some cases but the first option should always be to offer whatever support is needed to the birth parent and to ensure her decision to give up her baby isn’t based on a lack of money, experience, or resource.

I don't know where to begin with some of the comments on this thread, so here's some random points.

You don't 'just' adopt. However I think asking whether someone has considered adopting is a fair question at the right time.

Adoption isn't a cure for infertility. But if someone wants to be a parent, as opposed to wanting to have a baby, it can be a route if they can't conceive / carry full term.

Adoption isn't an event that happens once, it carries on for the whole of the childhood and beyond.

I am so glad we adopted. It hasn't always been easy, but we wanted to be parents and it has brought us a lot of joy.

Hardly anyone decides not to keep their baby, Ellsion

I've just been on a family support day aimed at the families of couples who are in the adoption process. I thought I knew and understood the problems they could face and will need support with, but I didn't really.

They explained that in a "good enough" family (because no family is perfect and doesn't have to be) , the baby:

Has a need.
Cries

The "good enough" family will:

Respond to the baby and help them.

The baby then knows that when it cries there is someone there who will help. It develops trust.

Babies and children in need of adoption have not had their needs met. They don't develop trust. When they cry, nobody responds. Or, when they cry they are hurt or abused.

Between the ages or 9 months and 20 months is when a baby learns that when something goes away, it will come back (think about playing peekaboo). They can't see your face, you're gone. They learn that you do and will come back.

Children in need of adoption don't learn that. When you're gone, you're gone.

They also may not know sensory needs, such as being too hot or too cold or hungry - they've learned coping mechanisms to survive and they just don't feel the heat, cold, hunger as a child from a Good Enough family does.

Then, joy of joy, they're adopted.

Great.

Only for them, they are once again taken from their home (foster home for eg) and all they know. Their teacher that they've formed a bond with, the lollipop lady who gets a hug everyday, the Foster parent's daughter, the family cat. All ties cut and you're with 2 new people and in a strange place and suddenly you need to understand its safe and you can trust. Only you can't because you weren't able to develop those responses and understanding in your early development.

So that's where the problems can lie and it is a very basic explanation, but we tend to think that once adopted the child is rescued and is a joyous occasions. Which it is. But not initially for this little soul who has lost everything and hasn't developed the emotions needed to get through the upset in their life.

We welcome our new family member (If all goes well, fingers and toes crossed) in a month or so. I can't wait.

It's taken 18 months from my relatives first signing up. They had been through countless failed IVF treatments and it just isn't possible for them to conceive naturally.

Adoption is not for the faint hearted. It isn't a quick fix. But it is wonderful to know we will be able to make a huge difference to this little child's life

(have been intentionally vague with details for obvious reasons)

The course I went on was run by Adoption Matters, if any one is interested.

@hashtagthathappened what on earth do you mean? One of my best friends from school gave up her baby for adoption (and regretted it every day of her life after that). Some babies and children are taken away by the courts or are orphans but plenty of women and girls give up their babies due to lack of money and support (especially women in poorer countries who supply babies for international adoption).

Adoption is often a very unhappy story in many ways and the women and girls who give birth are forgotten while the adoptive parents who raise their babies are treated as heroes.

The fact is, most adopters want a healthy baby that matches their own ethnicity. There aren’t many of those waiting to be adopted.

As do most people setting out to conceive, surely.

I think you’re a bit misinformed elision

In this country (UK) there are very few relinquished babies these days, because rightly mothers are not as stigmatised as in the past and there is the benefits safety net.

The great majority of children needing adoptive families have come through the care system.

@hashtagthathappened are you trolling or just hateful and thick? Or all of the above? One iota or explanation or evidence to explain yourself might clear that up. I supported my friend for years through her adoption regret and she knew many other women who were the same through support groups she was part of. There are countless stories of women and families being encouraged to give their children away or even having their children stolen to supply orphanages in African countries for misery tourists and international adoptions. What a vile person you are to blithely deny what you clearly know nothing about.

@TeenTimesTwo the world is bigger than the UK

Very annoying. For all the reasons listed.

YANBU.

@Elision, I imagine hashtag means that virtually no babies in the UK are now relinquished -- how long has it been since your schooldays? The overwhelming majority of children who are freed for adoption in this country are children whose parents have had their parental rights terminated by the family courts because of abuse/neglect, often after being given numerous chances and support to turn their lives around to be 'good enough' parents.

I'm not sure I recognise your 'adoptive parents are always regarded as heroes and birth mothers are forgotten' narrative, either. There's still a significant narrative which sees 'forced adoption' as some kind of conspiracy where social workers steal quotas of cute blonde babies from guileless birth parents for financial gain.

And even though it is true that most non-international adoptions come through the care system in the uk, the fact that I am literally the only person to mention birth parents in this thread says a lot, really. Whether they chose adoption or had it chosen for them, it is incredibly traumatic and they are forgotten in these stories.

Elision The world is bigger than the UK. But MN is a UK-centric site.

Inter-country adoption is a whole different ball game, so if you want to talk about the ethics of that go right ahead, but be clear that is what you are talking about.

Stop being a dickhead eli

Have you not read the post above about the kid who had his teeth knocked out and cigarette burns on his arm?

But was your school friend an African birth mother encouraged to give up her baby to 'misery tourists'? Or are you just trying to make her sound like something other than someone who made a difficult decision she later regretted?

Adopters do not forget the birth parents.

But this thread is about infertility and 'just' adopting (or not). It is not about why the children have needed adopting in the first place.

@BookBookBook you realise that not everyone here is from the UK? In the United States things are much different, no social safety net, limited access to abortion, ‘clinics’ that exist solely to trick pregnant women and coerce them into birth and adoption.

@elision my sister runs a support group for people who have had their children removed, she has even featured in national papers as a hero for ‘forgotten’ parents who have ‘wrongly’ had their children removed.

She fails to mention that her children were regularly beaten, used as an ashtray, emotionally neglected and malnourished. As a 13 month old child my son had had six broken ribs and a broken leg, he is covered in scars from having fags put out on him. He has missing teeth from beatings. He got off very lightly compared to her two older children.

I don’t doubt - actually I know - there are cases where children are removed from birth parents where this probably shouldn’t have been the case.

However the USA and the UK differ vastly in how adoption works.

SimonJT Well said.

Each case should be taken on its own merit. But from the little bit I've seen as we wait to welcome our new addition, they don't get removed from their birth parents care because the birth parents are misunderstood. They largely get removed due to neglect or abuse. Both cases leaves me with the desire to sympathise with the child and not the birth parents.

International adoption is not relevant to this thread as we are talking about experience of adopting within the UK.

Ffs, everyone was listing reasons why adoption isn’t that easy and isn’t always the answer and I just added more reasons- SOME children available for adoption SHOULDN’T be and their birth parents have been wronged by the lack of a social safety net, and even children who SHOULD be and must be adopted leave tragic stories behind. Even if their parents were abusive, there are grandparents, siblings, etc. who are left behind. It’s almost always fucking tragic and difficult and not everyone is able to handle the fallout. How on earth these are controversial additions to the list of reasons why adoption isn’t always the answer is beyond me.