12 Things People Always Ask Me About Adoption
...and why these questions matter.
As a specialist in the architecture and purpose of human adoption in society, I am routinely asked the same questions.
Q1. “I know adopted people who had positive experiences – do you think a bad experience has shaped your view of adoption, and you are perhaps projecting that onto the whole system?”
This is the most common question, but it’s like saying, ‘I know some women aren’t abused, so your experience must be an exception.’
It’s not about whether I had a good or bad adoption or if I’m happy. It’s about how the system treats all adopted people as second-class citizens with fewer rights than the non-adopted.
Because of the secrecy defines human adoption we tend to individualise the expereience, but individual happiness isn’t proof that a system is just.
My experience reflects a structural truth: adoption removes identity, hides history, and privileges adult desire over a non-consenting person’s right to truth.
It’s about an embedded legal and social system that is unjust, inequitable and unethical.
Q2: “Surely some children are genuinely better off with adoptive parents than their biological ones?”
All children deserve to be with safe and loving caregivers. But adoption is not welfare (we have other legislation to manage welfare issues).
That question assumes a binary: adoption or remaining in harm.
Removing a child from danger doesn’t require permanent legal erasure of their identity, ancestry, and rights. Safety and stability can be provided through guardianship, kinship care, or open foster arrangements, without the lifelong legal fiction that adoption imposes.
Even if the adoptive home is materially better, this doesn’t mean the adopted person is emotionally or psychologically “better off.”
All adopted people live with legal inequalities stemming not from maltreatment but from adoption itself.
Q3. “Orphanage or Adoption? Surely adoption is better than growing up in an orphanage?”
This is also a false binary.
Intercountry adoption turns children into legal orphans to satisfy foreign demand.
It should never be the ‘solution’ to poverty or poor social policy.At least 25 countries have fully or partially banned or suspended intercountry adoption (ICA), either permanently or temporarily, due to corruption, trafficking, or human rights concerns.
Q4: “Wouldn’t it be better to strengthen the NZ Adoption Act to ensure it genuinely prioritises the best interests of the child?”
That assumes we know what “the best interests of the child” actually are.
“Best interests of the child” is vague, subjective, and often shaped by adult desires or state convenience, not by the lived reality of adopted people, or by the science of the damage maternal separation inflicts on infants.
Reforming any adoption legislation without defining “best interests” from an adopted person’s perspective risks preserving the same harms under a softer label.
If the best interests of all children are safety, identity, continuity, and legal equality, why does adoption not include safety checks, why does it still erase ancestry, sever kin, and block lifelong access to truth?
Q5: “When did you find out you were adopted?” (And why is it offensive to ask?)
That question assumes there’s a right time to be told you’ve been transplanted into a stranger’s family.
As if when we discover we are legally kinless is a curiosity, not a trauma.
To ask is to trivialise a profound personal experience, while centring the questioner’s curiosity.
It’s offensive because it reduces complex identity shock, grief, and loss of trust to a casual anecdote.
Q6: “Aren’t you worried you’ll upset your adoptive parents?” (And why is it offensive to ask?)
Why is an adopted person’s truth always expected to be subordinate to their adopters’ needs?
Why is our pain something we must protect others from?
This question assumes that adoptive parents’ comfort matters more than the adopted person’s right to understand their own life.Meanwhile, depending on your sources, genealogy and the creation of family trees is the second most popular hobby in the United States after gardening and/or porn.
Many adopted people want what their adopters take for granted—authentic and genuine ancestry.
It’s offensive because it frames an adopted person’s search for truth as betrayal.
Q7: “Why aren’t you grateful for all the advantages your adoptive parents gave you?”
This question is so common that I should print it on a t-shirt.
Gratitude should never be a condition of being raised. In general, the non-adopted are not expected by family and strangers alike to be grateful that they were fed and clothed.
Why should adopted people owe a lifetime of gratitude for the basic care every child deserves?
This question implies that being adopted is a favour, something altruistic, deserving of special recognition.
It demands emotional servitude in exchange for survival, ignoring what was taken: family, heritage, identity.
It insists we focus only on what was given.
It reinforces the idea that adoption is a transaction.
It prioritises the needs of adopters.Gratitude is code for: Don’t question, or speak unless it flatters the adoptive narrative. That’s not gratitude. That’s coercion dressed as virtue.
This question tells us we are expected to remain loyal to silence, to prioritise someone else’s feelings over our need for authenticity. That’s not love. That’s control.
Q8: “We hardly ever hear about 'birth fathers. ’ Why are fathers not featured in the adoption discourse?”
This is a critical and underexamined dimension of New Zealand’s 1955 Adoption Act.
While all unplanned out-of-wedlock pregnancy was framed as the woman’s moral failure, the biological father was absolved of all legal, financial, and moral or ethical responsibility.
Adoption enabled men to:
Hide their pre or extramarital paternity.
Prevent future claims on estates or reputation.
Re-inscribe a clean male legacy: wives and legitimate children only.
Unmarried mothers were not allowed to name fathers on their child's birth certificate.
The 1985 Adult Adoption Information Act failed to acknowledge or remedy this.
A 2005 Supreme Court ruling brought that protection into the 21st century, further absolving fathers from responsibility and reinforcing legitimacy as a prerequisite for inheritance.
The 1955 Adoption Act and associated Acts cleanse the male record, deny the adopted person access to their rightful legacy, and institutionalise inequality along lines of legitimacy, gender, and power.
Q9: “Why is it so difficult to adopt?”
This is such a common question.
The adoption process is no more difficult today than in the last seven decades. Instead, it is an issue of supply.
The moment there were options such as the Domestic Purpose Benefit, birth control, and abortion access, the supply of babies dried up.
Adoption is a demand-driven industry that relies on vulnerable, under-resourced women to supply an in-demand product. The rhetoric of “adoption is so difficult” serves to obscure this uncomfortable truth.
Q10: “Why is the adoption system so broken?”
The adoption system is not broken - it functions precisely as designed. New Zealand’s 1955 Adoption Act (and similar frameworks elsewhere in the world) were built to:
Sever a child completly from their original family.
Install adoptive parents as legal replacements.
Seal original identities.
Erase ALL kinship ties.
This system has operated seamlessly for decades in that it continues to ensure that people taken as non-consenting infants have no intrinsic right to their records, or to annul the contract they were the object and subject of, but not party to.
Q11: “What if you desperately desire a child and can’t have one yourself?”
Decades of messaging have framed adoption as:
A solution to involuntary childlessness.
A path to "build a family" with social approval.This framing creates a sense of entitlement. If you want a child, there should be one there for you.
Adoption is not a noble or even an altruistic act. It is a desire characterised as a need that requires the body of an often unrelated woman and her child to fulfil.When the supply doesn’t match the demand, frustration sets in.
For the infant, all adoption is forced.
We know that maternal separation and the stripping of identity harm adopted people. And yet, we propagate the idea that ‘love is enough.’
The desire for a clean-slate baby is not about children’s best interests; it is about adult preferences.
The issue of surrogacy follows on from here. I leave this issue to those with lived experience of having been created and commodified to meet adult needs.
Q12: “Has the history of forced adoption caused us to swing too far the other way?”
This framing assumes adoption is the only, or even best, solution for children in need.
The drop in adoption isn’t a swing too far; it reflects a deeper reckoning with its harms.
It represents the availability of options for many (but not all) under-resourced mothers.
Prioritising family preservation, kinship care, and open guardianship isn’t extreme, it’s evidence-based child welfare.
The idea that fewer adoptions are are a “swing too far” presumes that adoption is inherently beneficial. The real question is: beneficial for whom?
If we’re truly centring the adopted person, then avoiding legal severance from kin is not a swing too far; it would be a long-overdue correction.
Any course-correction must also provide for the right of all adopted people to choose to become unadopted.
Do you have other questions? Just ask.
Liking the post doesn't feel quite right as the content is enlightening but not particularly likeable......it rather feels like I've had an eye patch on when looking at adoption and you Barbara, have given me a laser treatment. I feel a deep sadness for the mothers who lost their children in the worst way, not dead but dead to them. The mothers who couldn't reckon with not being able to have their own biological child and couldn't look at themselves in mirror in acceptance but most of all the children. Children filled with questions they were afraid to ask, deep feelings they could not name and the threats inherent to 'biologically unrelated' children coming to fruition in their small, controlled lives.
I can only imagine the collective sigh in the ether as you opened Pandoras box with both, your lived experience and the factual information you have mined to present from the souls of those never able to speak for themselves, to those gathering now to reinforce your findings as a voice not only for yourselves but for the generations fallen silent , honoring their lives and as a catalyst to reform for future souls whose literal lives are on the dotted line.
This is the best set of rebuttals to all the rhetorical claptrap around adoption that I've seen. As a 62 year old adoptee, I'm just now waking up to the way my identity was erased even though I had a happy childhood and parents who were straightforward about my adoption. (They had swallowed the framing and messages, too.) In the U.S. where I live, 37 out of 50 states still cloak adoptee identities in secrecy. Some of our Supreme Court justices used the childless parent trope to justify overturning a woman's right to privacy around reproductive decisions. Which means that in some U.S. states, women who miscarry are being jailed, children as young as 9 are being forced to carry pregnancies to term, and in Texas, a woman who was declared legally dead while 6 weeks pregnant will be kept on life support until the baby is born. The adoption rhetoric spewed out by the adoption industry greases a slippery slope into dystopia.