Domestic Same-Race Adoptee From The Baby Scoop Era In The USA
Adopted Through The Notorious Louise Wise Agency
Telling the Truth About Adoption:
Trauma, Misogyny, and Reproductive Justice
I write from the crossroads of adoption trauma, misogyny, reproductive justice, and adoptee mental health. I’m a domestic same race Baby Scoop Era adoptee. My birth mother died before I found her, a victim of the silence and shame that surrounded forced relinquishment. Her trauma cost her life. My abortion saved mine.
Through personal narrative, I tell adoptee stories that go beyond the sanitized adoption narrative, because for one family to be created, another is often shattered. My work challenges the dominant mythology of adoption and makes space for the complicated, often invisible truths of adoptee identity.
I’ve been published in Business Insider, Esperanza Magazine, The Huffington Post, CrossingGenres, and Human Parts. My essay I Was A Zionist Until I Fell In Love was named a Medium Story That Defined 2021, and Microdosing, Mastodon, and Jonah Hill was selected for Medium’s 2022 Year in Review.
I’ve also written for film and television, including co creating and co writing the Emmy Award winning Sneakerella on Disney Plus.
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Adoption
Adoption is trauma.
Acknowledging the impact of maternal-child separation on adopted people, creating space for adoptees to speak about the down side of adoption, to express our grief without demanding our gratitude is essential to our healing.
We can hold many truths at once: love for our birth families and love for our adopted families, sadness over what we lost, gratitude for what we have.
My writing about adoption and reunion asks the reader holds those truths, too.
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Womanhood
I am a post-menopausal American woman, born before Roe to a woman who had no choice, who died before I found her.
I am a mother, a daughter, a wife, a friend. I was born in the era of sealed records, secrets, and shame. It took me 26 years of searching for me to find both of my biological parents and half-sisters.
And I am a survivor.
My writing about womanhood exists in the intersection of my roles and experiences; it challenges the reader to suspend judgement and extend compassion.
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Mental Health
Adoptees are 4x more likely to attempt suicide than our non-adopted peers, we are over represented in mental health settings and more likely to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety, ADHD, and behavioral disorders than non-adopted people.
I have lived with depression and anxiety most of my life.
I tell my story to shed light on the lifelong impacts of adoption, and to de-stigmatize speaking openly about mental illness.
Before it is anything else, adoption is loss. Loss of a child, a parent, a sibling, a story, a history, a culture, a past, a bond.
It does not matter how well you are raised, how loved you are, how much better your adoptive family is at providing or nurturing or parenting.
It does not matter why or if it was for the best or if your life is so much better than it would have been.
It does not matter. Because before it is anything else, adoption is loss.
Mindy Stern, “Adoption Is Trauma” 2019
Awards
Sneakerella: Winner of Four Emmy Awards
Including Outstanding Fiction Special
