This Is Us
What the ‘Better Life’ Narrative Takes From Adoptees
Every adoption story is different
“If I’d known, I would have raised you. I don’t know if you would’ve had a better life. My parents would have wanted you too. They would have helped.”
My biological father said that to me when I found him two years ago. I was 50 — the same age my birth mother was when she died of colon cancer. She died before I found her. She told no one about me, not even my father.
I was born in 1968 to an unwed woman who did not know she was pregnant. Conventional wisdom assumed my life would be better if a married couple — a doctor and a homemaker who had adopted a boy four years earlier — parented me.
Perhaps. But do we know that for sure?
No. We can’t. All we know for sure is my life was different.
The dominant culture narrative of adoption presumes that adoption gives the adoptee a better life. Common assumptions are the birth parent did not want the child, the birth parent could not afford to provide for the child, the birth parent was negligent, abusive, or somehow incapable of parenting, that adoptive parents so wanted this child (and went to great expense) — their desire makes them better parents.
