Complicating the Narrative with the Adoption Constellation

48 min readDec 24, 2022

Me and a group of birth mothers and adoptees at the Concerned United Birth Parents retreat in Tampa, FL. October 2022.

Trigger Warning: This report contains information about sensitive topics regarding unaliving oneself and sexual assult.

Introduction

The community I have chosen to work with for this program is adoptees and birth mothers who are looking to push for social change centering around adoption. I wanted to work with this community, because being an adopted person myself, I have first-hand experience with the mental and physical health impacts adoption can have on someone. After starting my research, I was stunned to discover a number of accountability gaps and information needs that weren’t being met as well as adoption myths that have been perpetuated as truth that I myself believed. Stunned, because I am part of this community, so how did I not know about these things?

While the community as a whole is fighting for a number of things — from legislation changes to mental health resources — a throughline I saw throughout was the need to bring our own community, as well as the public, up to speed by complicating the public narrative around adoption. There are so many people who are impacted by adoption who aren’t aware of these issues, nor how it has likely affected them, so it’s not surprising that people who aren’t impacted by adoption aren’t aware either. One reason this is the case is because, on the surface, many adopted people have had a “positive” experience with adoption (i.e. they were in stable and loving homes) and birth mothers are rarely public about their experiences with it. So no one has given them any reason to look deeper about how it may have impacted them. But as any adoption-competent therapist will tell you, adoption is a traumatic event. Thinking about this raised questions, like:

How can an adoptee who is struggling with their mental health know to search for adoption-competent therapists if they were not made aware how adoption may have contributed to this?
How can pregnant people who are considering placing a child for adoption know how to assess the ethics of adoption agencies and lawyers, if they don’t know the often coercive tactics that are involved, or that they have limited legal rights?
How can adoptive parents know how to tend to their children’s unique challenges as adoptees, if they aren’t made aware of all of the struggles they may face in the first place?

Questions like these are what made me realize how complicating the narrative around adoption needs to be made a priority in the media and press. But not everyone is ready to be public with their story, or even outing themselves as being impacted by adoption, on social media or as sources in a piece of journalism. So I set out to create opportunities for this community to share what they know in formats that felt safe and authentic: through creating vetted journalistic content on multiple social platforms.

Common Myth-Conceptions

Birth Mothers Prefer Being Called “Birth Mothers”
The term “birth mothers,” while it’s the legal term for a woman who has relinquished her child into adoption, by being on numerous private adoption Facebook groups I have seen in their community guidelines specifically to not use the terms ``birth mom, bmom or bio mom” as many find this offensive. After speaking with community members I learned that the reason is that it makes many of them feel like birthing vessels. While many don’t mind the term “birth mother” since it’s become so normalized, most in this community have told me they prefer just being called “mother.” Other alternatives are “first mom” and “natural mom,” but never “biological mom.” I have spoken with two trans birth parents and while both of them identify as he/they, one of them likes to be referred to as a mom or parent, while the other prefers the more non-binary term “parent.” I’ve learned that the term should be treated like a pronoun, because everyone has a different preference. To tailor my callouts and prompts to suit everyone, I finally landed on the least offensive term, which was “mother’s who have relinquished.”
These differing terms illustrate who really controls the narrative when it comes to adoption. The term “birth mother” was coined by an adoptive parent when quoted in a women’s magazine when talking about adoption, and later incorporated into what became known as “positive adoption language( P.A.L.)” This was to associate the birth mother with making a responsible choice, so she wouldn’t be painted as a victim. Adoptive parents, however, were always referred to as parents, without a qualifier. This is indicative of the power dynamic between adoptive parents and birth parents, where adoptive parents have largely controlled the narrative in the media about how adoption is seen. While many birth parents are okay with this term, as it is now the legal term, many are upset by this as they don’t want to be associated with P.A.L. as the coercive tactics used on them during the adoption process caused them to be victimized by the adoption process. They also don’t feel as though a qualifier should be necessary when they still carried a child to term.
Adoptees are “Chosen” and “Lucky”
During the last year of this program, I have had all of my preconceived notions about adoption growing up challenged and many of them proven to be based on outdated models and inflated fairy tale takes by the media. In turn, I have found myself continually frustrated with having to debunk these myths for others as well: my professors, editors, friends and even others who are adopted persons themselves. Growing up, I was told that my adopted sister and I were chosen and because of this we were very special. Which sounds great, but over the last year, I learned that many other adoptees were told this as well. In a simple Google search of “‘chosen one’ ‘special’ adopted child”, over two million results come up, with many being adoptees (and even a book written by adoptee called The Special Chosen One) talking about their experience of growing up being told they were special or chosen. While I had a difficult time finding the origin of how this trend came to be, I did find a study about the effect on various “adoption entrance” narratives, “Chosen” being one of them. The reality is, the idea that we as adoptees were chosen against all other babies at the orphanage (which haven’t actually existed in the US in decades) is false. Adoptive parents in the domestic private and agency system can range anywhere from a few months to a few years — so more often than not, adoptees were usually just the next available child to be adopted by the parents.
Adoptees who are adopted at birth in closed adoptions are the least likely to be impacted by adoption
As mentioned above, the “blank slate theory” is rather outdated. Studies show that adoptees who are adopted before three years of age experience what is known as “pre-verbal trauma,” meaning that before this age, a child isn’t able to experience explicit memories (such as facts and events) but they do retain implicit memories (unconscious, perceptual). When adoptees are abandoned at birth by their primary caregivers, this commonly results in long-lasting attachment issues, depression, anxiety, hypervigilance and C-PTSD. It is compounded when children move from foster home to foster home before ending up with an adoptive family. Early childhood experts also believe that we inherit feelings our mothers had while they were pregnant with us, and since birth mothers are often experiencing crisis when they are pregnant, this in turn could be passed on to the adoptee. “Early pre-and post-natal experiences, including trauma, are encoded in the implicit memory of the fetus,” states Paula Thompson, a birth psychology researcher.
Birth mothers gave up their children willingly to have a better life
I have engaged with close to one hundred birth mothers in-person, in listening posts or in interviews (and if including social media engagement, closer to two-hundred) and all but one of them wanted to keep their child and be a parent. The most common thread as to why they placed their child for adoption was socio-economic. Birth mothers who have led the charge for adoption reform have come out of what is known as the “Baby Scoop Era,” which is the period between WWII and Roe v. Wade where there were an estimated 1.5 million forced adoptions in the US alone. The Baby Scoop Era, aka the “Scoop Era,” is said to have ended around the time of Roe v. Wade because when abortion was made widely legal/available, women had more choices and therefore fewer women were experiencing forced birth. This time period is also marked by societal shame that would be placed on a woman for having premarital sex, so if she was discovered to be pregnant, she would often be sent to an unwed mother’s home to have her child in secret and the child would automatically be placed into the adoption system with little-to-no choice for her to keep her child, considering how few resources were available to single, unwed mothers. The women who were targeted for this were usually working class, white women, since it was white couples who were looking to adopt and they would try to match a child up with parents they would look like, since adoptive parents would often try to pass the child off as their own, since there was a lot of shame placed on infertility as well.
Today, expectant mothers are coerced in other, more subtle ways. Hospitals can and do often report pregnant women to Child Protective Services (CPS) if they believe a child is at risk, this includes being low-income. In fact, the majority reason children are taken into CPS in the first place is “neglect” which can be defined as low-income. However, in many states (for example, in California) if a pregnant woman has an adoption plan in place, they won’t. I have heard from a few first moms who relinquished within the last fifteen years that they were told by a social worker that their options were to either have the child taken into CPS once they are born, or have more options by relinquishing their parental rights by way of adoption. Family preservation resources, however, were never divulged.
Since studies have shown that children generally fare better in the long-term with open adoptions, this is what is usually promised to expectant mothers who want it, from the adoptive families. However what they are rarely told, is that open adoptions are most often not legally enforceable and that generally adoptive parents usually close up the adoption within the first five years. Angela Welch, LPC, said to Bethany Christian Services that most adoptive parents promise openness because to help the birth parents grieve or because they felt like that’s what they had to agree to in order to adopt, but that once the adoption goes through and therefore the power shifts to them, they close it up.
First semester, I did a data project that explores the correlation between poverty and adoption in NYC and how increasing family preservation resources can reduce unwanted adoptions.
We don’t need abortion because there’s adoption
For my first TikTok post, I had adoptees answering the question as to whether adoption was the solution to abortion and all twenty-one participants agreed that adoption and abortion were two separate conversations that should not be conflated. Some of them had also had abortions, one was also a birth parent, and there was further intersectionality in that some were transnational, transracial or former foster youth adoptees. The standing argument that adoption is an alternative to parenting and pregnancy is an alternative to carrying a pregnancy to term. In recent recordings I did ask birth mothers of all age ranges and backgrounds this same question, some of whom had also had an abortion, they explained that adoption is a lifetime of trauma for the birth mother and the adoptee, whereas abortion is a shorter-term trauma. Many adoptees in the comments section of my first video, as well as in some of the recent recordings that I did, commented that they wish they had been aborted, to avoid the pain and suffering that adoption trauma has put them through.
Adoption is this beautiful thing! There are so many children that need to be adopted
This was the first myth about adoption that was busted about adoption for me. As it turns out, there has been an 89% decline in unmarried women placing their children for adoption since the end of the Baby Scoop Era. Even through foster care this number has reduced. Referencing a data project I did about this, in 2020 the number of children in the New York state foster care system was 15,016. Of those, only 669 were available to be adopted and nearly all of them were adopted.
As for adoption being such a “beautiful thing,” in addition to the slew of ethical and mental health considerations that have already been mentioned, it should also be noted that research as shown that adoptees are 4x more likely to commit suicide.
Moreover, modern adoption practices to this day are still influenced by outdated, draconian models that were spear-headed by known child trafficker and child murderer, Georgia Tann. She stole an estimated 5,000 babies between 1924 and 1950 for what has been referred to as the “black market for white babies” by the NY Post and roughly 500 children died in her care during this time. She made millions preying on unwed mothers and selling their children to rich families, which is not too unlike adoption practices that are legalized today.
It can’t be true that adoption is trauma because I know an adoptee/birth mother and they are completely normal and happy about their situation
This is exactly how I felt about my adoption until I began to connect the dots between my mental health struggles that I’ve dealt with my whole life and how it can all be traced back to both my adoption and my adoptive parents being completely ill-equipped to know how to parent an adopted child, because they were not only given limited information about how to parent an adopted child (1.5 pages worth of information), but were also fed the “blank slate” narrative by the agency they went through. Even when I didn’t cry for the first several months of them having me, which experts know is a trauma response, doctors told my parents that they should be grateful for having a quiet baby and not worry about it. This shows how everyone loses when we are not honest about the impacts of adoption.
For my part, I was what my community specifically, refers to as being “in the fog” Being “in the adoption fog” is a term that this community uses to describe the experience of being someone who is impacted by adoption, but not yet aware of the inherent issues that come with it and how this may have affected them in a systemic and subconscious way. The term was originally coined by Susan Forward in her book about emotional blackmail, where it is an acronym that stands for Fear, Obligation and Guilt. Though most people in the community I have spoken with, except for adoption-competent therapists, are unaware of the term’s origins and only know it as the description I gave as it specifically pertains to adoption awareness.
For adoptees who use this term, they believe that we are in the fog because we are often fed the “chosen” narrative. For birth mothers who use it, they believe it’s because they are often shamed into silence or told that they are “selfless” and “brave” for placing their child for adoption — when most of the time they were coerced. Not to mention, with the media often playing into a positive adoption narrative and raising up the adoptive parents to be heroes, it runs counter to popular opinion to speak or think badly of adoption.
I have also heard this term being used to describe a state of “readiness” by Eileen McQuade, a birth mother from the Baby Scoop Era. It should also also be noted that this is a term usually only used by those in the part of the adoption community that I have been working with.

Community Strengths

I have conducted six callouts through each phase of ideation for this practicum: the Adoption Listening Post Survey, The Community Collab Project Survey (Adoptees), The Community Collab Project Survey (Birth Mothers), How should we present these TikToks?, one that is still on-going and continuing to collect data, the Voices of Adoption Survey, and one that I started upon launch of my Substack newsletter to get more information about product use. These were promoted on various adoption Facebook pages, Twitter and sent out to the mailing list of the adoption agency Spence-Chapin, thanks to Jack MacCarthy who is a birth parent I have been working with since September 2021.

I had 262 individual responses, 235 of which were adoptees and/or birth parents. Based on this data 10.43% of the adoptees and birth mothers who answered this question described themselves as either activists fighting for adoption reform, researchers or adoption-competent therapists. In addition, there were a number of people who were allies, either because they were simply curious about adoption, had a loved one who is in the community, are adoptive parents themselves, or had fostered or were considering fostering a child — or no reason at all other than just what they had stumbled upon on social media!

What this means is, that this community is rather self-sufficient in getting their own needs met and has built strong communities centering around complicating adoption narratives on social media.

While there have been reports on black market baby sales on Facebook, there are also dozens of private Facebook groups specifically for the adoption community to find support. In my research, I have noticed that birth parents (especially on the older side) gather on Facebook the most and that this platform is most often used for venting or for a substitute online support group. One reason this is, other than demographics of Facebook generally leaning older anyways, is that the privacy features on Facebook groups allow birth parents to feel more comfortable to express themselves. There are also a handful of search and reunion groups, specifically for adoptees, birth parents and relatives who are all searching for their biological families.

On Twitter, there is a sizeable #adopteetwitter community. On my first post with this hashtag, which was a call-to-action to be involved in the first TikTok post, I got 375 new followers, 113 likes, 27 retweets and five quote tweets in just a matter of days, when I started out with almost no following at all. Adoptee Twitter I have learned is where most adoptees who are also advocates or professionals tend to gather. According to Desiree Stephens, an adoptee and advocate who helped get birth certificates unsealed for adoptees in Connecticut, she used Twitter to engage with lawmakers during proceedings to make sure the bill was discussed before the state house session for that term was over — which is one reason the bill passed, as prior to this, it had kept getting postponed for future term discussions.

On TikTok, the hashtag results alone have a lot to say:

4.3B #adoption
183.9M #adoptee
159.2M #birthmomTikTok
114.6M #adopteesofTikTok
411.9M #adoptionjourney

AdopteeTikTok is largely focused on raising awareness about adoption-related trauma, coercion and power dynamics in adoption and other egregious adoption practices that are still in effect to this day. One TikToker I spoke with, @miathaicha, who is a transracial and transnational adoptee with 115.3k followers, said that the reason she likes TikTok is because of both the supportive community built around adoption reform and also the the high level of engagement she tends to get when going live on the platform. Another adoptee TikToker, @karpoozy states, said in an interview to Romper,

“Adoption is supposed to find a family for a child, not find children for people’s family-building purposes. That’s the narrative I am hoping to start shifting.”

In addition to online activism, several organizations have been born out of a desire by adoptees and birth parents to change the systems they were hurt by. Here are just a few that I have been fortunate to connect with:

Access Connecticut: Organization that succeeded in unsealing birth certificates for adoptees in Connecticut. I wrote an explainer about how this organization teamed up with the Catholic Mothers group (below) to make this happen.
Catholic Mothers for Truth and Transparency: Organization made up of Scoop Era birth mothers, many of whom went to Catholic unwed mother’s homes, to assist Access Connecticut in its mission. They continue to meet monthly on Zoom to see what adoption reform causes they can help next.
Episcopal Voices of the Baby Scoop Forced Adoption Era: A sister group to the Catholic one, started by Scoop Era birth mother Francine Gurtler and Scoop Era adoptee and retired Episcipalian transracial adoptee Mark Diebel. They are currently in the process of getting an official apology from the Episcipalian church for forced adoptions, which will be the first of its kind in the US. I wrote a profile on Francine to show her journey from teen pregnancy to adoption reform activist.
Saving Our Sisters (SOS): An organization started by Renee Gelin, a birth mother who experienced what she refers to as an unnecessary adoption, which was supposed to be open, but closed soon after she started speaking out against coercion practices in adoption. Her organization provides family preservation resources to expectant moms and will even help mothers who have changed their mind about placing their child for adoption to get their baby back after the adoptive parents have already taken them. They also collaborated with the Catholic Mothers group as well as CUB to create family preservation resource pamphlets, which are currently being distributed to clinics across the country. SOS has been gracious enough to promote the live events and listening posts I’ve been doing to their networks on social media.
Concerned United Birthparents (CUB): An organization started in 1976 by birth mothers, to offer support groups and community to other birth mothers. It has since expanded to serving anyone touched by adoption, believing that everyone in the community can learn from each other. They also host an in-person retreat every year, which I went to both last year and presented and did recordings at this year. In the first listening post survey I did, I asked what organizations people were a part of, if any, and CUB was mentioned most often, which is a big reason why I wanted to partner with them.
National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP): An organization created in 2009 by two adoptees in order to unseal Indiana’s closed adoption records. It has since grown into a larger movement and organization that has affiliate organizations and conferences all over the country, with the intention of educating legislators and the public about relevant adoption issues. They also host weekly Zoom happy hours that have a featured speaker, two of which I have tuned in to. At the CUB retreat, I was invited by the organizers of NAAP to come do recordings for the TikTok channel at their next national convention in March in Kentucky.
Adoptees United: Organization founded by adoptee-rights lawyer Gregory Luce, who also has Adoptee Rights Law Center, which provides free legal information for adoptees. I have interviewed Gregory several times for various stories and input. Adoptees United sponsors events and projects that are adoptee-centric and are looking to spark change within the adoption narrative.

Community Needs

I included needs assessments within four of the surveys I conducted, to see where news is lacking as far as adoption-coverage goes.

Here were the top ranking topics/issues:

The business of adoption and how money plays a role.
Coercion tactics used on birth mothers during the adoption process.
The mental health impact adoption has and public perception of it
Roe v. Wade and reproductive justice
Common myths perpetuated about adoption
LGBTQIA+ adoption-related issues (same-sex couples adoption rights, trans birth, queer adoptees struggling to assimilate with religious adoptive parents) Dark history of adoption.

Here were the top ranking information needs:

Mental health impacts and resources for adoptees.
Mental health impacts and resources for birth parents.
Family preservation resources.

More Ethical Reporting Methods

Accurate and ethical reporting on adoption is sorely needed, as most adoption stories are currently told from the adoptive parents view, less so than adoptees or birth parents.

Fact-checking for reporters covering adoption issues becomes an issue as well, since adoptees don’t have access to their original birth certificates and privacy laws prevent anyone from being able to FOIA or FOIL adoption records. I have had an adoptee confide in me an uncomfortable experience she had with USA Today, where their fact-checkers were using ignorant methods to get proof that she was in fact adopted. An example she gave was they were asking for her birth certificate to prove this, even though, had the fact-checkers done their research, they would know that our birth certificates as adoptees don’t have anything on them that shows we are adopted. It just shows our adoptive parents’ names on there as if they gave birth to us, and our original birth certificates are sealed, which we don’t have legal access to in all except for 10 states.

This is left-over from a practice created early in the Scoop Era, where it was shameful not only to be an unwed mother but also to be an infertile couple. The “solution” was for birth mothers to have their children in secret and have them then adopted by infertile couples. The original birth certificates of the adoptees, with the birth parents names, were legally sealed and replaced with a new amended birth certificate, identical to the original one except that it had the adoptive parents names on it so that it would look like they were the biological parents of the children. This practice is still in existence to this day and adoptees and birth mothers are working together to change this.

In the listening post survey, I also asked about news coverage satisfaction:

76% “extremely dissatisfied”
18% “dissatisfied”
5% “neutral”

In a listening post I did last April, in working with mothers who relinquished within the last 10 to 15 years and had open adoptions, anonymity was expressed as a high concern. This poses a problem for more balanced coverage because there are fewer birth parents, especially those who are in open-adoption relationships with their children, are willing to go on the record. In a survey, answered by 9 younger birth mothers, here are the top reasons for desiring anonymity in posts:

To preserve the relationships within our open adoption
There is still stigma and shame surrounding what I am dealing with regarding adoption
I am concerned about, or have experienced, hate speech because of my role within adoption

However, in the Voices of Adoption survey, which was answered mostly by adoptees (69.5%, with 83% being born post Scoop Era), when asked on a scale of one to five how important anonymity was to them for involvement in the project on social media (one being comfortable being completely on the record, including having face shown), 74% adoptees and 48% birth parents were answered one, in that they were completely comfortable with their likeness and name being used. 48% of the votes of adoptees and 42% of birth parents were somewhere on a two or three on this scale. Considering that the majority of this poll has had results from TikTok after the first video was launched, as well as it being people in a post Scoop Era world, what this shows me is that younger adoptees were more comfortable opening up about their stories with people knowing.

Along with desiring a connection to identity by unsealing original birth certificates for adoptees, they are also looking for a way to attain their updated medical histories. While DNA testing has helped, it doesn’t cover all medical issues and isn’t as accurate. There is also an ethical consideration, since many birth mothers have not told extended family that they had a child they relinquished into adoption and looking for birth parents by way of DNA, might turn up some traumatizing results. This also puts the adoptee’s health at risk. For example, I have now had two breast cancer scares, but my insurance company has denied me coverage for the BRCA gene test because I don’t have any family medical history “proof” that I’m at risk for breast cancer. I wrote an op-ed about this issue and the various ways it can manifest.

Considering the adoption community has been lacking in ethical and accurate reporting on adoption, there are many who don’t trust reporters to do their stories justice and therefore they are often less willing to talk to the press. With the amount of community engagement I have been doing with both birth mothers and adoptees, as well as being part of the community myself, I have managed to build lasting relationships with others in the community.

Community Challenges

The adoption fog presents a challenge to adoption-reform messaging. Since so many adoptees were raised with the “special” story and have grown up with media reinforcing the aforementioned myths, there is a lot of push back on adoptees who are raising awareness of adoption-trauma and systemic issues within adoption. Moreover, this supports trolls who often enter these spaces who often bully adoptees speaking out telling them that they should be “grateful” they were adopted. The bullying can be a trigger for those in the community who speak out about adoption issues and this can cause social influencers to either take a break from posting, or to create reactionary posts where adoptee influencers tend to appear to be very angry and even dogmatic, which creates an intimidating space for people who are not in the community but are adoption-curious and want to learn.

The same issues found with birth mothers, but because fewer birth parents are out publicly this is mostly found on private Facebook groups. I have observed in several groups that it is sometimes unclear whether these spaces are meant to be support groups or spaces to vent. Ways to solve systemic issues surrounding adoption are often argued about in these spaces. One of the most heated topics is whether or not adoption should be abolished altogether and replaced with legal guardianship. The reason for this is not because they don’t want children to have safe and loving homes, but that they feel as though it is wrong to seal a child’s birth certificate and erase their identity in the process. Many believe that this decision shouldn’t be made until a child is old enough to consent, and until then, legal guardianship can provide the safe and loving home they need without the legal impacts. Those who oppose this idea, believe that an adopted child often already feels out of place, that referring to the person raising them as their legal guardian and not a parent would make them feel further othered.

For adoptee or birth mothers who enter these spaces seeking support, but are not quite out of the fog yet, I have noticed (and experienced it myself) that they are often confronted with individuals who are attempting to moonlight as therapists, diagnosing them with any number of issues and pushing them to a point where they now feel bullied by people within their own community. As a reporter, I have personally gotten a lot of hate when I posted a prompt as part an assignment, where I was accused of being insensitive for not knowing how to address the community and also accused of treating them like lab rats — which I learned later from Jen Matthews (who runs the Facebook group, “Conversations About Adoption”) and Eileen McQuade (board member for CUB) stems from traumatic experiences many in the community have faced from reporters who did not do their due diligence to do their homework on adoption trauma or history, not report on them in a way that they felt satisfied.

Another challenge is speaking with a diverse range of birth mother voices that reflects the community. Birth mothers who relinquished during the Scoop Era are predominantly white, since working class white women were specifically targeted, since white adoptive parents were who were adopting and it was common practice to pair adoptees up with parents who looked like them.

However, today roughly half of adoptees (and therefore birth mothers) are BIPOC. The challenging thing here is that birth mothers rarely come forward publicly about their status as a birth mom until their child is older. A large reason is that 95% of US domestic adoptions have some level of openness. In a listening post I did with 9 birth mothers last spring, they all expressed to me the feeling that they were walking on eggshells regarding their open adoption and that one wrong move could cause the adoptive parents to close up the relationship. This can explain why the birth mom space on social media and in the press tends to skew older and white.

The “Voices of Adoption” Multi-Platform Project

TikTok

This idea was born out of the listening post I did with the younger birth mothers last spring. They all expressed a desire and need to complicate the narrative surrounding open adoption, but were tired of having to explain the nuance of how it’s challenging to their friends and loved ones, while also being frustrated with the way open adoption seemed to be flatlined in the media. So we decided a short-form video that had a range of personal experiences and concerns represented would help mitigate emotional exhaustion, so that they could just send this instead, instead of having to re-explain themselves. Since anonymity was also very important, the format we came up with was an audio-only collage of voices that would overlay some animation or something to visually represent what was being said. These would be created as a series, answering common questions these birth moms tend to get, to not only expose the ignorance behind these, often inappropriate, questions but to also educate the public. To beta test this idea, we decided we would create the first one on TikTok and would have me listen to what is being said, as opposed to the loftier goal of having animation.

Just a couple weeks later, right around Mother’s Day, Dobb’s opinion was leaked. Footnote 46 put the adoption community as a whole in an uproar. In it, it stated that abortion wasn’t and that it was an answer to the baby shortage for domestic adoption. From the opinion leak it states,

“Whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.”

The birth mothers I had been working with expressed to me that because of this, they were emotionally exhausted and needed a break from the project. However, I noticed a lot of activity online from adoptees speaking out against this. This showed me that I should pivot to working with adoptees for this first post and dive into the debate online that Alito’s footnote seemed to be sparking on Adoptee Twitter.

Outreach
Considering that I got quite high engagement with under 100 followers on my personal TikTok page at the time, it seemed like TikTok was the place to do this. I consulted with two adoptee community members, Desiree Stephens and Gregory Luce, about applying this same format to adoptees answering the question “is adoption the solution to abortion?” and with their guidance found a way forward with this new idea. To find adoptees to get involved I posted to Twitter, private Facebook groups and emailed those who had already filled out my survey who identified as adoptees. I knew I was on the right track when I saw another adoptee (who is also transracial and transnational), Lina Venagas, post to Twitter and Facebook posts wanting to address this debate on TikTok as well. So I reached out to them with the project idea I had underway and we decided to combine efforts by both of us reaching out to our respective networks for the project.

The Recording
To be involved, I called upon them to fill out a Google form I created for the project. I posted this on Twitter and Facebook and within a week, I had a group interview that had 11 adoptees on the call as well as had nine individual interviews. For the group interview, since most people were meeting for the first time, I consciously took measures to create a sense of safety within the space. I opened up with a statement of purpose, making sure to let everyone know at the beginning of the recordings that the prompt would show up that way in the video to drive traffic, but was not in any way reflective of my thoughts on it. I then had everyone go around and introduce themselves, with their pronouns, a fun ice breaker (a hobby they learned during lockdown) and what their relationship to adoption is, in addition to being an adoptee (i.e. also a birth parent, a researcher, etc.). Afterwards I had us collectively come up with Community Guidelines to determine things like whether cross-talk was allowed and honoring everyone’s stories. I also let people know that if they wanted me to stop recording I would as soon as they ask.

This ended up becoming what felt like a support group meeting, even though I was making it very clear when I was starting and stopping recording. Everyone was very respectful and supportive of each other and some were even speaking about their experiences with adoption for the first time. I gave space to everyone to answer the question directly and then also go off on a tangent about the deeper issues behind the “adoption vs abortion” debate and how this impacted them personally. I wanted to make sure there was some context as to who we were hearing from, to add more credibility to what was being heard. So for example, if an adoptee has also had an abortion, or was an expert in this field (researcher, adoption-competent therapist, adoptee rights lawyer), I had them build that into their answer.

Editing the Audio
When editing the audio, I made sure to have the hook right at the beginning, which is that everyone felt the same, that it is not the solution and that abortion and adoption don’t even belong in the same sentence. After quick audio cuts, I built in more context, ending with a very emotional soundbite where an adoptee says that she believes every woman out there should have the right to choose, including her birth mother.

Representation
Intersectionality was very important to me as well, so to organize this I added various demographics questions to the Google form, which showed both the kind of adoption they experienced as well as whether they were representing more than one area of adoption (for example, if they were also a birth mother).

TikToker Collab
To increase visibility I also reached out to three adoptee TikTokers, to ask if we could collaborate by having them pose the question, that I would then stitch the video to. I made it a point to only reach out to adoptees who represented themselves in a less-dogmatic, more digestible way. I couldn’t find direct contact information, but I did see their Venmo handles. So I sent ten cents to them with a note about the project and how to get in touch with me. This caught the attention of Sara Jo (@sajotheadopteehag) who then hopped on a phone call with me to help me strategize how we would do this and what would work best visually. I learned that you can’t stitch with a pre-recorded video, so this would all have to be done live within the app itself.

Compiling the Video with the Audio
I worked with Sadie Brown, who heads up Newmark’s official TikTok page. She helped me create my introduction — which had me representing myself as both a journalist and adoptee. She then filmed me in various poses listening to the audio collage I had edited together. Knowing I would include captions for accessibility, I pointed up, where I imagined the captions would be, and we made sure to leave headroom for this.

The Goal
My goal was for this to not only generate conversation around the adoption vs. abortion debate, but also raise awareness about larger adoption issues and spark a curiosity for those not in the community to want to learn more. So at the end of the video I prompted people to be part of the conversation by commenting on the post or filling out a Google form that I included in the bio. To further encourage engagement, I committed to responding to every comment within the first 24 hours.

The Results

I didn’t know what to expect from my first post, except for maybe a few thousand views such as what my beta test posts had. What I didn’t expect was for this post to go viral! Especially since the TikToker I stitched the video with only had closer to 3,500 followers at the time of posting last May. Even Sara said that they had never had a video get close to the level of engagement that I had with that video. Having no followers to start, this was pretty unprecedented. On that first day of the post going live, it got 93k views and brand new 2,199 followers to the channel.

Here are the current stats from that first post:

142.2k plays
34k likes
1,963 comments
1,316 shares
1,265 saves

It has also been stitched, dueted and boosted more times than I was able to keep track of. TikTok has great video and page analytics that only get more sophisticated the more followers you have. But one thing it doesn’t do is track those things specifically. Duets and Stitches are a way for people to create new content for their page, using your content either as something to react to or piggyback off of. This is another way of elevating a video that the community feels as though it has content that should be highlighted — for good or bad reasons. In this post’s case, I most often saw people stitching and dueting it while they stayed silent and prompted in text to listen to the adoptee voices that were featured.

I was hoping my channel could continue on in this way, with every post I put up after going viral. But as Emma, our design teacher said to me, you can’t just plan for things to go viral. So I had to reset my goals and expectations moving forward.

A collage of just some of the comments I got on this first TikTok post, showing the impact it had on my community.

The first post definitely reached its qualitative goal of having sparked a huge conversation in the comments section, including comments where people said they learned something new. Mostly, it was adoptees and birth mothers who were agreeing with what everyone in the audio collage said and often also contributing a bit of their own story. But then there were others who said that the video gave them a new perspective or vocabulary upon which to articulate what they weren’t able to before. Some adoptees expressed that it helped them realize issues of adoption they hadn’t been aware of previously, and how that related back to them. Many who commented were interested in adopting a child and were completely unaware of the issues mentioned in the video because they wanted to learn more. There were also requests for future videos of related topics.

Developing the Channel

On an almost daily basis, I’ve engaged on TikTok to follow trends and topics that are being covered by members of the community by engaging in the comments section and/or by reposting videos I find intriguing/important and well-researched.

I have since experimented a bit with other video formats to add more content to the page more quickly and see what the response would be like. For all posts I used hashtags I noticed were used most often by the community to draw people in, as well as hashtags that might be more niche as it pertains to that post’s content. I also made sure that every video had captions to allow for more accessibility.

With the exception of the PairTree app review, I have avoided making too much commentary on the controversy of the moment, or participating in or responding to trauma dumping on adoptee TikTok. I have noticed with these types of posts — which have ranged from criticizing Rosie O’Donnell’s comments on adoption (which were fair criticisms) to canceling an adoptive parent who was virtue signaling — that while they drove more traffic to the pages, the quality of the engagement was lower.

Sara said to me in a conversation we had in September that I would have to choose between high engagement and high quality engagement. They said that strong emotions tend to drive high traffic but lower quality engagement, whereas more intellectual, fact-based content does the opposite. With the collage videos I saw the opportunity to do both, since they are both fact-based, being many people’s personal experiences, and emotional. For everything else though, I felt that in order to continue having this channel be seen more as a piece of journalism, I would have to avoid drama as best as I could. Even the stories I shared about myself were more in the style of a personal essay than of trauma-dumping.

Managing Expectations

For a channel that focuses on adoption that has around the same number of followers as I did after my first post went viral, the average number of views seems to be around 500 views per video, so that was my aim. I also knew I wanted to take comments into consideration more than views, since that to me would show higher-quality engagement, rather than just someone swiping through. My goal was to get the same ratio of comments to views as I had in my first video that went viral, which was three comments for every 200 views.

Once I started posting again consistently, I found myself reaching that goal pretty consistently.

Analytics from TikTok showing growth of the channel since I started posting more consistently in October.

Safe-Guarding the TikTok Channel

Community Guidelines:
Considering the heated nature of the comments thread, and in thinking about liability, I created a new post that detailed out community guidelines. The request was that if anyone was going to speak on issues that might trigger someone else, to add a “TW” ahead of their comment. I also made it clear that bullying and doxxing would not be tolerated, and that I would not be censoring comments so long as they didn’t go against the guidelines.

LinkTree:
I created a LinkTree to add to the bio section of the profile, which included not only the Google Form, but also an adoptee-therapist directory and a mental health hotline.

TikTok Comment Section Settings:
I also noticed that there were several comments about suicidal ideation, incest and rape. This sort of fit the mold, because people saw this comments thread as a safe space to share their personal adoption experiences. There was some bullying, with people dismissing some adoptee’s personal experiences or name-calling. So I monitored the comments thread very carefully for the next week and removed comments I thought were too threatening. I also made settings for the TikTok channel which would flag words that might trigger people. This allowed me to review these posts, before approving them to be posted. There were a handful of pro-life comments, but I did not censor them so long as they weren’t bullying anyone.

Concerned United Birthparents (CUB) Retreat

Information Packets that I put in everyone’s CUB retreat folders to encourage them to participate in a recording for the Voices of Adoption TikTok channel. October, 2022.

In September reached out to Eileen McQuade, a board member of the organization Concerned United Birthparents, who I have interviewed several times, to ask if there was a way for me to partner with CUB to do interviews at the retreat, so that I could get higher quality audio recordings and also possibly some video for those who were willing to be on-camera. I sent her a write-up of who I was as well as a brief description of what the project was and how CUB could be a part of it for her to present at their next board meeting. The project was greenlit by the contingency that I make it clear that this is completely voluntary and I will only be doing recordings on breaks during the retreat. Around the same time, I applied for a scholarship for the retreat itself, which I was awarded. This provided me with a free ticket to the event and a $250 stipend to help off-set travel expenses as well as a free year-long CUB membership.

I attended this same retreat last year, and remembered that roughly a third of attendees were adoptees and the rest were birth mothers. Many were also adoption-competent therapists or authors. I also remembered the majority birth mothers were Scoop Era and while they were active on Facebook, preferred analog methods of reaching out. So I created a detailed 3-page information packet that detailed out who I am, what engagement journalism is, what the project is, what topics we’ll be covering and a QR code that would send people to my calendly where they could book in-person recordings throughout the retreat. Once participants get to the booking page, they must confirm they give consent to be recorded, they can select whether or not they would like to be on-camera, what questions they would like to answer during the recording and where in the adoption constellation they are. It also prompted them to fill out the Google Form that’s in the TikTok bio to continue collecting data.

In addition to printing out 75 copies of these packets as well as a hard copy of the Google form (for those who prefer analog), I also made Voices of Adoption promotional stickers that had the TikTok handle on it. These were included with all of the packets, which in turn went into every retreat attendee’s CUB welcome folder. The purpose of the stickers is to add grassroots marketing as a way of further promoting the Voices of Adoption project. I had birth mothers, who also run support groups for birth mothers, take a small stack of them to then pass out to their clients and support group members. I plan on giving these out to all of my classmates, professors, friends and really anyone I talk to about the project. Considering this is a national community not geographically centralized, and most meetings are on Zoom, I plan on giving these to anyone who is curious about adoption or my work.

At the retreat itself I recorded three adoptees, five birth mothers and two participants who identified as both. I also was able to give a 10 minute presentation at the very beginning of the retreat to introduce myself and the project and also show the first post projected onto a screen, so that people would have a better understanding as to what they were signing up for. I got a lot of laughs and even some tears by the end of the viewing of the recording. I spoke with all participants at one point or another at the retreat and many of them expressed to me that they would sign up for a remote recording after that weekend. A contact list of all participants is given to everyone who attends, so I will be pulling from that to follow-up.

The same adoption-competent therapists who took the stickers to pass out, are collectively known as Adoption Savvy. They also offered to be guests on the TikTok channel for a live AMA, to discuss mental health impacts of adoption for both birth mothers and adoptees. Since then I have been asked to write a description of the Voices of Adoption project, which would be added to their next newsletter which is issued quarterly.

Substack

The Why

I had noticed on my TikTok account that there were some adoptive parents commenting on my posts, thanking me for the information and also being more understanding of their confusion or questions in my Live Listening Post.

Comments on the Voices of Adoption TikTok videos by an adoptive parent and one person who is considering adopting a child.

I also noticed that on other adoptee TikTokers’ pages, the responses to these questions were more reactionary. Some of the questions adoptive parents were asking I saw how adoptees could be triggered by, as they were often centering themselves at the heart of struggles they were dealing with instead of centering their adopted children. Other triggering comments I have noticed were by people struggling with infertility or who are in a same-sex relationship who wanted to adopt, who were upset that adoptees were saying that no one is entitled to anyone’s child. I have also noticed that adoptees who have not yet become aware of harmful aspects of adoption, who are new to the space, are often shocked and offended by what they find on Adoptee Tiktok, since Adoptee TikTok most often focuses on these harmful aspects as well as abolition. This challenges everything they’ve come to know up until this point and so they are likely having a trauma response.

These more harmful attitudes towards adoption drown out those who are on the app who are asking fair questions and are trying to do right by their adoptive kids by educating themselves and also those who are interested in adopting a child but want to hear more from adoptees’ experiences first. There are plenty of adoptive parents out there who are well-educated and also actively searching for reform, but they are not the majority, at least not on social media. For example, in November I participated in a webinar taught by an adoptive parent, Steven Coppard, called the “Seven Core Issues in Adoption,” which is based on the book of the same name. I ended up being the only one who showed up to his webinar, which I thought was very insightful both to the loss and trauma that adoptees and birth parents can feel but also loss and trauma that can be felt by the adoptive parents. He said to me that he had at one point had a more ignorant outlook on adoption which he felt like ultimately hurt his adopted child. But since he’s learned more about adoption trauma and loss, he has made it a mission to educate other adoptive, or hopeful adoptive parents on these issues as well.

I also got two private messages on Facebook from acquaintances of mine asking whether there is any way to ethically adopt. With all of this, it dawned on me that it would be advantageous to have a new, more private space that had helpful resources and tools for people who are new to learning about more complex adoption issues. I also felt like, with there being so much information out there but just spread out and not always vetted properly, a centralized information hub would be useful for anyone in the community. This could double as a place adoption influencers could use to reference, since I’ve seen people in the comments thread asking where someone got a statistic or story, and it’s often buried in a very long Linktree (which mine was becoming), if it’s there at all.

I thought Substack would be a good option because it can serve as a public website with different pages that anyone can visit without having to be a subscriber, as well as a private newsletter with various kinds of information about adoption being delivered every couple of weeks. With Substack’s new Chat feature and the places I could allow for comments, I also felt like it would be a good place to redirect the questions that were being asked on TikTok, where people wouldn’t be in fear of getting attacked online for wanting to know. Nor would their questions be in a place where they might inadvertently trigger someone who might be on TikTok while seeking comfort from the community while having a trauma response.

The What

I created a Welcome article that I could forward to every new subscriber. It included an introduction as to who I am, the mission statement of the Substack, what future articles could look like and also ways to get involved with Voices of Adoption. For subsequent articles, I thought it would be helpful to have pieces that added more context and information to what was currently trending on adoption social media pages. So for my first article I did a deep dive into the origins of National Adoption Month and how it’s evolved — basically getting into everything I knew I wouldn’t have time to in the explainer videos I created — so that I could direct people to this article at the end of the videos which would hopefully give them incentive to subscribe. There is also a separate article about the subscriber chat, which explains what it is and how to use it through the Substack app. I also noticed that there was a way to import Medium posts into Substack, so I imported my first Medium article from the first semester.

The About page was a description of the Voices of Adoption multi-platform project as a whole and what this Substack was for specifically. I wanted to encourage curiosity and questions so I described this Substack as a judgment-free zone and also made it clear that people could reach out to me with any questions by responding to a newsletter email and I will see the email and get back to them. I also encouraged them to connect through the subscriber chat so that they could get their questions answered in real-time and talk about these things with other community members as well.

It was suggested to me by Jeremy that I could repurpose the audio collages I was making to create a mini podcast. I liked this idea because the way I had to add video on TikTok really lowered the quality of the audio and this was an opportunity to upload a cleaner version of it. Substack has a built-in feature that allows one to add a podcast so I added that as another page to the newsletter.

I wanted to create as many avenues as possible for this to be co-created with the community, with me acting as the editor, so I created a Curated Resources page, which so far includes two Padlets: one titled “Adoption Reform Resources” and the other titled “Social Media Accounts to Follow.” I added a number of initial pages to have a starting place with some solid resources already for people. I also included the Downloadable PDF Information Packet I had on my Linktree for TikTok already, with a prompt to send this to anyone who is adoption-curious.

Adoption reform has a lot of words that are important to many community members, such as alternatives for the term birth mother, and social media tends to use a lot of acronyms. For example, today I just learned that “HAP” means “hopeful adoptive parent.” So I thought it would be helpful to have a “Terms to Know” section. I started off this page by adding terms to know that were specific to the article I wrote on National Adoption Month.

Feedback Loops

Every aspect of the Voices of Adoption project is done in response to things I’ve learned from the community and in collaboration with them. So it was imperative to me that this Substack included many avenues to keep the feedback loop going. On the Curated Resources and Terms to Know pages, I added a prompt at the bottom asking if something was missing, incorrect or if they had a suggestion, with a comment box underneath it. Having avenues to be held accountable by my community I have found helps me serve my community best and builds trust. I also included on these pages, as well as the Get Involved page, I included ways to share the pages. For the articles themselves, people would be able to like, comment, share or save them.

I also included a Get Involved page that lives on the Substack main page alongside the other pages. This included a Calendly link to sign up for a recording for the Voices of Adoption TikTok and Instagram Channels, which has with it some poll questions, an opportunity for them to decide ahead of time what prompt they would like to answer and a request for consent to record. I also included a different Calendly link for Press to set up a consultation with me, where I could help them learn about how to ethically report on and/or fact-check adoption stories; and also an offer to help connect them with viable sources.

I also created a new callout, which had the same information needs and demographics questions but was also specific to learning more about my community’s product habits, employing Design Thinking tools. I asked people to fill this form out, since the information gathered there will help me to make the Substack better for those who are using it. Below that I included the on-going callout form I’ve had since May, which is an opportunity for people to join a Brainstorm Session (a.k.a. Listening Post). I used this form instead of the above one, since it still gathers information needs and demographics information, but is asking a lot less questions. I also linked to the Curated Resources page and described what Padlet is and how they could help by contributing any resources they would recommend to others there.

Key Takeaways

Two years ago, if you had told me that I would have created a TikTok channel and a Substack newsletter, in service of busting myths around adoption I would have thought you were crazy. First of all, I was still adding horizontal videos to TikTok then and thought the platform was stupid. Second, I would joke that I struggled with relationships because I “obviously” had abandonment issues from being adopted — in other words, I would deflect.

We need more accurate and nuanced stories in the media landscape that will help complicate the narrative around adoption. But a lot of care on the part of journalists is absolutely necessary if they want to earn and retain the trust of the community and help to shift the narrative. I have learned that reporting accurately and fairly on adoption is a tough road, mostly because it’s so outside of most people’s awareness to consider that there are numerous human rights violations involved in adoption. It’s hard for people to make the leap that while adoption can provide wonderful homes for children in need, it is also rife with numerous ethical considerations and is inherently traumatic. So here’s what I would suggest when reporting on adoption.

Leave your pre-conceived notions at the door and deeply listen. Then adjust, accordingly.

I came into this program and this community with an open mind but so clueless. I was 100% sure I wanted to adopt a child because there are “so many children out there that need homes” and I saw not having kids as reducing my carbon footprint. I just wanted to know how my birth mom might have fared, whether there was any support for her. On the first phone call with Jack MacCarthy, a trans birth parent who I know through a friend, I realized that the opposite is true and it is one of many myths that I believed simply because there hasn’t been much information to counter these myths in front of the public.

Instead of deflecting, I listened. I asked who else I should speak to, things I should look out for and bear in mind. I got on Facebook and did nothing for a while. Just read the feeds to learn. When I did post I made mistakes with the terms I used for mothers who relinquished, not taking into account that different groups have different rules and not offering enough context as to who I am. But this community saw that I would listen to this feedback and pivot my approach, so they allowed me to stick around and keep learning.

Show up without an agenda, with openness and empathy.

A birth mother for my Community Beat Memo suggested I go to the Concerned United Birthparents retreat in California, which was just over a month from that interview and I immediately bought my plane ticket. I showed up, I asked birth mothers how they prefer to be referred to (instead of birth mother), I was up front that I was both an adoptee and an engagement journalism student looking to work with birth mothers and that I was there to learn. These earlier online fumbles prepared me to earn trust and build deeper relationships at this event.

Showing up without an agenda is imperative to working with my community as it’s the only way to truly build trust. There is a good reason for this. My community understands that they are challenging the status quo by looking critically at a system that people would prefer to think of as a beautiful win-win. Without taking the time to observe my community — by going to one of their many panels, reading one of their memoirs or going to an event, reading threads online or watching videos on TikTok — the first instinct when someone hears someone’s less-than-perfect adoption story is to meet this story with skepticism instead of empathy. My community is well-aware of the trauma that adoption is and many of them are in the throes of processing that trauma. Some members of the community have chosen to share their story with me for the first time. It’s the first time they’ve trusted a reporter. It’s because I keep showing up and the way that I show up is with openness and empathy.

When we show up in this way, this often and on this many different platforms, amazing things start to happen. People start referring you to other people. Potential sources ask their community friend who they see that I’m friends with on Facebook and that person encourages them to talk to me. People start coming to you with stories they want you to report on, TikTok videos and live talks they want to co-create with you and people they want to refer you to. I have been brought so many stories and invited to so many collabs these last few months that one of the most frustrating things about this grad program is not having the time to pursue all of those leads.

Create on-going feedback loops.

But the work doesn’t end with one reported story on adoption that the community felt proud to take part in. And it doesn’t end with one viral TikTok video. Or at least it shouldn’t. One reason I have continued to get stories from people and people wanting to participate is because I have built that into my projects by design. There is a survey on every platform asking demographics questions, information needs, media satisfaction and whether there is interest in participating in a future listening post to help complicate the narrative by building the channel. I have also tried to have a variety of formats of these feedback loops since different people prefer different methods of communicating. This has also helped to ensure that the pool of people I am working with is much less insular. These on-going feedback loops have not only helped me to optimize what I am doing for my community and keep my ear to the ground, but they have also helped to build trust.

Diversify your approach to help build bridges.

Diversifying the platforms I have worked on has also shown me how I can approach this community holistically by using design thinking. For example, adoptees are often at odds with adoptive parents (that they are not related to) online for a variety of reasons, but the main thing is the adoptive parents not being aware of various aspects of adoption trauma and sometimes, in their defensiveness, dismissing that trauma online. So naturally the adoptee often feels triggered and posts something nasty in return. But the adoptive parents were on these adoptees’ pages in the first place, usually to learn about how to deal with something regarding their adopted child.

When we don’t talk about adoption honestly, no one wins in this scenario, so we should all be on the same team. But things aren’t that simple. Many adoptees who have begun to process their trauma feel resentment towards adoptive parents that they had to be the ones to figure things like this out on their own. I have spoken with many adoptees whose parents don’t believe in therapy and are choosing to ignore what their adult adoptee is trying to educate them about. So it’s natural to feel triggered when a well-meaning adoptive parent asks a question, that feels rooted in bias, and reacts with anger.

This is where I discovered a solution to this problem: adoptive parents who are trying to learn need somewhere to get this information that isn’t going to immediately jump down their throats at one wrong move. Adoptees need for adoptive parents to listen to what they are saying and come to the table with some baseline information about adoption trauma before they engage online. I realize that I can’t take all adoptive parents offline, but what I realized I could do, is provide them with a service by giving the information they are seeking through a private newsletter on Substack. Funneling adoptive parents and adoption-curious from TikTok to Substack is one way that I realized I can create a win-win with my project.

Become trauma-informed and get some outside help to support you.

This has been an emotionally taxing experience, as I have had major disruptions in my personal life over the last year that didn’t have to do with adoption, but it did my adoptive mom. Not having that relationship to emotionally fall back on anymore, just as I was learning all about and relaying the many ways in which adoption trauma can show up in one’s life, forced me to confront my own trauma. I had already been in therapy, but it wasn’t enough. If I could do it all over again I would have checked in with my insurance as early as last January to see if I could go to two sessions per week, instead of checking in in August. Emotionally processing all of this has been an exhausting but necessary part of this process.

I also learned that when reporting on issues that have to do with trauma, we need to budget time not just for the work, but for emotional recovery as well.

I also didn’t realize how with this program, with every new post I create, there’s another workload just to write and reflect on it. I had been prioritizing engagement and impact, so my work for school which was mostly to write about what I’m doing has been late. But I don’t think I would change that because it’s the amount of engagement I’ve done that helped to build trust and it’s the number of posts I added that generated more interest in the project. I do think it’s good to be aware of, however, as I imagine if I’m ever to do this kind of work in a newsroom setting, there would be reports I would have to write and data I would have to deliver.

Closing Thoughts

To anyone who is considering working with this community, please show up before you have the story idea. Show up to multiple different channels, even the ones that seem extreme. Assess how people operate in that space and what is considered the appropriate way of doing or speaking about things and mirror this behavior. Follow-through on referrals for sources. Build in feedback loops on all project channels and modes of engagement. Variety is the spice of life. Diversify the groups you’re showing up in, the platforms you’re engaging on and the formats you get information through. It will expand your pool of sources and generate new ways of creating impact.

Finally, be angry at the system, not the people. Most people are trying to do their best so it’s important to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and remember that adoption practices as they currently exist harm everyone involved. When we don’t work together and build alliances within our communities, progress will be slow-moving at best.