Power, Identity, and the Lifelong Consequences of Adoption

In Part 3, Lynelle Long and Kristin Molvik Botnmark examined silence, emotional protection, and why some adoptees eventually distance themselves from adoptive families.

In Part 4, they explore something even more confronting: power. Not only emotional power, but legal, structural, and lifelong power — over identity, records, citizenship, truth, and belonging.

Kristin

One thing that has increasingly stayed with me throughout these conversations is your emphasis on power. Before these discussions, I think I understood power mostly in emotional terms — the authority parents naturally hold over children while they are growing up.

But what you are describing is much broader than that. You are describing power that extends into adulthood — over identity, documents, citizenship, access to truth, and even access to one’s own history. I do not think most adoptive parents fully understand the extent of that power when they enter adoption.

Lynelle

I do not think most adoptees understand it fully as children either. But many of us eventually come to realise how deeply our lives remain shaped by decisions made entirely by adults.

Adoptees often grow up hearing that adoption “gave us a better life” but what is rarely acknowledged is that adoption also transferred enormous power over our identities and futures into the hands of other people. That power does not automatically disappear when the adoptee becomes an adult.

For some adoptees, adoptive parents still control access to adoption records, identity documents, or information about origins decades later. Others fear speaking openly because they remain emotionally, financially, or legally vulnerable.

Kristin

When you anonymously shared some of the situations adoptees have brought to you through ICAV, I found them deeply confronting. Particularly the stories where adoptees struggled for years to obtain their own documents or information about their identities. What struck me was not only the pain itself, but the fact that adoptees were left carrying these battles largely alone.

Lynelle

Yes. Many people imagine adoption as a completed event that ends once a child enters a family but for adoptees, the consequences often unfold across an entire lifetime.

I know adoptees who have spent decades trying to access their own files. Others still live with citizenship insecurity because the adults responsible for their adoptions never completed the legal processes properly. Some adoptees fear deportation despite having lived their entire lives in the adoptive country. And when adoptees begin pushing for answers or accountability, they are often accused of being disloyal or ungrateful.

Kristin

I find myself increasingly asking why are adoptees the ones forced to fight for these rights? Why are adoptees carrying the burden of correcting problems created by systems adults participated in?

Whether it concerns citizenship, falsified records, illegal adoptions, or identity restoration, it seems adoptees are repeatedly left doing the labour alone.

Lynelle

That is exactly how many adoptees experience it. And this is where the emotional and structural dimensions of adoption intersect.

Many adoptees already carry grief, confusion, and fractured identity internally. Then they discover they must also become investigators, advocates, legal researchers, translators, or activists simply to access basic truths about themselves. That can become overwhelming. Especially because these systems were built and maintained by governments, agencies, professionals, and adults — not by adoptees.

Kristin

One thing I keep returning to is your observation that adoptive parents were never the powerless party within these systems. That has become difficult for me to ignore. Children moved overwhelmingly from poorer countries to wealthier ones.

Adoptive parents, myself included, were positioned within systems that gave us significant power in determining another person’s life trajectory. And even when parents acted with good intentions, that structural imbalance still existed.

Lynelle

Yes. Intentions matter emotionally, but they do not erase structural realities. Many adoptive parents entered adoption believing they were helping a child. But adoption systems also operated within enormous global inequalities — economic inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality,
and geopolitical inequality.

Children were transferred from vulnerable families and countries into wealthier nations where adoptive parents held vastly more social, legal, and financial power. Adoptees live with the consequences of those systems every day.

Kristin

When you used the metaphor of slavery in one of your earlier reflections, I initially reacted with discomfort and resistance. I think many adoptive parents would.

But as I continued reflecting on it sociologically, I began to understand that the comparison is not about equating experiences simplistically. It is about recognising what happens when one group of people gains profound power over another person’s identity, movement, relationships, and future.

Systems can produce harm even when the individuals within them believe they are acting morally. That has been one of the hardest things for me to sit with.

Lynelle

And for adoptees, these questions are not abstract theory. They are lived reality. Adoption changes our names, our identities, our citizenship, our language, our families, our cultures, and often our racial and social environments.

Most of those decisions were made before we were old enough to consent or even understand what was happening. So when adoptees later seek truth or restoration, we are often trying to reclaim parts of ourselves that were severed very early in life. That is why access to records, citizenship, language, culture, and first family connections matter so deeply. They are not “extras.” They are human rights issues.

Kristin

Your reflections about reunion also stayed with me strongly. Watching my own son reconnect with his mother in Korea changed something fundamental in how I understood adoption. It became very clear that his first family had never ceased to exist.

Adoption interrupted those relationships, but it did not erase them. And I increasingly feel that if adoption disrupted those connections, then adoptive parents have a responsibility to support adoptees in rebuilding them if they wish to do so. Not only emotionally, but practically and materially as well.

Lynelle

For many adoptees, reunion is not about rejecting the adoptive family. It is about understanding ourselves. People naturally want to know: Who do I look like? Where do I come from? What happened? Who are my people?

Adoption does not erase those human questions and when adoptive parents interpret reunion as rejection, adoptees often end up carrying guilt simply for wanting to know themselves more fully.

Kristin

What I increasingly see is that honesty may not destroy relationships in the way many adoptive parents fear. Silence often does far more damage. Perhaps the possibility for a different kind of relationship only begins once truth is allowed into the room.

Lynelle

I think that is true. Most adoptees are not asking adoptive parents to be perfect. We are asking them to stay present. To listen honestly. To acknowledge power and loss. To support truth rather than fear it. And to recognise that adoption is not only a personal family story. It is also a social, political, legal, and human rights issue whose consequences continue across generations.

Next Week: Part 5

Lynelle and Kristin explore reunion, first families, identity, and what responsibility toward adoptees’ families of origin might actually look like.