I know I've written about this before, but one of my friends said she really liked an answer I gave on Yahoo! Answers. The question asked (again - this question comes up so often is disheartening) why people opposed adoption.
Here is my answer (edited to avoid the particulars of the original asker's details). I thought I'd share it here as perhaps a more succinct statement of other things I've tried to express.
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As an adoptee, I want people to understand that adoption is a very complicated proposition, rife with emotional pitfalls. I have never felt unequivocally happy about my adoption, even while I love my adoptive parents. Why? Because adoption starts with loss. The one person in the whole world who should have loved the child and cared for him or her more than anything in the world either couldn't or wouldn't. That's a loss. That loss needs to be acknowledged by society, and it rarely is.
In most adoptions, when the adoption finalizes, the birth certificate is changed to something that is a lie. Mine says that my (adoptive) mother gave birth to me. But that is simply false. And my original birth certificate is then sealed away forever out of my sight. People on a daily basis tell me that I should be grateful for having parents who loved me, as though I didn't deserve love and care. We even get asked if we would rather have been aborted, as though grieving our loss is somehow impermissible because we could have lost more. Adoptees and their perspectives (please note the plural - I am not saying there is only one perspective from adoptees) are often marginalized. We have little voice in the discussion.
Until society is willing to have an honest discussion about the effects of adoption on children (the ones that adoption is supposed to help), I (and many others) will speak out about it, and will be called "fringe" and worse.
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