Before you surrender

Before You Surrender: Adoptee Truth

The Lifelong Consequences of Relinquishment – From Those Who Lived It

This page is written exclusively by adult adoptees and foster care alumni. We are the children agencies and crisis pregnancy centers urge you to relinquish. We are the evidence of what permanent severance inflicts.

Expectant parents are presented with narratives of “better life,” “open adoption,” and “loving forever family.” These are marketing deceptions designed to secure relinquishment. The reality is documented trauma, identity erasure, and commodification—for profit.

The facts we endured:

• The Primal Wound of Separation Severance from the original mother causes irreversible trauma, rewiring stress responses from infancy. Adoptees face suicide attempts at four times the rate, higher incarceration, and elevated substance abuse—consequences of separation, not pre-placement conditions.
• “Open Adoption” Deception Contact agreements are unenforceable in California and most states. Agencies promise visits and updates to obtain signatures, then permit adoptive parents to terminate all communication post-finalization with no legal recourse. Thousands of relinquishing parents and adoptees live this betrayal.
• Identity Erasure and Sealed Records Original birth certificates are sealed; falsified documents declare adoptive parents as birth parents. We are denied our origins, heritage, and medical history—state-enforced lies that treat us as transferable property.
• Commodification in the Market Your child will be priced by race, age, and perceived desirability. Caucasian infants command $50,000–$70,000 fees; children of color are discounted but generate lifetime subsidies. This is not matching. This is human trafficking.
• No “Better Life” Guarantee Adoptive placements can involve abuse, disruption, or rehoming. Transracial adoptions compound trauma with cultural erasure. The child’s grief, confusion, and loss are permanent—regardless of adoptive parent resources or intent.

We do not speak from resentment toward individuals. We speak from the documented outcomes of a system that prioritizes adult desires and industry profit over a child’s right to their family, kin, and truth.

Alternatives exist that preserve dignity and connection:

• Kinship care or guardianship—maintaining legal ties to original family.
• Community support, financial aid, and parenting resources without severance.
• Temporary guardianship during crisis, not permanent transfer.

Relinquishment is not rescue. It is the infliction of lifelong trauma for financial and emotional gain.

If you proceed after this truth, know that you are enabling the legalized trafficking we have endured. We fight daily to unseal the records that hide original parents from us and to dismantle the industry that severed us.

Choose preservation. Choose your child’s human rights over the system’s profit.

The primal wound is the foundational trauma inflicted on every child severed from their original mother through this legalized trafficking system called adoption. It is not a “theory” to be debated like some academic curiosity—it is the lived reality of millions of us adoptees and foster alumni, the gut-level grief, mistrust, and identity erasure that no “loving forever family” narrative can erase. Nancy Verrier named it in her 1993 book The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, drawing from her work as a therapist, adoptive mother, and our collective experiences: the bond formed in utero and at birth is ruptured, imprinting a profound sense of abandonment on the child’s unconscious psyche and biology, even in infant adoptions.

This wound manifests lifelong:

• Attachment and trust issues: Basic mistrust of others, fear of abandonment, difficulty forming secure relationships—because the first betrayal was by the very system that claimed to “save” us.
• Identity grief and loss: Constant underlying depression, anxiety, the aching question “Why wasn’t I kept?” sealed records compounding it by denying us our truth.
• Emotional and behavioral consequences: Higher rates of substance abuse, self-harm, and relational sabotage as coping for the unhealable hole.

Evidence from rigorous studies backs what we know in our bones:

• Adoptees attempt suicide at 4 times the rate of non-adoptees (Pediatrics journal, large Swedish and U.S. cohorts).
• Elevated risks for major depression, bipolar disorder, substance use disorders, and psychiatric hospitalization (meta-analyses of international adoptees and domestic).
• Incarceration and externalizing disorders overrepresented, even controlling for pre-adoption factors—separation itself rewires stress responses.

Critics—often from the adoption industry or those profiting from the trade—dismiss it as “anecdotal” or claim no “encoded neural scar” from neonatal separation. They point to thriving adoptees in stable homes, ignoring that outcomes vary but the elevated risks remain statistically undeniable. They conflate pre-placement adversity with the wound of severance itself, or demand “proof” of unconscious memory in infants while ignoring developmental neuroscience on early stress and attachment disruption.

But we don’t need their validation. We live it. The primal wound explains why so many of us, even in “good” adoptions, feel fundamentally broken, why reunion brings relief but not cure, why sealed records and falsified birth certificates are crimes against our humanity.

This wound is why adoption—as legalized human trafficking—must end. No child deserves this inflicted for adult desires or state profit. Kinship preservation, guardianship, support for families—that’s justice.

We’re cleaning it up by exposing this truth: separation is violence. The primal wound is real, and it’s why we’re fighting to dismantle the entire rotten system.

Adoptees stand united. The wound fuels our rage—and our resolve. The kids next won’t carry it because of us.

Adoptees stand united. We are the proof. The coercion ends with informed refusal.

→ Next: The Adoption Concept – The Hidden Pricing Catalog of Children → Previous: LGBTQ and Adoption Pipeline

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