Being "Chosen"

There is a great myth propagated by the adoption industry and supported by many adoptive parents that adoptees are somehow “special” because they are “chosen”.  I found myself wondering today if I might feel less bad about my experience as an adoptee if I actually had been chosen as opposed to being a single offering; take him or leave him.  Obviously that isn’t something I can find an answer to, but it is an interesting question.

There is a book called “The Chosen Baby” that is about adoption and is aimed at adopted children.  It was (and perhaps still is) recommend as a way to tell ones’ adopted child he or she is adopted.  I suppose it is possible that at some point in adoption’s past there we so many babies available for adoption that adopting parents had a choice of babies.  That was not the case when I was adopted in 1973 and it certainly isn’t the case now (I am speaking of infant adoptions, for older children there is likely some ability to choose).  The only choice my adoptive parents had was whether or not to say yes when I was offered.  Saying no was technically an option but they likely assumed (and would have been correct) that couples who turn down babies don’t get offered babies again.  They did not get to go to a home and pick out the “best” infant from a multitude; they were offered me and accepted.   They made no choice past “yes” or “no”.

Infants are given up for a myriad of justifications.  They all basically boil down to one reason though, we (the adoptees) were not as important to someone who would have been instrumental in keeping us with our natural families as some other concern.  In my case the people who should have had my best interests at heart but didn’t were my father and grandmother.  Other things were more important to them than I was.  They didn’t “love me so much they gave me away” (a justification we often hear from the adoption industry), instead they didn’t love me enough (or perhaps at all) to keep me.

So, was I or are any of us “chosen”?  No, that is simply a cover word used to deny reality.  The reality is that in order to be available for adoption the people who were supposed to care for us decided something else was more important.  The only choice made in relation to me was the choice to make “not being embarrassed” and “not being tied down” more important than me.  That is, unfortunately, the reality of adoption and adoptees live with it every day.  In many of us it creates lifelong feelings that we are not good enough or not worthy.  That is the reality behind being “chosen”.