Adoption in Reverse

Some of the hardest stories I hear don’t come from my own work as a therapist, but from conversations with my sister. She is a clinical social worker in a maternal health hospital unit, and over the years she has shared many stories about expectant mothers who relinquish their children for adoption. The circumstances vary, but certain realities often surface—addiction, instability, poverty. Sometimes a mother wants to keep her baby, but the state intervenes. Other times adoption is a decision she herself is preparing to make.

Most of the time, when my sister shares these stories, my response is sadness and compassion for the weight of having to part with one’s child under circumstances no one hopes for.

But recently one story unsettled me more than the rest.

My sister told me about a particularly difficult day at work. She described trying to help an expectant mother who was choosing to relinquish yet another one of her soon-to-be-born children, and how tense their interactions had become. The patient seemed frustrated, resistant, and entitled at times, and my sister left the hospital emotionally drained. Listening to her, I felt my chest tighten. My first reaction wasn’t analysis or reflection, but protectiveness. I was angry that someone who was just trying to help had been made to carry so much strain.

It was after that anger set in that my thoughts began to shift. Without knowing much about the woman, I started to draw conclusions about who she must be. I found myself thinking, How could someone do this again? How could a child be given away so easily? Did she know how many people long for children, pray for them, while she seemed to surrender them without hesitation?

I didn’t know her. I didn’t know the circumstances she was living within or the choices she believed were available to her. What I was sure of was that my judgment of her came quickly and confidently.

As a therapist I recognize this reflex. I see it often in my work. When people perceive wrongdoing, the mind looks for coherence. Pain wants a reason—an explanation for why things aren’t the way they should be. And when the reason isn’t obvious, we tend to make it so. Like the disciples who asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2), we search for limited options that make a complex situation easier to grasp. Moral outrage offers a kind of clarity. It simplifies what feels overwhelming.

What unsettled me most as I sat with my reaction wasn’t just the anger itself, but how quickly it organized my thinking. Once I had decided who this woman must be, the story felt resolved. There was little left to wonder about. And yet, relinquishing a child for adoption is a reality far too weighty to be reduced so easily.

Part of the difficulty, I think, is that adoption often confronts us with a set of truths we struggle to hold simultaneously.

A Child Should Not Have to Be Relinquished

In a world as it ought to be, without sin, adoption would not be necessary. If safety were assured, if support were present, if resources were sufficient, if sobriety, stability, and care were the prevailing reality, no parent would face the decision to part with their child. We know this intuitively. Even when adoption leads to good outcomes, it begins with the acknowledgment that something has gone wrong.

Pain wants a reason—an explanation for why things aren’t the way they should be.

This conviction matters. It helps us resist the temptation to normalize what should still grieve us. Scripture affirms that while humans may relinquish their children, God does not (Isa. 49:15). The biblical story is not one of divine abandonment, but of relentless pursuit. Giving a person up for adoption, in that sense, is not the ideal from which everything flows, but a response to fracture in the original design.

Even so, this conviction cannot carry the weight alone.

Relinquishment Exists Within Moral Complexity

The second reality that adoption forces us to confront is that relinquishment often unfolds within circumstances far more complex than our moral shortcuts allow. Most women who give up a child for adoption do so not because adoption is what they want. They do it because it appears to offer their child a better future than they believe they can provide. They know it is not ideal. They feel the loss of it precisely because they understand that something has already gone wrong.

That unideal situation is rarely the product of a person acting apart from the “principalities and powers . . . and rulers of darkness” at work in the world (Eph. 6:12). It emerges within a broken reality shaped by poverty; addiction; inadequate family, church, or community support; and systems that leave some people with far more constrained options than others—options those of us who have never lived within them often fail to understand.

Ellen White spoke to this when once writing about those struggling with addiction—a reality that shapes many adoption stories: “Those who have never passed through such experiences cannot know the almost overmastering power of appetite.” She cautions against responding from a posture of judgment, urging instead that we not assume“the part of the priest and Levite,” but follow “the example of the good Samaritan.”[*] Her point is not to deny responsibility, but to remind us how easily moral certainty can obscure compassion when we fail to reckon with the forces shaping another person’s struggles.

Daniel offers a similar framework for understanding responsibility (Dan. 9). When he confesses the sins of Israel, he does not isolate guilt to a few individuals. He repents corporately, acknowledging his own participation in a larger failure that required communal reckoning and reform. Adoption invites a similar humility. Even when relinquishment is chosen, it confronts us with the question of how responsibility might be shared—particularly in shaping conditions in which fewer parents are pressed toward such a costly decision.

Holding those two truths together—that a child should not have to be relinquished, and that the circumstances surrounding such decisions are often far more complex than we wish—can be difficult. One pulls us toward moral clarity. The other resists simplification. Without a third posture, we are left oscillating between judgment and despair.

Leaning Toward Redemption

Redemption is the lens through which Christians are called to understand suffering and damage. It is the third option the disciples missed when they encountered the man born blind—after already asking who was to blame. Jesus answered them differently: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him” (John 9:3). Redemption shifts how we attend to what has gone wrong before we decide what it means or where responsibility should fall. A redemptive lens keeps us honest about the cost of loss while resisting the conclusion that loss is the whole story.

Redemption is the lens through which Christians are called to understand suffering and damage.

When redemption becomes the lens, empathy becomes the practice. Not a feeling, but a discipline of attention. It is how we stay with what is broken without rushing to resolve it or explain it away. It keeps people from being reduced to their worst moment, and prevents stories from being closed before God is finished with them.

Seen this way, redemption is a way of remaining present long enough for a different ending to become possible.

An Adoption in Reverse

Recently I met a middle-aged woman at church who had been given up for adoption as a baby. She grew up not knowing who her birth mother was. For most of her life there was no clear path to finding her. State records were closed. Information was limited, and over time she learned to live with unanswered questions.

Her birth mother, meanwhile, had built another life. She married. She had children. And she never told her family that years earlier she had given birth to a child she relinquished for adoption. She carried the shame of that history and assumed it would remain buried.

That changed decades later, when the state of New York opened its adoption registry. The woman who had been adopted was in her late 50s by then. For the first time, finding her birth mother felt possible. She decided to try. She wrote a letter and sent it, unsure whether it would be received, welcomed, or answered at all.

It was answered.

The response was positive. They agreed to meet. When they did, the connection was immediate and unmistakable. I actually met them both that day at church, sitting side by side at the fellowship dinner. If I hadn’t known their story, I would have assumed they were sisters. They shared expressions, mannerisms, and an ease with one another that didn’t feel forced.

Over time they spent more time together. Today they live together. The birth mother, older and retired, is cared for by the daughter she once believed she would never know.

In a real sense, the roles reversed. The woman who had been relinquished as an infant became the one who adopted her mother—bringing her into her home, into her daily life, and into the family that had once existed without her. The years they lost are still real. But the ending the birth mother expected, carrying that shame-filled decision alone to the grave, didn’t happen.

Some stories invite condemnation because it feels safer to decide quickly who is responsible. Others, such as this one, make that instinct harder to sustain. When a woman who expected to live and die with shame is instead adopted back into the life she once believed was closed to her, it is difficult to pretend that we already know how these stories end.

May we resist closing stories God has not finished telling. And may we have the courage to trust that in adoption, and in life as a whole, shame does not get the final word—redemption does.

[*] Ellen G. White, The Ministry of Healing (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1905), pp. 173, 172.