Over in the Ethiopia blog, I was just reading Owlhaven’s excellent post about what we can say when ignorant people make glib, hurtful remarks about adoption.

It got me thinking about how many of these comments are rooted in a simple lack of knowledge.

Those of us who live with adoption every day know that not every aspect of this ongoing experience is easy, shiny or happy.

But that’s just us.

The rest of the world doesn’t particularly want to face the fact that behind every adoption is a tragedy. It can be a small tragedy (a woman left all alone with no one to help her through an unplanned pregnancy), or a big tragedy (Chinese government policies that force women to “abandon” their children for others to find). It can be caused by the first parents (child abuse, drug addiction) or it can be the responsibility of others (baby brokers, corrupt politicians). It can be a social problem (poverty, racism) or a personal problem (a series of bad relationships). It can be a combination of all of these factors. But no matter what, when it comes to adoption, there is always some depressing human failing at work. Something has to happen to get the ball rolling. A system or a safety net must break down.

Most adoptive parents quite naturally want to focus on the happy side of adoption. At the point where they enter the picture, they’ve been waiting a long time for a child, and undergone some pain of their own. Therefore, for them, adoption is a joyous and blessed event. They don’t want, or need, to dwell too much on the sad events that came before.

This is why it can sometimes be hard for birthparents to relate to adoptive parents. One person’s loss is another person’s gain. When birthparents try to speak up and remind the world of the injustices that begin every adoption, they can sometimes come off as shrill, negative harpies who want to destroy other people’s happiness.

But this is not actually the case.

Just because a person is able to see the tragic side of adoption does not make them “anti-adoption.” You can view adoption as a beautiful thing and still be utterly depressed by the way it is currently being handled in most cases. You can be happy for the new family formed through adoption and devastated for the original family that is shattered. You can want to try every last-ditch effort to preserve the original family, and still come to accept that an adoptive family may be the best solution for a given set of circumstances.

I truly believe that looking the pain of adoption squarely in the eye is ultimately a better approach than choosing to focus on the soft or sentimental side. This is what adoptive mother Karin Evans did in her excellent book, The Lost Daughters of China. I believe that Evans does her daughters a great service by acknowledging that a lot of things had to go wrong in order for their family to be formed. I also believe that her family will be much stronger and more tightly-knit as a result of her honesty.

If you are in a crisis pregnancy right now, I would encourage you to examine the details of your own tragedy. Take a hard look at the ways in which you have been let down, and also look at how you may be letting yourself down. Then you can conduct your decision from a place of honesty, without sugar-coating the harder truths of adoption.