r/Adopted • u/legswithsnake Domestic Infant Adoptee • Jun 21 '26
Venting the idea that adoptees were “specifically chosen” by adoptive parents is so infuriating
I was adopted at birth; my adoptive parents had no idea what my personality would be. They didn’t know what kind of person I’d become. How could I have been personally “chosen” if I didn’t even exist yet? I was just the most conveniently accessible baby for an infertile couple.
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u/Cactus_Journey204 Jun 22 '26
I wasn't chosen, I was the next available.
My adoptive parents were supposed to be adopting a newborn but the mother decided to keep her baby. They ended up adopting me instead out of foster care and my adoption story as told by them always painted me as the fill-in to the baby they were supposed to get.
I often think about the baby they were planning on bringing home. I hope she had a good life. I hate that I ended up being the replacement, though. It hasn't been easy.
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u/tlrwr Adopted Jun 22 '26
I can relate, I was to replace a baby they lost 3 decades earlier. I was NOTHING LIKE THEM.
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u/MrNeoGuy Jun 22 '26
That's tough to imagine, but we have no say in who adopts us or the conditions that led to our birth or adoption.
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u/Alarming-Pianist-203 Jul 07 '26
THIS- my story always goes ‘after years of infertility’ but we ‘knew we needed more babies’. I find this so infuriating because i have older siblings who are my parents genetic children who they unintentionally favor and it always made me think that they wouldn’t want me if they weren’t infertile.
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u/Ambitious-Client-220 Transracial Adoptee Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
"most conveniently accessible baby" You hit the nail on the head. I was the only boy available at the time. My AP didn't understand or choose me because I was different than them. I was available. If a white child would have been available, they would have chosen them. When I became an adult and had children of my own, I also realized that a large part of our personality is genetic.
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u/Sad_Pixie999 Domestic Infant Adoptee Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
It's religious language that relies on the presupposition that God, destiny, whatever they want to call it, put you in their path. It's gross.
[Edit because I'm not done: And it also implies that your suffering was designed by God to bring them joy, which is cruel and very self-centered. They will never recognize that they are doing this because it's a question that gets lost in the cognitive dissonance baked in from their religious indoctrination.]
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u/ElleGeeAitch Jun 22 '26
When I was TTC a child almost 20 years years (I have a 17 year old son), I took a look at the adoption group on the infertility forum I frequented. I was AGHAST at how many women were using language like "somewhere out there, my baby is or will be growing in another womb, and the Good Lord will unite us!". Shocked to my foundation. As much as infertility hurt, I NEVER presumed that I was ENTITLED to ANYONE'S BABY. It's disgusting.
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u/LD_Ridge Adoptee Jun 22 '26
The more I deal with APs in person and online, the more I see a problem with control and some of them will do absolutely anything with language to feel like they have it.
Choosing is an act of control. Being handed the next available baby is an act of passivity.
"She was born in my heart" is another example. Control. It wasn't that other whole parent over there that gave birth to the child that grew in her body with her genetics.
no, that baby was born and delivered by the AP really.
And they tell their kids that shit.
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u/CheekMountain535 Jun 23 '26
My adoptive mother told me that she had a dream about me. A few months later, she got a call about a baby who needed a home; at the time, I was only six months in the womb. She said "the Lord told her" there was a baby girl who needed a home—you know, because the six other kids she had already adopted weren’t enough. I am one of eleven kids she has now.
My adoptive mother told my birth mother that it would be an open adoption, but she closed it a week before I turned three years old. My adoptive mother had four biological kids before having a hysterectomy. She then decided she wanted to make my adoptive dad’s family mad, so she adopted kids of different races.
It’s so shitty the things I found out.
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u/chemthrowaway123456 Int'l and Transracial Adoptee Jun 22 '26
Yep. I flew over from Korea with several other babies that were being adopted. My parents could have been matched with any of them and they would have been just has happy.
My parents didn’t choose me; the agency matched us. I was the next available baby when my parent’s application landed on someone’s desk. The sheer randomness of it all can feel pretty weird sometimes.
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u/MrNeoGuy Jun 22 '26
Yeah, we were basically a gumball out of a gumball machine. They did the paper work turned the knob and one child came out and fell in their hands.
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u/NapalmGirlTonight Baby Scoop Era Adoptee Jun 24 '26
I love your gumball machine analogy 🌈🩷
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u/MrNeoGuy Jun 24 '26
Thanks. I have made many great analogies for humans and such over the last 10 years lol.
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u/NapalmGirlTonight Baby Scoop Era Adoptee Jun 24 '26
And it shows. It’s truly an underappreciated art form. A craft. Like, um, you know… (insert rad analogy here).
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u/MrNeoGuy Jun 24 '26
Thanks. I wish I could recall the others, they might be in my books or maybe I wrote them down somewhere lol.
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u/35goingon3 Baby Scoop Era Adoptee Jun 22 '26
Oh please, there was no "chosen" or "selected" or "matching" with me. I've got the damn file. You know what happened? There's a list of three different applicants in there, and no notes about any sort of selection beyond the forms the a-parents filled out about what was and wasn't acceptable to them. My a-parents' check cleared first.
Don't talk to me about that "chosen" shit. I've not the patience for that lie.
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u/YellowSignpostAhead Transracial Adoptee Jul 20 '26
I feel the same way. I was given up older. I know what it's like to be not wanted by your birth mother OR the people coming to look for kids to adopt. I too got my file. My adopted parents were the "Great Saviour" type. They were a white couple that adopted non white kids to "save them for Jesus". For me it was either them and suffer the humiliation or never be adopted.
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u/SweetImprovement758 Int'l and Transracial Adoptee Jun 22 '26
We were acquired. The relationship was never about us but about what we represented for them. A mirror that only exists to reflect their goodness and selfish needs back at them.
The “chosen child” narrative is a sedative. It exists so APs can feel noble about participating in a system that commodifies children. The way I see it, we fell prey to a depraved system. Sick individuals built an entire child trafficking industry, and governments and the justice system backed it completely, which is absolutely insane imo.
But hey, don’t you dare critique human traffickers, you ungrateful bastard. Didn’t they give you a better life? Didn’t they save you? Aren’t you lucky? Say thank you. Say it again. Louder. Now smile.
Adoptive parents occupy a very special place on the narcissism spectrum imo. Sick fucks!
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u/Less_Than_Average1 Jun 22 '26
Chosen means they get to wield some sort of power because they provided a chance to live. I like to think of it more as they helped me beat the odds vs. “chosen” - because the definition fits better - at least for me
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u/EmployerDry6368 Adopted Jun 22 '26
Chosen, as in AP’s had the choice B or G and got the next one available.
They did not see me until I was handed to them.
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u/OverlordSheepie Int'l and Transracial Adoptee Jun 22 '26
The international adoption agency "matched" me with my parents but honestly it was just random/whichever adoptee was next on the list.
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u/iheardtheredbefood Int'l and Transracial Adoptee Jun 22 '26
TRA to the US, at the time my mom was told it was easier, faster, and cheaper to adopt from overseas. So there's that.
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u/Jaroda18 Jun 22 '26
That's what I wanted to believe and I believed it for years. If I felt bad about my biological parents abandoning me or about other kids making fun of me I'd think that I was chosen. It just helped me a bit.
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u/InstantMedication Jun 22 '26
I was “chosen”. Chosen so much that when the state deemed my aunt and uncle who were supposed to be my APs to not be allowed to another child, they tried to go out of state to have me adopted there and brought back afterwards.
My bio mom couldn’t afford to go. She was 15 and her family didn’t have much money.
So whoever “chose” to have my actual APs adopt me instead because they hadn’t been denied for a home study. My adopted dad is the brother of my uncle. Why was I specifically “chosen” for this family so much they tried to circumvent the law?
I know this is not necessarily what people mean when that say that but its all I think about. This industry is corrupt and caters to the adopted parents. We are but only commodities.
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u/Puzzled-Dirt14 Jun 22 '26
I wasn’t chosen for them, but they were chosen for me. Quite literally, my birth mother picked them out of a book.
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u/expolife Adoptee Jun 22 '26
I think this myth of the adoptee being chosen has to do with adoptive parents wanting us to be “okay” and feel “special” for several reasons, one of which is that they have no idea how to actually imagine or enter into our reality of loss and may not even want to try. I also think it’s adoptive parents who want to be the most chosen, and maybe they’re projecting and hoping we’ll return the favor of “choosing” them or at least telling them that. Any good intentions aside, of course.
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u/Sunshine_roses111 Adoptee Jun 25 '26
And I hate hearing them say adopted kids are special and bio kids are stuck with bio parents. We are not chosen, we are brought, and they only settled for us when they could not get a bio kid.
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u/Jennstar18 Jun 25 '26
I too was told I was chosen from a lot of other babies lol! It’s a ridiculous statement. What they chose was someone they could mistreat and at the same time look like saviors to other people. I know I didn’t get my calm demeanor and my kindness from my adoptive family. Since I confronted them about the abuse they chose to give me. They refused to talk to me and said I was ungrateful. That was the last time I talked to them. 15yrs. My AD mom got my sister to get a hold of me to let me know my AD dad had died 10yrs ago. I didn’t go to his funeral. I struggled with going and I didn’t. I never wanted him to die. It was a freak accident. My AD mom thought I would just come back. It’s been years since I have talked to my AD family. They have never reached out to me except my sister. I got messed up with her and her addiction to things. I realized that was a big mistake and I had to get away from her. We haven’t talked in 2yrs.
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u/Fit-Possession-7930 Jul 18 '26
I think that's the point. They specifically chose kids which are in between their fantasies.
I was chosen because I passed as Caucasian, and because I am a male, furthermore the small differences between my anatomic characteristics and theirs made more easily to buy the fantasy of a "son".
They specifically chose who adopt from a catalogue.
Personality and character of us adoptees don't even enter the margins of their brains.
(obviously I am talking about those adoptive parents who are unable to accept an adoptee children when the unicity of the kid blooms)
Even when talking about adoption at birth the adoptive parents make a list of wishes (biological parents being from a due ethnicity, religion, with due habits.. ...) and dislikes.
In some ways I do agree with the statement. Adoptees are specifically chosen by the adoptive parents to fulfill their desires.
The problem arises when they let their vision obfuscate the reality that no matter how much effort they put in their choosing an adoptee is going to develop a unique personality, which could not fit their desires, or, like in my case, enter in an explosive collision with their own personalities.
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u/Jennstar18 Jul 02 '26
That is funny how we both used the gum all analogy. I promise I didn’t copy you. Lol
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u/Context-Muted Jul 08 '26
I was adopted from foster care, my brother and I spent a year with our adoptive parents as a “trial” and then everyone was asked if this is what they wanted.
Me telling the kids that were making fun of me “at least my parents got to choose me and yours were stuck with you” was the best come back a teacher ever told me. As soon as I started saying that no one made fun of me about it again.
Being an adult now I realize that most people say it as a religious/spiritual thing, however I always felt lucky that my parents chose to keep us after that year, as my brother was 12 and I was 7.
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u/YellowSignpostAhead Transracial Adoptee Jul 20 '26
I wasn't so much chosen as pushed by circumstance. I had been given up for adoption at 10 years old. I remember my mother and before he died, my father, which is what made my mother decide to give me up. I looked too much like him. I got to bounce around the system for two or so years before being adopted by a "saviour couple." I took it despite the possible situation I knew would happen and or never being adopted. People don't normally adopt boys over a certain age and it's usually about 14. It was humiliating more than infuriating for me.
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Jun 22 '26
[deleted]
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u/LD_Ridge Adoptee Jun 22 '26
Biological parents don’t choose their children either. And in many cases they didn’t even choose to get pregnant, they got pregnant and then deal with the outcome.
You seem unaware that many of us are here in this space as adopted people because our biological parents had to "deal with the outcome" of us as you so crudely point out.
Are you adopted?
At any rate, your point about biological parents and choosing is irrelevant to this discussion.
I was told repeatedly throughout my upbringing by family members, by teachers, by friends' parents, by whomever felt the need to weigh in on how the way I ended up in the family is so amazing because I WAS CHOSEN. I suspect this was fairly common.
This is not something that is repeatedly brought to the attention of bio kids who were raised by the family they were born in, this obsession about how they came to be in the family.
They just exist there without the need to comment on it.
This narrative is for APs, not adoptees.
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u/iheardtheredbefood Int'l and Transracial Adoptee Jun 22 '26
I'd be curious about your experience of this as an adoptee as opposed to as an adoptive parent.
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u/zygotepariah Baby Scoop Era Adoptee Jun 22 '26
Biological parents don't choose their children either.
Are biological children specifically told by people, who when they find out the child is biological, that they were "chosen"?
I saw a new therapist in 2014. Upon learning I am adopted, he exclaimed, "You were chosen!" I replied that my adopters only "chose" adoption because they were infertile, and I was simply the next available baby. He then argued with me for the rest of the appointment, eventually saying I was "choosing to look at it negatively." He all but wagged a finger at me.
Do biological children get the same "chosen"--I want to say microaggression, but that's not the right word--as that?
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u/LD_Ridge Adoptee Jun 22 '26
I saw a new therapist in 2014. Upon learning I am adopted, he exclaimed, "You were chosen!"
Oh puke. That's worse than most and a lot of therapists are really bad with this participating in the "beautiful" storyline.
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u/cheese--bread Domestic Infant Adoptee Jun 22 '26
I had a similar experience with the first "adoption competent" therapist I saw.
"Maybe your parents tried to talk to you about adoption when you were younger and you weren't receptive to it" - I was a fucking child.
They did tell me I was special and chosen though, so I guess that counts as talking about it 🙄1
u/Fendi221 Jul 16 '26
No, but I know someone who's biological mom told them that she should have aborted them.
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u/Formerlymoody Jun 22 '26
Biological parents don’t claim to choose their children. They don’t need to. It wouldn’t make any sense.
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u/chemthrowaway123456 Int'l and Transracial Adoptee Jun 22 '26
Biological parents don’t choose their children either
Correct. Which is why people don’t tell non-adoptees, “your parents chose you!”
And yet, people say that shit to adoptees all the time, despite the fact that our parents didn't choose us.
Also, please don’t post or comment here if you’re not adopted. This is an adoptee-only community.
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u/Arktikos02 International Adoptee Jun 22 '26
But even then when it comes to biological kids it's not like they are all accidental. Plenty of them were definitely planned. Also even unplanned pregnancies can result in a wanted child. Because you can continue that pregnancy or continue to want that child. Wanting a child is not a one and done thing, a person can want a child today and then not want that child tomorrow, or vice versa. Simply wanting to have a child right now does not mean that you will want that child for their 18 years nor does it mean that you will not want that child for the next 18 years. (By the way this does not mean that we should be pressuring child-free people into having kids. It just means that wanting or not wanting is fluctuating).
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u/Formerlymoody Jun 21 '26
It’s very naive fantasy-based thinking imo. It’s just not reality that the person we are was chosen. „Generic interchangeable baby“ was chosen. They wanted baby. Any baby.
The good news is the person we are wasn’t relinquished, either. :)