better off dead?

One of the most offensive things to me, as an adoptee, is when someone on the pro-choice side insinuates that adoptees would rather be dead than adopted.  This happens more than you may think.  It normally comes up during the course of a debate when the pro-life side brings up that  choosing adoption is also a choice -- and the pro-"choice" side inevitably brings up their one adopted friend that they know who doesn't like their parents (because all biological children like their parents???) and they extrapolate from their friend's experience that adoption is not a good choice.

I was reading a facebook group discussion about abortion around the time of the presidential election (I think it was either an anti-partial birth abortion group or the Fight FOCA group) and this very subject came up and this ignorant person brought up this argument.  It bugged me at the time, but it's been needling me ever since that there are people who think that adoptees would rather be dead than adopted and they think that this is a rational, cohesive argument for abortion?

I, for one, am glad that I was born.  I'm glad that my biological mother made the hard decision to give me life.  I don't know the circumstances of my adoption, but I'm thankful for the life that I have.  I had really good adoptive parents, but they weren't perfect, but I don't know many biological children who think their parents were either.

I will say that there are things that adoptive children do miss out on, and many do feel a sense of loss and have a difficult time getting over it (though I did not).  I remember my best friend growing up always commenting on how she had her dad's feet & nose and her mom's hair.  I never had that.  I would look at family pictures and feel self-conscious because I looked different than everyone else.  When I was younger, I had this feeling that my life was totally random, that if my case number was different or if a prospective set of parents wanted a boy instead of a girl, that my destiny could have been forever altered by very slight changes.  Knowing that there is a God who orders the world and our lives was important to me when I became a Christian, the knowledge that I was put into my family for a reason and that it wasn't a random act of chance.

I'ts been a joy to me to have children for many reasons, but also for the reason that I have people who look like me in my family (although Ben is ALL Chris, with just a touch of Korean).  To say that my daughter has a nose like mine or hair like me.  To look at our family pictures and not have that feeling that I don't look like everyone else.  I've really enjoyed that and am glad that I'm alive to experience it!