Michele Merritt, Ph.D.
@Skyphly
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Abolitionist, Adoptee, Dog Obsessed, Marathon Swimmer, Triathlete, other discipline interloper, Philosopher, Adoptees for Choice Co-Founder, She/Her
Memphis, TN
Joined August 2010
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My piece for
@thenation
, unpaywalled. Sticking to 800 words is tough, but also easy when the message is pretty simple: the supposed 'need' for adoption is a manufactured fairytale.
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@thisaintmeyall
Hi, adopted person here. We are humans, not butts of jokes. Many birth parents were coerced into relinquishing or there were no supports in place for them to parent and they are devastated for the rest of their lives, desperately hoping to be reunited with their child 1/
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Adoptive parents: your happy and adjusted adopted child is not proof that you know exactly how they feel. In fact, it could be the exact opposite. High-acheiving and outwardly happy children are often hiding the most pain. Don't speak for someone whose life is not yours.
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Folks remove children from impoverished families and call it "rescue", rather than helping to remove poverty from the struggling family.
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Imagine strongarming your own child into relinquishing their baby for adoption. Your own grandkid and you just chop them off the family tree as if they aren't part of you, all because you want to maintain an illusion of purity.
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Interested in listening to adoptees now? Cool. Here is a thread of adoptee authored work (starting with a bit of my own).
#adoptees
: please link to your published books, papers, blogs, etc. I know I am only listing a couple off the top of my head. 🧵
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Met two sisters I didn’t even know I had for 38 years of my life this past week.
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I see you'd like to buy a puppy. Ok, but you must wait 8 weeks because separating the puppy too early from its mother will traumatize it and cause all sorts of developmental problems. It's scientifically proven.
Would you like to buy this newborn human instead?
#adopteetwitter
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Being adopted means every aspect of your existence is leveraged as quid pro quo by a world that sees "not being aborted" as absolution against any harms an unjust system causes you.
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Behind every adoption 'success stroy' is a destroyed family. Let's quit measuring the quality of an inherently harmful system by the ones who were harmed least.
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When a white adoptive parent of black children says it isn't clear why biological relatives are needed to provide adequate mirrors, and that person is like a top tier academic, I just...
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Maybe most folks can't wrap their heads around
#adoptees
and
#birthparents
being critical of adoption because
#adoptiveparents
see adoption as ADDITIVE, while the rest of us know that it is, fundamentally, SUBTRACTIVE.
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Propping up Angelina Jolie as an adoptee advocate is like claiming Elon Musk is the hero of the working class.
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How much abuse within adoptive homes goes unchecked by child 'welfare' agencies because the uncritical societal assumption is adoptive parents are all saints who provide better homes? Like, maybe we should rethink this idea: purchasing another human = ethically superior parent.
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@thisaintmeyall
So, your 'funny haha' tweet completely erases all of this (and more - I'm not even speaking into the immeasurable losses of intercountry and transracial adoption). Maybe learn some things about the adoption industry and quit dehumanizing those of us who have been harmed by it
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Reunion, for adoptees, is not an achievement. It’s a complicated, sometimes healing, sometimes retraumatizing, and always unnecessary aspect of our existence as adoptees. It’s not a hallmark movie to be consumed. Treating it as such is irresponsible and harmful.
#adopteetwitter
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My birth was forced on my mom
My adoption was forced on me
I was one couple's worst nightmare
And another's Plan B
Don't you dare tell me to be grateful
That I was not aborted
#adopteetwitter
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When speaking about adoptees or displaced persons who have gone on to lead successful lives, what if the narrative was not "they did what they did BECAUSE of adoption," but was instead, "they did what they did DESPITE adoption"?
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If you can’t afford children, the state takes them away from you so other people who can’t afford children can crowdsource on social media to buy them.
Most of you don’t know me personally, but if you’d be so kind, please share, donate or both so to help me and my wife adopt a child within the coming year.
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If you think a black man talking about the racism and microaggressions he experienced being raised by white parents is “throwing them under the bus,” “calling them out,” or “ungrateful”, congrats: you would have voted against abolishing slavery and segregation.
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Poverty shaming and equating good parenting with "having lots of shit in the house". Then...3/
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Ok, ok, since I keep being told I need to highlight the positives of adoption, I'll play fair. Knowing nothing about myself helped me develop epic sleuthing skills and the capacity to find the truth about nearly anything/anyone. You?
#adopteetwitter
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Telling adoptees biology doesn’t matter has strong “I don’t see color” vibes.
#adopteetwitter
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Woman 1 on facebook, big mad that woman 2 who was supposed to give her newborn baby to woman 1 changed her mind after, you know, she gave birth and realized how utterly effed that would be. Here is what she said...1/
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It's the hatrick of adoptive parent narcissism - 1. shaming natural parents while bolstering self on grounds of money, 2. self-centering, 3. belief that god caters to only their whims and desires. End.
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Wild how I can publish an abolitionist piece about how all adoption should end and receive not even a tiny % of the vitriol spewed at me as Rebecca has for saying yt people should educate themselves if raising black children. But do go on about how colorblind y'all are.
My white adoptive family can't see the value of the Black writers who endorsed my memoir, bc they've never read them. If you're a grown white person and haven't read Roxane Gay, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Damon Young, Bassey Ikpi or Kiese Laymon, you shouldn't be raising Black children.
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“Children will always need homes; therefore adoption will/should always exist”
True premise. False conclusion.
You can care for and house children without purchasing them and erasing their identity.
It’s called guardianship.
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So can we talk about how 16% of serial killers are adoptees (adoptees only make up 2-3% of the population) and that adoptees are "15 times more likely to kill one or both of their adoptive parents than biological children"?
#adopteetwitter
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@Renaedarlene
@corsent
Parents should never speak for their kids. Never. And please realize that relinquishment causes trauma. The AAP even recognizes this. Saying all adoption is trauma does not mean all adoptees have terrible lives.
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You can be happy with, benefit from, or have good experiences within a system and that system can STILL be harmful AF. Your individual positive story does not erase systemic injustice.
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So, you’re realizing adoption is an oppressive and exploitative industry?
Your next step: amplify adoptee voices and center them in all adoption discussions.
Otherwise you are perpetuating more exploitation and theft of our intellectual and emotional work.
#adopteetwitter
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Hey look! Black Friday for buying Humans! But please tell me again how adopted people are ungrateful if we talk about being commodified.
#adoptees
#adoption
#humantrafficking
#BlackFriday
#CyberMonday
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Wait so some yt people used their (fake) adoption story and their Black foster kid to make money and lied to him the whole time? Nope, never saw that coming 🙄
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“Family is everything” is such a weird thing to say to someone whose first family relinquished them and whose next family purchased them.
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The Venn diagram of people who say babies cannot remember their biological parents if they are taken early enough and the ones who think playing Mozart to fetuses will make them smart is a circle.
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Adoption is the embodiment of all that’s wrong with capitalism and the failure of society to collectively care for its most vulnerable.
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White adoptive parents of transracial adopted persons need to stop being allowed to publish on anti-racism or feminism or basically anything that positions them as authorities on social justice.
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I wonder if we made it illegal to adopt an infant before 8 weeks bonding time with their parent(s), you know, like how we do with dogs, if the domestic supply of infants would dry up and people would finally realize adoption is not “acceptable abortion”
Ask a pro-choice person:
If the foster care system was perfect, if the adoption system was perfect, and if we had built-in systems for maternal and prenatal care in America, would you still think abortion should be legal?
If the answer is yes, they are just pro-abortion...
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Everyone: Family is chosen. Don't stay in dysfunctional family systems! It's ok to cut ties with toxic family.
Adoptees: Can we have the right to annul our adoptions if that is best for our mental health?
Everyone: Shut up and be grateful you were not aborted!
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"There is no greater pain than losing a child and while we're so thankful that she's okay; we have lost her and we're not okay."
Trying to equate this 'failed adoption' to losing a child to death. Ok. 4/
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Starting the week off reading an email about how my writing has changed someone's views on adoption and they will no longer pursue it as a parenting option. Mondays don't always suck.
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I’m sorry you had a bad experience and are traumatized by adoptees not validating your biases, but you must realize that you don’t speak for all non-adoptees. Some of them are actually critical thinkers that can see the harms of adoption when pointed out to them.
#adopteetwitter
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Yep, if you want to see this play out in real time, suggest guardianship to adopters/potential adopters and explain to them that this option is truly child-centered in that it allows potential reunification with the original family one day, and watch how quickly they fight you.
Adoption exists to procure children for those who want them. That’s it, that’s it’s purpose. Every “child centered” take is pure propaganda, and not based in truth or reality. A hard look at how adoption functions, at every stage and every level, shows this
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There's a difference between stating facts surrounding emprical findings on trauma and the developing brain and how family separation causes this trauma vs. saying that this trauma affects all adoptees the same way. 1/
#adopteetwitter
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No, adopting from foster care is not the more ethical way to do adoption. It's maybe even less ethical because most kids in the foster system are there unethically.
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Hey
#adoptiveparents
: don’t be like this. Also, if you want to show some solidarity with
#adoptees
, now is the time. This fragile adopter has blocked every single adoptee and erased tons of their emotional labor. This is when we need the more powerful to stand up for us.
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42 years ago I was purchased for 10k because my parents were poor and couldn’t access resources.
Tomorrow, please vote so that forced birth, coerced relinquishment, and child trafficking are not inevitably woven into the coming decades.
#adopteetwitter
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If you know an adoptee who has no trauma or negative things to say about being adopted, it might be because they don't trust you with that information.
#adopteetwitter
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#adoptees
, I’d like to start a thread about therapy, so CW for many of you.
My aim here is to highlight how complicated therapy can be for adoptees, since we are so often brushed off and told to “get help” as if it’s that simple.
#adopteetwitter
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Part of the reason it is so hard to convince adopted parents that they participated in and benefitted from a harmful system is that same system uses powerful propoganda to convince folks that buying a child is the most selfless thing imaginable.
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When you begin to frame adoption as part of a larger web of systemic violence, your focus tends to shift, from rights acquisition to system abolition.
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As long as you keep believing "adoption is never going anywhere" it won't. Abolitionism means believing in radically transforming the world so adoption is, at best, a last resort, and never something we can turn into an ethical good.
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Mine: the question is nonsensical. There was no “I” to abort. If you are asking if im glad to be alive, then yes, I am. But should my mom have been able to terminate her pregnancy? 💯 and that decision doesn’t have anything to do with the me I am today.
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#prochoice
#adoptees
: what’s your answer to the inevitable and hackneyed question, “would you rather have been aborted”?
#adopteetwitter
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#adopteetwitter
: since I am apparently in a fringe cult of adoptees, I thought I'd use the opportunity to share some of my peer-reviewed research on adoption trauma recently published in Child Abuse and Neglect, the 2nd best social work journal worldwide.
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I don’t do a ton of personal on here but so you know I’m a real person (and not JUST a commodity🙄), me, my dad, and my daughter. Found him right after she was born and knew immediately from one pic. We met in person once. He died a few months later. 🧵
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Exactly. White adoptees need to stop centering themselves on this. Yes, adoption is fucked up but this is more fundamentally a racism issue.
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Today would be my Dad's 60th birthday. Found him Jan 2020 when he met me and his granddaughter. He died a few months later. I'm told to be happy I found him, to be grateful for the time we shared. But no one ever says "I'm sorry you and he missed out on so much."
#adopteetwitter
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Really excited to share my forthcoming paper "Be Grateful or Be Quiet: Confronting the Epistemic Harms of Adoptism" when it is published later this year in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. Happy to share preprint copies beforehand if you DM me. This sucker took 3 years of work!
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Hey progressives decrying this: maybe recognize this is not anomalous and that entitlement to other people’s children is baked into the adoption industrial complex aka family policing systems.
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I always love being told I should highlight the positives of adoption in my work more. It's like telling a feminist scholar (also me) to write more about the benefits living as a woman under heteronormative capitalist patriarchy.
#adopteetwitter
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#adopteetwitter
, a thread 🧵 of fallacious arguments you encounter when trying to point out systemic failures of the adoption industrial complex. I'll list a couple of my 'favorites.'
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Periodic reminder that many adopted people support safe and cost-effective
#abortion
access, which includes
#mifepristone
aka the abortion pill. Many of us, myself included, have benefited from this vital form of healthcare. Adopted people are not your anti-choice pawns.
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Been researching silencing and microaggressions as they occur with adoptees.
Funny thing: all the articles I’ve found are adoptive parents claiming they are the victims of these injustices.
File this under “totally saw that coming.”
#adopteevoices
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“It could have been worse” is just an attempt to distract you from the reality that it should have been better.
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Trauma survivors often subconsciously block out traumatic memories for survival, and the mask of always being busy, productive, and seeming like there is no possible way something is deeply wrong is a prime example of this.
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An analogy in adoption and suicide research is the oversaturation of third-person knowledge. It's especially noticeable in suicidology where survivors, despite existing in very large numbers, are conspicuosly absent in conversations about what it's like to be suicidal.
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Jo said she'd rather have an abortion than have her babies get adopted by white evangelicals and is now receiving death threats and unenrolling her children in school for safety. This is the same crap adoptees deal with when we dare to speak negatively about being adopted.
Here is my public resignation to my children’s School Board.
The Board has been notified. Please help me disseminate, we need people to know my children will not be at the school for the foreseeable future after receiving threats to their safety that concerned school community.
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Not being able to have children of your own doesn't give you the right to own children.
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Can we just take a moment to consider how the adopted daughter of Nancy Verrier has never spoken about the Primal Wound at all, let alone in a positive manner? What if, just spitballing here, she feels exploited, pathologized, and spoken for by an AP - in this case, her own AP?
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Me, writing academic stuff about adoption, first few sentences of paragraph: Let us examine these arguments in sequence, bla bla academic speak, nice tone, etc.
By end of paragraph: GIVE ME MY FUCKING OBC AND WHY THE FUCK DON'T ADOPTEES HAVE FREE MENTAL HEALTHCARE FOR LIFE.
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wonder how many of the "free Britney" crowd are now shouting "ungrateful!" at Oher.
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One of the most insidious ways
#adoptees
are gaslit is being told we are special because we were "chosen."
I was chosen like a blueberry muffin gets chosen - desired flavor + next in line at bakery.
The 'bakery' was the industry that capitalized on my parents' poverty.
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I mean, let's use Occam's razor here: it makes no sense all these adopted folks were just born this way and happened to be abandoned, adopted, and then turned into murderers. Simpler explanation: untreated trauma is the cause. Trauma from...you guessed it: adoption.
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Adopted folx arguing for dismantling the system that subjugates them are not reproducing harmful bioessentialist norms. This dog whistle distracts from the real harm: those who’ve always had access to their genetic origins insisting biology is meaningless and family is chosen.
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These are not the same statements:
1. all adoption causes trauma
2. all adopted people process/react to/remember that trauma in the same way
So much misunderstanding (including among adoptees) could be cleared up if we appreciated how these two statements differ.
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This is appalling and really, when you read academic literature that says things like "I forgot to have kids because I was so busy working on my career, so I adopted" it sounds the same - narcissistic and not the child-centered gig it's touted to be.
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You tell a kid their whole life their parents loved them so much they gave them away to strangers, that they were rescued from their own family, that they ought to be grateful for their trauma, then wonder why they snap.
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Child 'welfare,' the foster system, the adoption industry, the prison industrial complex, and the police - not separate entities, but closely cooperative systems of oppression that maintain social divides and delimit who counts as a 'good' vs. 'bad' parent.
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"Our birth mom changed her mind at discharge and they took our little girl. Instead of coming home to her room she went home to an empty RV with only the outfit she was wearing. No crib, no clothes, no books, no bassinet, no nothing, her "home" is as empty as our hearts." 2/
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Imagine hearing two adoptees speak on the radio about their lived experiences and you, an adoptive parent, say this:
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Giving a talk tomorrow on social neuroscience and why adoption is bullshit.
Ok, that’s not exactly the title, but that’s the gist.
This is what happens if you invite me to participate in a philosophy of neuroscience workshop, just sayin.
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Two of my favorite replies to my article so far. Speaking for adopted people while claiming I, an adopted person, am using adoptees as pawns in my evil family preservation agenda and 'we need the ability to purchase poor people's children because infertile people exist.'
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Continuing to amplify "The Primal Wound" and other adoptive parent authored work about adoptee experiences is not revolutionary, nor does it change the narrative. It keeps the narrative right where the adoption industry wants it: in the hands of the oppressors.
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Wild that folks can understand other identity shifts late in life - gender, sexuality, etc. - but when an adoptee does a 180 on the adoption narrative forced onto them their whole lives: "get help, you ungrateful meany-face! Stop attention seeking! You could have been aborted!"
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My article in the Dobbs decision special issue in Adoption and Culture where I discuss being adopted, having an abortion, and why it's bullshit that folks claim adoption is a reproductive choice.
#adopteetwitter
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You can love your adoptive family while still calling for a dismantling of the unjust systems that make adoption seem like an inevitability.
It's always funny to me when I'm accused of being an absolutist by folks who cannot even recognize this non-mutual exclusivity.
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So we are told to "get help" when we speak out about adoption, but then we are told adoption provided us with a better life so why would we need help? Hence, therapy and mental health services are not provided free of charge (in the U.S.) for all adopted kids as they should be.
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If we turn out great and successful: it was the amazing love our adoptive parents bestowed upon us.
If we go on a killing spree, it's because of "bad genes".
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"Adoption is not a for-profit industry that marginalizes adoptees"
Ok, but why does the agency that made thousands by severing me from my family want 1000 bucks just to 'begin the process' of 'searching' for said family they have literal records of?
#adopteetwitter
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Adoption is not a reproductive choice.
The choice to purchase a child is not a reproductive right needing protection.
Conflating adoption and abortion rights this way does a huge disservice to actual reproductive justice.
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I would like to start a coalition of
#adoptees
and
#donorconceived
#dcp
and folks generated via other
#AssistiveReproductiveTech
like surrogacy. We all have differences but I think some important overlaps too and could be powerful together.
#adopteetwitter
RT pls
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Today I'm thinking about what it might be like if we stopped pathologizing suicidal people and instead reframed their desire to die as a reasonable reaction to the unreasonable demands of oppressive schemas and capitalist fuckery.
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It's a myth that adoption is a revolutionary way to build queer kinship. Modern-day plenary adoption practices regurgitate capitalist heteronormative prescriptions of "suitable families." You don’t circumvent this simply by allowing couples – of any gender – to purchase children.
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"Adoption is morally good" cannot be a true statement if participants within that institution claim it harms them.
What you mean is "Adopting fulfilled my wishes." This more accurately represents what is meant and from whom its coming.
#adopteetwitter
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"I keep praying she will change her mind but I'm also truly struggling with my faith. How can God do this to us? What have I possibly done to deserve such heartache?" 5/
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Gee I wonder what giving 15k to a struggling family who is unsure they are capable of caring for a baby, instead of installing these abandonment boxes all over town, might do.
I got banned from the Indiana-based Baby Box Corporation's Facebook page literally three seconds after I posted information that the baby box people don't want you or Floridians to know. Whatever you do, please don't retweet this. 🤣
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