Partially reformed cave goblin<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden" class="u-url mention">@<span>ErikUden</span></a></span> Many of us <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/adoptees" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>adoptees</span></a> would actually prefer for plenary <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/adoption" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>adoption</span></a> to be abolished, or at minimum heavily reformed. Adoption is not the rosy &amp; universally wonderful thing it is frequently advertised as to the general public.</p><p><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Adoptee" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Adoptee</span></a> children have higher rates of certain mental illnesses &amp; substance abuse problems, &amp; have a 3x greater rate of suicide attempts than kept people. There are also serious ethical issues with the perverse incentives of making unplanned or unaffordable children into commodities to be bought &amp; sold by socioeconomically privileged people, rather than creating social support systems that could help preserve family ties wherever possible.</p><p>There&#39;s also the fact that in many places (such as my own home country &amp; state) adoption comes with certain practices which are quite harmful to the child involved; for example, falsifying birth certificates of adoptees &amp; sealing the originals away from them. Only recently has this begun to slowly change, &amp; even now adoptees frequently face patronizing policies that force us to beg for the right to our own records rather than having a right to them. The adoption industry is also known to use predatory, manipulative, &amp; coercive practices to encourage pregnant people to surrender their children for adoption.</p><p>I know that this sentiment of adopting over procreating often comes from good intentions, from people who want to help children in need &amp; be ecologically responsible. However, because people who are drawn towards adopting often view their own actions through this lens of benevolence, the voices of us actual adoptees who speak out about these harms frequently get sidelined. We should be building a world where family separation is a last resort rather than a service industry; where alternatives such as legal guardianship &amp; so-called &quot;simple&quot; adoption protect the rights &amp; interests of children when some degree of separation is required.</p>