The adoption industry. Specifically international and trans racial adoption. I am a trans racial adoptee (person of color adopted into a white family) and I was actually stolen after the hospital lied, pressured, and coerced my bio mom to give me up.

I know many many other adoptees with similar tales. Usually they will say something is wrong with the child, and there’s a couple with money who will save the child but you must surrender your baby. Sometimes it’s coercion or pressure from a different standpoint, maybe involving living family or debts. I was adopted from Colombia and FARC or rebel groups would traffic children and babies to help fund them. I was adopted in early 90s and cost around 15k american, so the incentive is most certainly there.

Adopted and displaced people are far more likely than the average person to die from suicide. Mental health and trauma are cornerstones within the adoptee community. Many people don’t realize how traumatic infancy and early childhood is for many of us. Many studies have shown how traumatic being taken away immediately from the birth mother can be to an infant.

Trans racial adoptees top the list for issues listed in my last paragraph. Often times were placed in very white spaces and grow up not knowing how to groom ourselves properly (hair) or never being exposed to anyone that looks like us. In America, we often deal with loads of racism, blatantly in front of us or directed at us, and often have to resort to survival tactics of just taking it. And then of course we have no honest or truthful insight on how racist our country and many of its people are. My rural white town had me feel so ugly in my own skin that I wanted to kill myself by age 8. No child should ever have suicidal thoughts.

Then there’s issues like adult adoptees who never gained citizenship (whether the fault of parents, the state, the adoption agency, or a mixture of all) and get deported in the middle of their lives. There’s a film that just came out that covers ONE of these stories, Blue Bayou.

Then there’s the issue that most adopted and displaced people NEVER have the privilege of knowing any medical history. 0. Nada.

I could go on, but you get the point. It’s an industry that intersects so many different things, and an industry that fails to remember their “product” is living human beings, and denies so much of our autonomy from day one to potentially the rest of our lives.