The Experience of Adoption

This is a follow-up to ["The Training Is Built for Clinicians. The People Affected Need Support Workers."](https://thoughtlessdel.substack.com/p/the-training-is-built-for-clinicians), which argued that the adoption training governments fund reaches health professionals, not the support workers the people affected actually rely on. PART ONE — THE SEQUENCE Say it once, plainly, in a room: adoption t...

Western Australia is promoting training on past forced adoption to general practitioners, psychologists and other health professionals. The state's release of 23 October 2026 lists three online courses: a free two-hour introductory course, a psychologist course that carries CPD hours, and an accredited GP course. It describes them as helping these professionals "expand their knowledge and skills t...

Before you read further, do something for me. Picture your mother's face. Not a photo. The face you can call up without trying, the one that's been there your whole life. Now imagine a government official tells you she isn't your mother. Your biological mother's name has been removed from your birth certificate and replaced with someone else's. The original is sealed. You're not allowed to see it....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com An Open Letter to Those Who Dismiss Adoption Reform I am an adoptee. I am not here to be polite. I am here to tell you that your dismissal of adoption-reform advocacy is not neutral. It is not “just a difference of opinion.” It is a choice that helps preserve an environment where child sexual abuse is easier...

The most common defence of adoption is also the most evasive: the home is loving. It is offered as an answer, and it answers nothing. The question is whether a child was justly severed from their first family, and how warm the second family is cannot settle that.​‌​‌​‌​​​‌​​​‌​​ The usual explanation for why people keep giving this answer is ignorance, and some of it is. But ignorance is only one...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com They defend the severance because admitting what was taken would cost them too much. Every time a child’s separation from their first family is questioned, the same reply arrives: but the adoptive home is loving. It is a deflection, and it fails on its own terms. Nobody can guarantee a loving home, biological...

When an adoptee describes a documented injustice and receives a crisis script in return, the message they hear is specific. Their account of their own life has been classified as a risk. Their testimony has become something to manage rather than something to weigh. Nobody in that exchange has to intend harm for it to happen. Protective protocols are built to catch danger, and they catch on vocabul...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com They did not want a child. They wanted a witness. Somewhere underneath the paperwork, the home study, the nursery painted before anyone knew whose baby would fill it, sits a hunger that has nothing to do with parenting. It is the hunger to feel chosen, transformed, awake — and the fastest route to that feelin...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com Let’s stop pretending. All of us, right now. Adoption is not a rescue. It is not a gift. It is not a love story, a calling, a blessing or God’s plan. It is a transfer of ownership dressed in a christening gown, and every institution, agency, church and family that has profited from it knows exactly what it is...

Adopted people warned you. For decades we said the systems that took us were not about protecting children. They were about which families the state decided deserved to stay whole. We were told we were ungrateful. Angry. Damaged. Unrepresentative. A bad experience, not a pattern. In 2026 the pattern is back in plain sight, across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Different gover...

There is a number I keep returning to, the way a tongue keeps finding a missing tooth. In the 2023 financial year, the money American jurisdictions claimed from the federal government to keep children out of foster care came to less than two percent of everything they claimed under Title IV-E, the largest federal child-welfare funding stream in the United States. It is the finding of the US Depart...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com The charge I asked Grok, the AI model built by x AI, to defend its reasoning on adoption against a single charge: that its distinctions were thoughtless delineations . The phrase is the name of this publication. It names something specific. The state draws lines through people's lives — between the mother and...

Some albums carry a hidden track. It sits at the end of the final song, after a long stretch of silence. It isn’t on the sleeve. It isn’t in the tracklist. Most people never hear it, because they lift the needle or stop the stream when the listed songs run out. It was always on the record. You just had to keep listening. Australian rock is full of hidden tracks. Not songs. Children. Between the 19...

Some sentences read as policy. Others read as a confession. On 29 September 2026, the Administration for Children and Families announced that unborn children “are now considered ‘candidates for foster care.’” Read it again. The federal agency that funds the removal of children from their families has decided that children who have not yet drawn breath can be counted among those it expects to remov...

In May 2025, a man stepped onto the balcony of St Peter’s and the world learned his name. Robert Francis Prevost. Leo XIV. A French surname, a Chicago accent, a story that seemed to explain itself. It did not explain itself. Genealogists went looking for the marriage that should have produced the name Prevost, and they could not find one. They could not find the grandparents at all. What they foun...

The release of Yothu Yindi’s Treaty in 1991 was not merely a cultural milestone; it was a strategic instrument of state reckoning. It forced the Australian public to confront the visceral reality of severed sovereignty, translating complex legal demands for Indigenous land rights into a shared national vocabulary. As an investigative historian, one must view Treaty as a permanent ledger in the Aus...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com Every adoption begins with a record being rewritten. The original birth certificate is sealed. An amended one is issued in its place, naming the adoptive parents as though the birth never happened. The state has issued a document that says something untrue, and it has done so on purpose, with a court order be...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com There’s a class of people who built a system that makes children disappear on paper. You’ve been funding it at baby showers. And people are done extending grace to people who won’t name what they did. That’s not a political statement. That’s just where we are. The Epstein files gave us a name for this class....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com This one is not addressed to adoptees. You already know this. You have lived it in your body for decades — the vertigo, the translation work, the grief with no name and no funeral. You don’t need this essay. This one is for the people who thought they knew you. The parents. The siblings. The extended family w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com The Architecture Has a Name A forensic map of the global system that built the five mechanisms — and who profits from keeping them in place. In previous episodes, I’ve named the five mechanisms. There, I gave you methods to document them in your own case. This report answers the question neither of those epis...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com There is a particular vertigo that follows the moment of naming. You read the taxonomy. You recognised yourself in it — in the Substitution, or the Sealing, or the Dissolution. The mechanism became visible. And then, almost immediately, the Gaslighting arrived to do its work: Are you sure? Isn’t that a bit mu...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thoughtlessdel.substack.com We have a word for a punch. We don’t have a word for the thing that slowly, politely, legally removes you from your own life — and that is exactly why it works. The absence of language is not a coincidence. It is a design feature. The most effective machinery of erasure depends on your not being able to name...

There’s a fan film doing the rounds called The Return of Superman — a Christopher Reeve tribute made by SWFX, twelve minutes of Clark Kent coming home to Martha after years away “searching for answers about who he is and where he came from.” It’s earnest, well-shot, clearly made with love for the 1978 original. It is also, without meaning to be, one of the more accurate depictions of adoptee psych...

A few weeks ago, a YouTuber laid out a theory for why Robert Downey Jr. is coming back to the MCU as Dr. Doom. It’s a fun watch. It’s also, without anyone involved realizing it, one of the most accurate descriptions of adoption’s actual endgame I’ve come across in pop culture. Here’s the theory, and here’s why it matters. The theory, in short In Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark travels back to 1970 a...

Game theory is just math for figuring out what people will actually do when their choices affect each other — not what they say they’ll do, not what they’re supposed to do. What they’ll actually do, once you know what they get paid for. I fed the adoption industry into that math. Here’s the plain-English version of what came out the other side. The rule that explains everything Game theory doesn’t...