Adoption.com Is Anti- Adoptee

Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially responsible for the harm that befell them. This is what happens to adopted people who voice an opinion that is isn't grateful and entirely pleased with adoption.

Religious views combined with men returning home from the war led to an increase in unwed births and subsequent surrender. The adoption process became an industry, finding white babies for paying infertile couples. The phenomenon of victim blaming is well established in human psychology and history; for instance there are plenty of examples in the Old Testament in which tragedies and catastrophes are justified and blamed on the victims for their faults as sinners.

Adoption.com pays a lot for placement in internet searches and is sometimes the first place a searching adopted person will find. They own the domain name "adoption". They will allow an adoptee to post info or ask questions, but no adopted parents or birth mothers really want to hear the life long consequences of adoption. Just browse through the adoptee forum section and see how many posters have "banned" under their screen names. They hide the posts of adopted people or otherwise delete and ban them from the forums. Adult adopted people's opinions are very valuable because they have come full circle and some became parents themselves. Adoption is a lifelong issue that deals with the thread of family continuity and our connection to our ancestors.

Not My Child. Adoptive parents who were unable to acknowledge their child’s needs also had a strong tendency to report that their child does not express a need for admiration, is not sensitive to criticism and does not take pleasure in activities that he/she usually enjoys (anhedonia). These findings support clinical observations that adoptive parents tend to report fewer problems in their children.  Adoptive parents may be trying to make their child feel better about social rejection/problems in reminding them how special they are, it's actually counterproductive, increasing the child's isolation and adoption loss.

Instead of securing therapeutic support as any good parent is obligated to do, they deny the truth. Some are in true denial (unconscious) because it sure seems as though they only see what they want to see. They really do not see the adopted child's needs and problems. Problems that might be precursors to an alienated existence or character flaws.

Adoptive parents of the 60's , 70's and 80's were not aware of the needs of an adopted child. They were told in pamphlets and various other propaganda put out by the adoption industry, that the adopted child is a blank slate and if they were good enough parents they child would not need to search for their genetic families. They did not have an entire generation of adopted people to learn from. Unfortunately, the adopted adolescent's unchallenged grandiosity is also reinforced, possibly hindering future development of normal, fulfilling, and intimate relationships. Vulnerable children are dependent on being loved and cherished as individual human beings; not blamed or valued as trophies for parental sacrificing and sainthood.

Pregnant women want to know if the child they give away will hate them or have a happier life. Suppressing the views of grown adopted people and unhappy mothers of children lost to adoption shows that adoption has something to hide. There is another reason that adoptees and natural mothers are being silenced. Many people are concerned that if the truth about adoption and it's long-term effects on the mother and child were known, the abortion rate would go up. Because of the misperception that they were unwanted and would have been aborted, some adoptees have been known to say they consider themselves a "nine-month abortion."

People should, whether they have adopted a child or not, whether they are pro-choice or pro-life, begin to encourage all natural mothers and adoptees to tell their stories and provide insight into what can be improved about the treatment they have been given. A lack of support for unmarried mothers leads to a greater number of abortions. Statistics show that in the years following Roe v. Wade, as more mothers were supported in keeping their children rather than being forced to surrender them for adoption, the number of abortions dropped off. Babies are not saved from abortion when they are adopted because no child is ever adopted until after it is born.

  A pregnant woman might be best served by telling her that instead of abortion she will have the option to be supported in keeping her child (moral support, financial support from the child's father, parenting classes for both mother and father, young parents groups, and government assistance if necessary). If she does find after her child is born that she really does not want her child, she will still have the option to surrender all parental rights .According to statistics compiled on Adoption.com, the mothers whose children are adopted-out often come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.  Unfortunately they are uninformed, misinformed and have no moral support from anyone due to the mistaken belief that they will soon get over the loss of their child and that their child will not know "the difference".

Children are not best served by adoption, which provides them a trauma situation where they are torn between their natural and adoptive families. Adoption is not a better life, but a different one.
Pregnant mothers are being encouraged to "choose" adoption before their children are born and even to choose prospective adopters. It makes it very hard for a mother to disappoint the seemingly kind people later when she realizes she loves her child more than anything in the world and wants to keep him/her. The people served by this are those hoping to adopt an infant and those who profit from adoption. Those older foster children who truly need a home are not served by it, either.

Adopting a 7 year old child who is legally free with no kinship placement available can be a good thing. Adopting an older dog out of a shelter who will otherwise die is a good thing. Everyone wants a kitten, no one wants a cat. People think nothing of donating to a fundraising site for people to adopt a newborn baby. People are not entitled to be parents. Financial support for an expectant single mother is not a support of her sin of unmarried sex. Supporting a single mother to keep her baby is not going against anyone's religious beliefs or encouraging people to sin. It is in the best interest of the child who is a victim of circumstance.

Adoption.com says nothing about the devastating effect that this may have on both the mother AND on her baby. None of them talk about the unending grief and symptoms of PTSD that most mothers will experience from losing their children. Many women bury these emotions for years usually until at least a year into reunion with their child, at which point the repressed memories re-surface and devastating guilt begin. A natural parent's PTSD can introduce an added complication into the reunion, especially if the adoptee is not aware that this is a common occurrence.

There are literally THOUSANDS of websites out there encouraging women - especially young women - to give up their babies. Infertility is a burning, painful loss. Often, couples focus so much on what they are going through that they overlook the fact that their child will need a different kind of support and guidance as they wrestle with what it means to them to be adopted. For those who contemplate adoption, it is important to know that adoption may cure childlessness but it doesn’t cure infertility.

 Adoption.com has a moral and ethical responsibility to take every action toward safeguarding the best interests of children, enhancing the adoption experience and sustaining families – while achieving equitable treatment for everyone within the extended family of adoption. This includes unhappy adopted people and their original mothers.

Losing A Child To Adoption

The loss of a child to adoption is the most devastating experience a parent can face-and missing the child never goes away. A piece of yourself is lost and your future is forever changed.

Many grieving birth mothers question whether life will hold any meaning for them and wonder how they will survive the pain of their loss. Mothers describe the feeling as having a hole in their heart that will never heal, and may blame themselves and ask, "If only I had." Or they may be angry with their spouse, the physician, God, or the government.

Mothers feel alone and isolated in their grief, as friends and relatives are often at a loss as to what to say. But it is important to talk to people who understand the loss. This may be other first mothers, adoptees, therapists, or support groups.

 

 Everyone suffers loss in different ways depending upon their beliefs, culture, family history, and relationship with the person who fathered the child. It doesn't mean that others care less if they mourn differently than you do. Grief can also vary greatly depending upon the openness of the adoption. While some losses are less visible, such as miscarriage, other experiences of loss are more traumatic.

1. Miscarriage affects about 25 percent of women who become pregnant during their lifetime. The experience of pregnancy loss can be devastating to couples, yet the majority of women who miscarry become pregnant again soon after the loss. This can become emotionally and physically challenging for the couple. They are often plagued with concerns about the possibility of another miscarriage and whether they made an appropriate decision to conceive again.
2. Stillbirths, occurring in about 1% of pregnancies, can leave a feeling of disorientation, yearning and despair. Hospitals will give parents the option of spending time with the baby to say goodbye, and many parents have said that seeing their child was important for their grief process and enabled them to see the baby as a part of themselves. Another form of infant loss is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)-the most frequent cause of death in children under one year of age-that creates a profound void and sense of loss in the family.
3. Approximately 2,000 children are reported missing every day, and these kidnappings and cases of missing children cause parents almost unbearable pain. Not knowing whether a child is dead or alive results in confusion, fright and anxiety. When the bodies of kidnapped children are found, parents may express saddened relief that their children can now have a proper burial and healing can finally begin.
4. The parents of murder victims face many unique struggles in their process of bereavement. A sense of loss of control is common, and the suddenness of the death is so overwhelming that, for a period of time, parents are often incapable of processing through the grief. For this group, dealing with spiritual beliefs, attitudes toward life, and general physical health may hold special importance.
5. Each day, 46 children are diagnosed with cancer in the U.S., and 35% of those will die. Cancer remains the number one disease killer of children. The anguish and extreme pain parents experience begins with diagnosis. One part of the parents' heart hopes for a cure, while the other part begins the quiet process of impending grief.
6. Losing a child to adoption is almost never included because it was the mothers choice. Some mothers especially those of the baby scoop era felt like they didn't have a choice. They were uninformed about the trauma and loss.

Birth mothers often experience more anger, depression, guilt, and physical symptoms than those grieving other losses.

The Loss ( Adoption Loss ) Award Winning Poem

The Loss is a predator that stalks his prey
His shadow has followed me every day
Each birthday when I turn a year older
The Loss gets bigger, darker and bolder
He sucks out the joy from every room
Laces each feeling with sadness and gloom
He crushes my happiness with loneliness and guilt
Smashes the walls from the pain I have built
He is there each holiday evening and noon
He changes the meaning of every tune
At what should be the happiest times of my life
His unwavering stare cuts through like a knife
The Loss has no intention of leaving
He will be there until the day I stop breathing
I tried to outrun him and live in denial
He hid from my view but was there all the while.
He waits in the darkness 'till all my friends leave
When I finally stopped running I was able to grieve

With more days behind me than are left ahead
I asked The Loss if he wanted me dead
"You were given away through no fault of your own
But the sadness you bear is not yours alone
You never knew I stalk yet another
Still running away from being your mother
When you turned to face me and looked in my eyes
Your actions and words caught me by surprise
You did what your mother could never do.
You walked a long mile inside of her shoes
She couldn't acknowledge the hand you were dealt
Nor ever imagine the pain that you felt.
She never once bothered to look at the fact
The face in your mirror is hers staring back
You both know The Loss never really goes away
But she is too afraid to ask me to stay."

Now The Loss and I walk hand in hand.
We stare at the stars all alone in the sand
There are still days of both sunshine and rain
But gone is the secrecy, stigma and shame
The Loss is my oldest and dearest of friends
One of few I can trust to be there at the end.

How To Get Over Being Adopted

The open ended loss of adoption is distinct, unlike any other kind of grief. It is a lifelong issue that  doesn’t resolve itself and because of societal views, resolution is difficult to impossible. The grief is regularly re-awakened. Learning how to cope with the ongoing nature of your adoption isn’t unlike learning to live in a war zone, with no peace in sight, or surviving with PTSD. There are skills and techniques that can make coping easier for you and for those around you, and there are resources you can draw on as you build a life that can endure the constant highs and lows of unresolved loss. The survival skills necessary to deal with an unhealthy and painful situation for extended periods of time aren’t automatic, and many adoptees can’t find them without a little help from other adopted people.

All adoptions are NOT the same. There is a difference between the child removed from her biological home from horrible abuse and being later adopted by foster parents as opposed to the child given away at birth from an underage mother. Growing up knowing your real name and some biological family members eases the pain. Being able to reunite (whether good or bad ) with the biological family is also a relief for the pain, but because of current laws and shameful adoptive practices not all adopted people are allowed these two comforts. The adopted person who does not know his or her true origins is in limbo.

Many adopted people may have had good homes. Why then would they choose to search for their real families? While not wanting to offend the adoptive family may hinder the adoptee's decision to search, there are people who want to know and people who do not. Much like wanting to know the gender of your unborn child. 60 percent of people want to know what color to paint the nursery while others choose to live with the fantasy. The difference is you'll eventually find out. Many adopted people who do not search are very open to being found and put their info on reunion sites "just in case" but it really deals with the underlying issue of not wanting to be rejected or be seen as ungrateful.

Until you have come full circle and accepted the truth over the fantasy, you can not start to heal. The biggest mystery of your life is unsolved. Adopted people need to fill in the gaps in their own lives in order to feel more complete. Closure is very important to the healing process. Helen Keller said "The only way to get to the other side is to go through the door."

Grief is not a disease. What if someone you loved very much died and you were discouraged from crying? Adoption loss is a ROLLER COASTER. Some days you don't think much about it, other days you find yourself in the depths of despair. Non adopted people feel uncomfortable with your grief and will shut you down or minimize it. It would be like a white person telling a black person in the United States, fully knowing the history of slavery, that they are being overly sensitive about discrimination. Just because the white person may not be racist or treat black people differently there is no way they could ever know what it is like to be African American in America or to grow up not knowing a single biological relative. I can cover my eyes with tape and pretend to be blind for a whole day and that would not even be a drop in the bucket of what it is like to be blind in a seeing population. Don't get your advice from adopted people who come from the worst biological homes as they are in the minority. There is no single adoption experience and any number of factors, not just childhood trauma or age of adoption that influence how a adoptee deals with adoption loss. 27 percent of soldiers coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq report PTSD while the suicide rate among veterans is 4 times higher than the civilian population. This suggests the numbers are much higher than reported as is true for adoption loss.


So how do you get over being adopted? You don't, but knowing that is the key. For those who are unable to find their families for closure because of laws preventing them from accessing their birth certificates (which I have termed ambiguous adoption loss ) you must learn to live life as fully as possible despite the uncertainty and the persistent sorrow it can create. Remember that most adoptive parents wanted a child. No one knocked on their door and begged them to take you in and you don't owe anyone anything. You got the short end of the stick and you just have to make the best of it. Your mother most likely would not have given you away if she thought you would not find a good home. The universe is not punishing you nor is there a reason for your adoption other than the circumstances surrounding it.There are plenty of people who have it much worse than you although it is pretty sad you have to think about it that way. Get exercise, eat healthy, light a nice smelling candle, clean your house, organize your life and finances, take a walk through the woods, travel to new places, visit the grave of a loved one,  put little signs around your house like "It is what it is" or "don't let too much of yesterday take up too much of today" to remind you not to dwell too much on it. Most importantly don't let anyone tell you how to feel. If you are lucky enough to be in reunion you can always help other adopted people change the laws or find the missing pieces of their own self. Remember you deserve to be here. Most of the people on this planet are not planned pregnancies and more and more children are born to unmarried mothers. Happiness is relative to the observer.

13 Reasons Why Adopted Children Are Not Lucky

1. Unlike a child who has lost his or her parents through death they are not allowed to grieve. Adoptees are expected to be grateful for the family they now have. The public perceives it as disrespectful to the adoptive family and is discouraged.
2. Adopted people are viewed to have had a better life. Some adoptees do get a nice, stable home but it comes along with the trauma and grief of losing their original family. Statistically adopted children are at an increased risk of child abuse and later in life drug and alcohol abuse.
3. Adopted people have their records sealed and are unable to open them in most states. Not all adoption agencies reported the correct facts or passed on information. Many adoptees that were able to reunite with their biological families found that they had never received updates, photos and letters given to the agency. They also found their reason given for surrender was incorrect and also things like cultural heritage, family medical history and siblings.
4. Adopted people can never go home. There is a misconception that at 18 a child can do what they want and be a part of both families. Most adopted people are a part of two families, but are neither fully a part of either.
5. Adopted people experience genetic bewilderment and the lack of mirroring. Being able to see how tall you will be or how your body is shaping through puberty is more than a mere curiosity. It is essential to being able to transition from child to adult.
6. Denial of information regarding ancestors. The adopted person wonders not just who gave birth to them , but if they are related to someone famous or have an inherited trait or skill. Adoptees wonder what jobs they should have and think about the legacy they want to leave behind for their own descendants.
7. Birthdays are triggering for adopted people. Most people whether they were a planned pregnancy or not are visited in the hospital by family. Photos are taken at birth and the first bonding begins between mother and child. For most adopted people their birth was a sad occasion with decisions made for them that not only affect their adolescence, but the rest of their lives.
8. Children adopted internationally are sometimes the victims of coercion or kidnapping. They are not only losing their family heritage but an entire culture and way of life.
9. Adopted people are used in pro-life arguments. They are seen as poster children for anti-abortion groups. It would be wrong to assume that every one of those relinquishments actually averted an abortion. Many women placing their baby for adoption may never have considered abortion in the first place. Adoption rates almost always include foster care from children removed from abuse or neglect that were never candidates for abortion.
10. When having their own children, adoptees often relive the trauma of their adoption. They realize how vulnerable they were and how much they love the child they have brought into the world. It is hard to imagine how someone could give the most precious thing in the world away because of their current financial situation. It is then that many adoptees feel the loss of adoption. It overshadows what should otherwise be a joyous time in their lives.
11. The lack of birth family connection can be a strain during childhood. Much like those who have a loved one who is presumed missing or dead the adopted person thinks of them often. Sometimes it can become an obsession and disrupt their lives.
12. Adopted people because of the stigma and shame of the history adoption have self esteem problems. Just growing up away from where they belong and not having the most basic things like being told how much they look like their sibling, parent or other family member can be an emotional strain. While the adoptive parents and children feel as though they are a family, other extended family or the public may not feel the same about their family bonds.
13.  One is not simply adopted on one day or date. Being adopted is a life long part of the adoptees identity and can carry onto their own offspring. Every time the adopted person looks in the mirror or at their own children it is a constant reminder of their true origins. When the adoptee is watching a news story about breast or prostate cancer or reads a new study on family history regarding heart disease they can not help but think of their birth families.
    
    

    

The Cons Of Egg and Embryo Donation

 

Embryo Adoption (as it is rightly called) is a fertilized egg with no genetic match to either parent being born to people often who otherwise do not qualify for traditional adoption. This can be due to age, lack of funds ect. Even though the child will be born to the mother it will not look like either parent and be no different to a baby adopted at birth.

The donor family is usually a husband and wife who froze eggs due to cost and saving the mother from another extraction. When they have conceived all of the children they wish to have, a surplus is left over. The new term for this is "snowflake baby". They feel they don't wish to donate them to science or otherwise destroy them so they are placed for adoption. Contact between the families can be open or closed. Laws are not in place yet to oversee this.

 The lack of knowledge of and definite relationship to one's genealogy,  “genealogical bewilderment”, and which can result in the stunting of emotional development in adopted children and can lead them to irrational rebellion against their adoptive parents and the world as a whole. Ignorance about their personal origin made adolescence more of a strain for adopted children than other children and genealogical bewilderment is a factor which frequently appears to be present in adoption stress.

Several other researchers found a predilection for impulsive behavior and acting out, antisocial symptoms in adopted children at birth. Adopted children often go through a stage of feeling like an outsider. He may fantasize about the person he would have been had he been raised by his "real " family. The child will think about his genetic parents everyday. This is true with knowing the parents and without in open and closed adoptions. When the child is asked who she looks like or how many brother or sisters he has. His cultural heritage may not be the same and his medical history will not match the parents.As the child becomes an adolescent he will have great difficulty establishing a sense of self because he will have no sense of his true history or heritage. He will not know who is supposed to be because he will not know his true origins if the adoption is closed or semi open. Not knowing another biological relative makes one feel like a misfit. The first relative most adoptees meet is their own child. The birth of a child in an adoptees life always brings the question..."how could I give this baby away"?

How would a person feel to know that they were not needed by their original family? That somewhere there is a loving mom, dad and full blood siblings that get to grow up with them while the child is born to a world where he or she should be grateful they were not destroyed. Would the donor mother feel the same if she carried the child to term and gave him away or is it a disconnection from a group of cells in a freezer? What if the child is abused or not told they are adopted? What if the adoptive family does not honor the open agreement?

The major issue here is cost. In most instances it is cheaper to create extra embryos and cheaper to adopt an embryo than a child. The Catholic Church is also debating this topic.In 2008, the Vatican released a major document on bioethics, “Dignitas Personae” (“The Dignity of a Person”), that reiterated the Catholic view that embryos should not be created in the lab and frozen, but added that embryo adoption is also not allowed. It is, the document said, “a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved.” In the United States, Congress and the Bush administration gave $1 million to promote embryo adoption.

Embryo donation is legally considered a property transfer and not an adoption by state laws. However, Georgia enacted a statute called the "Option of Adoption Act" in 2009 which provided a procedure for couples to become eligible for the federal Adoption Tax Credit.

Embryo adoption is implanting cells which could not grow on their own. If not for artificial means would die on their own. They were intentionally created in a lab and can remain frozen indefinitely."All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and are entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status." There will be no original birth certificate or hospital record should the donor recipient decide to not tell the person he or she is not adopted. If there is a flood, fire or unexpected death the identity of the adopted person's ancestors will be lost forever. Not telling people they are adopted is a bad practice. Less than 5 % of adoptions are closed. The sealing of birth records is a short lived, bad practice that caused unnecessary suffering.

There is also a new way to choose the donor egg and donor sperm thus intentionally creating an orphan with no intention of ever being used for the genetic parents. If your personal or religious views support embryo donation as an alternative to destroying the embryo you must consider that creating a human being with no relation to either parent in a closed adoption who wouldn't exist otherwise is morally wrong and reprehensible. Enter the "designer baby" who is destined to be top of the class, excel in math, and have hair, eyes and other physical characteristics that fit his or her parents' wish list.The main objection to the procedure is that it opens the door to a world of unethical possibilities. A very slippery slope for future generations.

Adopted children face loss in the most loving of homes. Our ancestors and family history help give us a sense of belonging and define who we are. Adoption is a life-long issue that deals with identity and the broken thread of family continuity. Being adopted is not always a better life, but a different one. One must decide if embryo donation is adoption or it isn't. If the embryo is a person for abortion issues it must have the same rights for embryo donation issues. One must put their own wants and needs aside and consider the dignity of an adopted person even if he or she is only in the beginning stages of life.

Closed Adoption Is Child Abuse

Adoption was a social experiment in which babies born to unmarried mothers were taken at birth and given to strangers for adoption. It was claimed to be in the best interests of the child, who would be protected from the slur of illegitimacy and would have a better life in the adoptive family. Adoption enabled infertile married couples to have a family, and the State saved money on its welfare bill.
Adoption legislation was first introduced in the 1920s, but adoption was slow to be accepted, due to the belief that immorality and other evil tendencies were passed on from mother to child. After World War II, however, when environment was seen as more important than heredity in the development of the child, adoption became more popular. It was believed that mothers would not bond with their babies if the babies were taken immediately after birth, and the mothers were prevented from seeing them, and that babies would bond successfully with their adoptive families if they were placed as soon as possible after birth. All ties with the natural mother were then severed, the child was issued with a new birth certificate which showed him as being born to the adoptive parents, and the records were sealed.
Adoption was promoted as being in the best interests of the child. Mothers were expected to forget about their child and get on with their lives, get married and have children of their own. Adoption was seen as an instant cure for infertility. None of these beliefs was based on any scientific evidence.
In 1952 a British psychiatrist, Wellisch, drew attention to a problem of adoption - the lack of knowledge of and definite relationship to one's genealogy, which he termed “genealogical bewilderment”, and which could result in the stunting of emotional development in adopted children and could lead them to irrational rebellion against their adoptive parents and the world as a whole, and eventually to delinquency. Ignorance about their personal origin made adolescence more of a strain for adopted children than other children and genealogical bewilderment is a factor which frequently appears to be present in adoption stress.
Several other researchers found a predilection for impulsive behavior and acting out, antisocial symptoms in adopted children. (Simon & Senturia, 1966; Jackson, 1968) They were found to have serious adjustment problems in adolescence (McWhinnie, 1969), and all seemed to have a sense of abandonment by the birth parents irrespective of experiences. (Triseliotis, 1971) Triseliotis suggested that the wound could be healed in a loving adoptive family, but the scar always remains.

The child who does not grow up with his own biological parents, who does not even know them or any one of his own blood, is an individual who has lost the thread of family continuity. A deep identification with our forebears, as experienced originally in the mother-child relationship, gives us our most fundamental security. :xplode
However it was not until 1991 that anyone writing about adoption gave any serious consideration to the traumatic effects of separating mother and child at birth. Nancy Verrier hypothesised that the severing of the connection between the child and biological mother causes a primal wound, which often manifests in a sense of loss (depression), basic mistrust (anxiety), emotional and/or behavioral problems, and difficulties in relationships with significant others.
Studies conducted on animals, particularly other primates, indicate that there may be a biological basis for what Verrier calls the primal wound. Reite in 1978 demonstrated that when monkey infants were separated from their mothers they experienced decreases in body temperature and sleep pattern changes, even when the separated infants were immediately adopted by another adult female. Reite suggests that these physiological changes are not due to the physical absence of the mother, but are caused, at least in part, by the perception of loss of the mother on the part of the infant, i.e., the cause is essentially psychological.
Separation of newborn babies from their mothers causes a high secretion of the stress hormone cortisol. (Bowlby 1980; Noble 1993) There is physiological evidence from studies of laboratory rats that the level of maternal care given to the infant influences its response to stress: the more care, the lower the levels of hormones like adrenaline in reaction to stressful circumstances. People who are highly reactive to stress are at greater risk for the development of depression, and drug and substance abuse problems, etc. Adopted people have a greater vulnerability to stress, and are also at greater risk for depression and drug and substance related abuse problems.
Studies in primates show that if an infant is deprived of its mother soon after birth, the infant's brain does not develop normally. For example, the number and sensitivity of the infant's brain receptor sites for endorphins - the internal morphine-like chemicals that affect mood - are diminished."
Birth
Vicki M. Rummig, author of "Adoption: Trauma that Lasts a Life Time," reports that, "When the adoptee is separated from her birth mother, she undergoes extensive trauma. She will not remember this trauma, but it will stay in her subconscious as she lived it." How long the newborn will live with this trauma is unknown since a baby's memory cannot be quantified. "An event from a person's infancy can and will stay with them through life," says Nancy Verrier, author of "The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child." It's no coincidence, Rummig suggests, that many of these children grow up to be emotionally wounded. It should be noted that Rummig herself was adopted as a baby.

Teens
Adopted children often go through a stage of feeling like an outsider. He may fantasize about the person he would have been had she not been adopted. He'll come up with ideas of what his birth parents are like and may even produce a ghost-like image of what his life and family would have been like. Rummig describes the experience that he and other adoptees have as "feeling like my adoptive family is in a big circle but I am on the outside looking in.
With the adoptee not having a role model who resembles her physically or psychologically, it is more difficult to define where her life shall lead. She may come from a biologically artistic family, but adopted into a scientific family. She may not only feel the need to follow in her adoptive family’s footsteps, attending similar colleges, choosing similar careers, but she did not have the artistic role model to show her that way of life. This further complicates the identity formation of the adoptee. “One’s identity begins with the genes and family history...” (Reitz & Watson, 1992, p. 134)
Adoptees also lack the ability to see their physical characteristics as they will present themselves in the future. A natural born daughter would be able to tell how big she is going to be, if she will have a tendency to be overweight, or if she is going to go grey early in life, but the adoptee is denied this genetic role model and will not know these things until she reaches that stage in life herself. This adds to the curiosity of wanting to know their genetic background.
Rachel says that families are a hall of mirrors, “Everyone but adoptees can look in and see themselves reflected. I didn’t know what it was like to be me. I felt like someone who looks into a mirror and sees no reflection. I felt lonely, not connected to anything, floating, like a ghost.” (Lifton, 1994, p. 68)
The adoptee will feel even more dissociated when conversations regarding other family members or peers births are brought up. She is missing the story of her birth parents meeting, her conception, her birth, and in some instances, sometime after her birth. It is often commented that the adoptee feels placed on this earth, not born or that they are some type of space alien. Non-adoptees take their own life story for granted, but the adoptee is acutely aware that theirs is missing. So now, not only does the adoptee feel dissociated from her adoptive family, but also from her peers, for she is different.
Adoptees are faced with a feeling of loss and grief that they are not allowed, by society, to actively mourn. “With adoption, the child experiences a loss (like divorce or death) of an unknown person, and doesn’t know why.” (Adopting Resources, 1995) She is aware that family members are lost to her, but is expected to not mourn the loss of this family member she has never known. She will often be chastised when asking questions of her birth family from her adoptive family.
The consensus among researchers is that adoption affects development throughout life, with the fact of "being adopted," creating unique responses to significant life-events, e.g., the birth of a child
In Western culture, the dominant conception of family revolves around a heterosexual couple with biological offspring. As a consequence, research indicates, disparaging views of adoptive families exist, along with doubts concerning the strength of their family bonds
The most recent adoption attitudes survey completed by the Evan Donaldson Institute provides further evidence of this stigma. Nearly one-third of the surveyed population believed adoptees are less-well adjusted, more prone to medical issues, and predisposed to drug and alcohol problems. Additionally, 40-45% thought adoptees were more likely to have behavior problems and trouble at school. In contrast, the same study indicated adoptive parents were viewed favorably, with nearly 90% describing them as, "lucky, advantaged, and unselfish."
Not all of these issues affect adoptees to the same extent. Some may spend a lifetime dwelling on it, others may not even appear to notice. This would be true of any group of people that lived through trauma, such as Vietnam War Veterans. It should be noted that adoptees are over represented in residential treatment centers.