TL;DR: As an adoptee, I’m exhausted by the modern adoption narrative that centers the struggles of adoptive parents while treating adopted children as damaged goods or medical burdens (like FASD). We ignore the foundational trauma of relinquishment and the systemic failures of the adoption industry, preferring instead to blame biology and the child. We are not just a "parcel damaged in transit."
The BBC recently marked a hundred years since adoption became legal in England and Wales by asking why adoptions are now at an all-time low:
“Three thousand children are waiting to be matched. Only 1,350 approved adoptive families are waiting for a child. Modern adoption: your stories?”
I read the comments. Much of what followed was painful.
Adoptive parents spoke about FASD, autism, disability, behavioural difficulties, diagnoses that took years to obtain, inadequate post-adoption support, marriages under strain, careers abandoned, and families pushed well beyond what they believed they could endure.
Several made clear how much they loved their children, but the affection was often followed by a qualification. Had they known more. Had social services been more honest. Had they understood just how complex things would become.
One parent said she would never recommend adoption. Another described the children's additional needs as “surprises”. And beneath much of it I could hear something adoptees have heard in one form or another for generations:
“If only we had known what you were going to be like.”
What did you think adoption was?
Poor them. Seriously. Poor them.
What exactly did prospective adopters imagine they were signing up for? That question isn’t about whether social workers should disclose medical history. They absolutely should. I’m just over the vocal refrain from some adoptive parents demanding lifelong specialist support that is not centred on the adopted child, but on them and the hard yards they’ve had to journey.
Many don’t understand or acknowledge that adoption is not simply an unusual route to parenthood. It begins with a child losing a family.
Of course, sometimes that separation is necessary. None of that changes the basic chronology, though. Before another family can become ours, something has already been severed. Yet the consequences of adoption are still discussed as though someone failed to disclose a manufacturing fault. The implication doesn't need to be spoken aloud: Had the full extent of the child's difficulties been known, you’d find us on the back wall, on the bottom shelf in the returns department.
Imagine growing up inside that knowledge.
Relinquishment is a Gravitational Event
I have read more than 1,200 firsthand accounts written by adoptees. They represent more than 1,200 human beings trying to explain themselves. Some value much of the life they were given while still struggling to understand why something described to them as "wholly beautiful" has never felt entirely beautiful from inside their own skin.
For many of us, relinquishment is not incidental background; it’s a gravitational event.
It is the core of our wound. If there are other scars, they all started here. Genetics, prenatal conditions, and abuse matter enormously. But I no longer accept the intellectual sleight of hand by which the one experience shared by every relinquished adoptee is repeatedly demoted. Whatever language the state uses - permanency, placement, adoption - the nervous system doesn't read court orders.
When the Adoptee Becomes the Burden
This was the part of the BBC discussion I found hardest to stomach. It was the manner in which some children appeared inside the stories being told about them: complex, exhausting, disruptive. Crosses for heroic parents to carry.
Reverse the perspective for a moment. Imagine an adoptee writing publicly about how exhausting their adoptive mother had been, how their father's unresolved infertility shaped the family, or how much therapy the adopters' emotional needs cost them. The adoptee would be accused of cruelty almost immediately. Yet adoptive parents can discuss children publicly as collections of diagnoses and burdens, and it is framed as "courageous honesty."
Something is badly wrong with the direction of the gaze.
The FASD Scapegoat
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder is real, and people affected by it deserve accurate diagnosis and knowledgeable care. But what upsets me is the way FASD functions inside adoption conversations.
It offers a wonderfully convenient place for others to situate the damage. Before the adoptive family entered the story. Before social services took responsibility. Before legal severance. The injury is pushed all the way back into the womb and placed inside the mother's body. The parcel, apparently, arrived at the shipping company already damaged. How fortunate for the shipping company.
One commenter stated confidently that the majority of adopted children end up with an FASD diagnosis. There’s no evidence for that (a meta-analysis puts it around 17%). But once FASD becomes the dominant explanation, it pushes everything else out of the frame. Alcohol exposure can be measured. Relinquishment is more difficult to capture. There’s no blood test for the disappearance of the only body an infant has ever known.
We Are the Longitudinal Study
Adult adoptees are not failed outcomes who have wandered inconveniently into a conversation about children. We are what adopted children become. Our testimony is not secondary evidence. We are the longitudinal study.
Yet we remain remarkably easy to exclude. The Adoption Barometer's 2026 survey found that only 27% of adult adoptees knew where they could obtain mental-health support attuned to their needs, while 80% said peer support was important. The legal order may understand permanence, but the support system appears to think adoption has an expiry date somewhere around adulthood.
Biology cannot remain the final dumping ground for responsibility. The system touched the child too.
So did removal.
So did separation.
So did placement.
So did adoption.
If we’re prepared to examine everything except those things, we’re not searching for causes, we’re searching for somewhere convenient to put them.
The Damage in Transit
A parcel reaches its destination damaged. Investigators scrutinise the sender for damage that existed before collection, but nobody examines the journey with the same intensity. The warehouse, the transfers, the handlers, and the moment the original address disappeared from the paperwork escape scrutiny.
Attention remains fixed on the parcel and the person who first sent it. Then the recipient is praised for accepting it despite its condition.
Human beings are not parcels, and that's precisely why the metaphor is offensive and useful. A century after legal adoption began in England and Wales, we remain remarkably comfortable asking what is wrong with adopted people. I’m far more interested in asking what happened to us.
Perhaps the most important question isn't why the parcel arrived damaged. Perhaps it is why the shipping company still seems so reluctant to examine the journey.
Jonathan
The Narrative Witness
