Pre-Sale: The Adoption Paradox

Description

RELEASE DATE: APRIL 2025! This paperback version will be a personally signed copy of the book shipped to all buyers in early April, 2025.

The Adoption Paradox will challenge the narrative that adoptions are always what is best for children and their parents. In fact, it creates mental health challenges that need our attention and deserve to be heard. For example, adoptees are four times more likely to attempt or commit suicide than the general population. Plus, they over-represent in depression, anxiety disorders, and other problems, despite being less than three percent of the U.S. population.

The book will dig deeper into what adoption gets right, and wrong, and inspire you to join an important conversation about improving the process for everyone involved.

What is unique about this book is that it combines significant research and statistics along with powerful storytelling from all three sides of the adoption triad. It’s about a mixed-race girl who is adopted by her white, religious parents who fail to understand her. Or the birth mother contacted by her long-ago relinquished son, who suddenly rejects their first planned in-person meeting – and she never hears from him again. As well as the mother who adopted two twin boys from Ethiopia who knows that her love is not enough to heal and raise them.

 The book contains five parts. It begins with an Introduction, including the history of adoption in America. The next part focuses on adoptees, the third on birth parents, then adopting parents, and the book’s final part will discuss reunions between adoptees and their birth families. Each section will contain personal stories and in-depth interviews with professionals in the fields of mental health, the foster care system, family court lawyers and judiciary members, and other agencies, advocates, and service organizations.

 National adoption statistics for 2021 show that approximately one million willing couples in the U.S. are actively seeking to adopt a baby. This contrasts with only eighteen thousand domestically born babies who will become available in any given year. This is the largest disparity between the demand for infant babies and the available supply since adoption records have been kept.

In conclusion, the book examines how to make adoption processes better and more ethical. It does not intend to be critical of adopting parents or suggest that the practice should end. However, this is now a profit-driven industry with many bad actors capitalizing on their desperation. There is also meaningful coercion of birth mothers to relinquish their babies. Handed off in this process are the children, the welfare of whom all of this is supposed to be about. Many groups and organizations throughout the U.S. have sprung up – some working together and others working primarily for the rights of their part of the triad. Resources for information, support, and calls for improved legislation are also shared.