The Great Adoption Swindle:

The World’s Dirty Little Secret

Shane Bouel
Thoughtless Delineation
12 min readOct 6, 2024

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Adoption is the last great con of the modern age, and let me tell you, it’s a brutal one. It’s not some noble act of heroism, not the grand “rescue mission” that all these smiling, well-heeled parents want you to believe. No, it’s a racket – a heartless, soulless machine built on shattered families and broken lives. And the worst part? No one wants to admit it. Everyone’s too busy patting themselves on the back, high on their own sanctimonious fumes, while they churn out kids like goddamn commodities. It’s enough to make you sick. And yet, here we are, turning a blind eye and pretending it’s all for the “greater good.”

Let’s get one thing straight: adoption isn’t about the kid. It’s never been about the kid. No, it’s about the parents – the well-meaning saviours who think a kid is a missing piece to their perfect life puzzle. You’ve seen them: affluent couples strolling through their suburban hellscapes, toting around their newly acquired “bundle of joy,” convinced they’ve just performed a miracle. And maybe they have – in their own twisted minds. But the reality? They’ve just secured themselves a living, breathing trophy to prop up their own fragile sense of self-worth. The child is nothing more than a prize – a prop in their ego-driven fantasy.

They’ll tell you they “rescued” the kid from a life of misery from some tragic hellhole they barely understand. But let’s be honest: the real rescue mission here is about saving themselves from the emptiness gnawing at their insides. The kid? Just collateral. A body to fill the void. A Band-Aid for their broken dreams. And if the kid grows up feeling lost, disconnected, and confused? Well, tough luck, kid. You’re supposed to be grateful.

And let’s not forget the true masterminds of this con – the adoption agencies. These clowns have it down to a science. They sit there behind their gleaming desks, smiling with their pearly white teeth, pushing paperwork across the table, making you believe they’re the gatekeepers to some higher moral calling. But behind the scenes, it’s all about profit. They’re not creating families – they’re running a goddamn baby auction. They’ve commodified human life and turned it into a product to be bought, sold, and delivered to whichever couple can pay the most.

And the kicker? They call it “placement.” Like they’re just shuffling cards around, moving pieces on a chessboard, with zero regard for the trauma they’re perpetuating. These kids aren’t chess pieces, goddamnit! They’re human beings. But who cares, right? Just another notch in the agency’s belt, another commission earned. The adoption industry runs like a well-oiled machine – smooth, efficient, and dead inside. It feeds on the desperation of birth parents, the longing of adoptive parents, and the silent screams of the children caught in the middle.

But we, as a society, we lap this shit up. We love the adoption story. It makes us feel good – it makes us feel like we’re part of something bigger and contributing to a better world. We love to think of adoption as this grand act of altruism, a golden opportunity to give a child a “better life.” But what we’re really doing is lying to ourselves – hard. We don’t want to see the cracks in the façade. We don’t want to hear the stories of adoptees growing up feeling like they’re trapped in someone else’s life. We don’t want to know that, for many of these kids, adoption isn’t a fairy tale – it’s a nightmare.

Let’s talk about the transracial adoption debacle for a second. White families adopt kids of colour, bringing them into their perfect little suburban bubble and then pretending that race doesn’t matter. They claim they “don’t see colour.” Well, guess what, assholes – everyone else does. You may not see it, but the world sure as hell does. That kid you adopted? They’re going to grow up in a world that sees them differently, and no amount of wishful “colourblind” thinking is going to protect them from the reality of racism. But you don’t care about that, do you? You just want them to fit in – to blend seamlessly into your world while they lose their own identity in the process.

These kids grow up looking in the mirror and seeing strangers staring back at them. Their birth culture? Gone. Their heritage? Erased. And for what? To make you feel good about yourself? To make you feel like you’ve done something meaningful? You call it “rescue,” but what you’ve done is wipe them clean – strip them of everything that made them who they were before you swooped in with your saviour complex. And you expect them to be grateful for it.

It’s not just the adoptive parents and agencies, though. Society as a whole is in on the con. The public eats this shit up, loves the “happy endings” and the warm, fuzzy lies we tell ourselves about adoption. But no one wants to hear the truth. No one wants to talk about the fact that adoption is built on loss, on severing children from their families, from their roots. No one wants to admit that, for many adoptees, the trauma of that severance never goes away. It just festers – quietly, painfully, for the rest of their lives.

But what would it take to fix this mess? To burn the whole damn thing down and rebuild something humane? Well, for starters, it would take the people in charge admitting that they’re part of the problem. It would take adoptive parents checking their egos at the door, confronting the fact that adoption isn’t about them, and learning to actually see the child they’ve adopted rather than the fantasy they’ve projected onto them. It would take adoption agencies being held accountable for the commodification of human lives they’ve been running for decades.

It would mean we, as a society, stop slapping a “happy ending” on every adoption story and start actually listening to the adoptees – the ones who live with the fallout long after the paperwork’s been signed and the congratulations have been handed out. It would mean pouring resources into family preservation – so that adoption isn’t the default solution to poverty, or lack of support, or social stigma.

But let’s be honest – none of that’s happening anytime soon. The system’s too big, too profitable, too deeply entrenched in its own bullshit. The truth is people don’t want to fix adoption. They don’t want to face the ugly reality that it’s not the altruistic fairy tale they’ve built in their heads. They just want to feel good about themselves, and as long as they get to keep feeling like saviours, nothing’s going to change.

And who pays the price?

The adoptees. The kids who grow up are lost in the wreckage of a system that was never about them to begin with.

Ask yourself, are you complicit in your silence?

We’re failing. As a collective species, we’re absolutely failing. We’re sitting in a mess of our own making, too cowardly to address the hard truths, too comfortable to confront the reality that this bullshit system has been built on generations of lies, secrecy, and pure exploitation. We pretend we’re doing the right thing, yet everywhere you look, the adoption racket is riddled with corruption, greed, and the commodification of human lives.

Look no further than the Korean adoption system, which has been exposed in recent years as one of the most corrupt international adoption pipelines on the planet. For decades, Korea has been exporting its children like cheap labour, like a damn commodity to be consumed by wealthy Western couples eager to play the hero. Babies were whisked away from their mothers, their birth records falsified, sealed, or outright erased, all in the name of feeding the insatiable demand for cute, foreign infants.

Those governments turned a blind eye to rampant fraud and sometimes pressured the South Korean government to keep the kids coming, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Documents show that at the peak of adoptions from South Korea, Western diplomats processed papers like an assembly line, despite evidence that adoption agencies were aggressively competing for babies to send abroad, pressuring mothers and paying hospitals. Governments focused on satisfying intense demand from Western families desperate for children.

There are stories of children being trafficked under the guise of adoption, taken from parents who were told their children had died or had been relinquished under duress. Yet the whole system has kept rolling, greased by corruption and a Western appetite for children that borders on pathological.

And it’s not just Korea. Take a hard look at Bali, where babies are sold like products at a market stall. “

Police said the “well-organised” syndicate operated in Depok city of West Java, about 27km from capital Jakarta. The infants were bought from parents for less than £800 on Facebook and sold to foreigners in Bali at four times the price, police said, adding the traffickers also worked on “pre-orders”.

This isn’t adoption; it’s human trafficking in all but name. It’s just been whitewashed with paperwork and bureaucracy, hidden behind layers of legal jargon to make it palatable for the Western conscience. The buyers walk away feeling like philanthropists, but they’re part of a system that treats children like currency, like livestock. But hey, at least the children weren’t dumped in a plastic bag in a rice field!

And, in the so-called land of the free, the American adoption system is no better. It’s a carefully disguised commodity market – babies for sale, but with just enough moral lipstick to keep people from questioning it.

American adoption agencies rake in billions of dollars each year, churning out adoptions for couples who can afford the steep fees. Want a white baby? Well, that’s going to cost more. Want it expedited? Sure, let’s talk about an upcharge. This isn’t about family building – it’s a business transaction, a pay-to-play game where adoptive parents get what they want as long as they can pay the price.

Despite almost single-handedly normalizing adoption in the U.S., Georgia Tann ran one of the most ruthless and wide-spread child-trafficking rings in American history that wrecked thousands of families and presided over the deaths and abuse of countless. To this day, black-market adoptions are still a salient problem internationally and no government has undertaken a reparations program to redress the afflicted families

In Australia, during the 20th century, an estimated 250,000 white Australian children were taken away from them without any specific case evidence of maltreatment as a matter of general policy.

Within the current political landscape, we observe a fascinating interplay of personal histories and official apologies. The present Prime Minister, for instance, narrowly dodged the fate of Forced Adoption as an infant. Meanwhile, the Leader of the Opposition Incumbent, who has only recently expressed remorse for failing to attend the first Apology to the Stolen Generations some 15 years ago, confronts the weight of history and its enduring effects. And let us not forget the former Prime Minister who issued both the inaugural and 15th apologies to the Stolen Generations, yet appears unaware of the First National Apology for Forced Adoptions a decade prior.

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, operated from 1925 to 1961 as a maternity home for unmarried women and their children. Run by the Bon Secours Sisters, the institution housed women who were forced to work unpaid for a year after giving birth, while their children were often kept and later adopted, sometimes without the mother’s consent. Historian Catherine Corless uncovered shocking evidence that nearly 800 children died at home due to malnutrition, disease, and neglect, with many buried in an unmarked mass grave, which was later found to have been a repurposed septic tank. Excavations in 2017 confirmed the discovery of human remains, with the Irish government launching a full investigation into the site’s atrocities.

The home became a symbol of institutional abuse when it was revealed that some children had been sent abroad for illegal adoptions and that the care in the facility was grossly inadequate. High death rates, poor conditions, and overcrowding characterized the home, with reports from the time confirming widespread malnutrition among the children. Public outrage led to a government inquiry, and the Bon Secours Sisters issued an apology, acknowledging their failure to uphold Christian values. The investigation continues today, with efforts underway to exhume, identify, and properly memorialize the remains of the children.

A Government-appointed director will oversee one of the most complicated forensic excavations in the world at the Co Galway site where the bodies of almost 800 babies are to be exhumed.

And all of this? It’s enabled by our collective refusal to grow a pair and deal with the real issues. We don’t have the balls to shut this shit down, to stare the problem in the face and call it what it is – exploitation, plain and simple. The truth is that adoption is a smokescreen for a much bigger problem we refuse to talk about: men, power, and control over lineage. This whole mess is rooted in patriarchal control in a society where men have historically refused to take accountability for their actions – whether it’s abandoning children, they helped create or hiding their infertility behind closed doors by pretending that adopted children are their own.

Let’s talk about the ugly reality of infertility, something so shrouded in shame and secrecy that men will go to any lengths to cover it up. Instead of dealing with the fact that they can’t reproduce, they hide behind adoption – silencing the child’s origins and rewriting their history as if their biological roots never existed. It’s like a sick game of pretend, where the kid becomes a stand-in for what they couldn’t biologically create. Meanwhile, the child grows up in a shadow of lies, forced to conform to a family legacy that was never theirs in the first place. It’s a sick joke – one that everyone plays along with, all because the truth is too painful for the men in power to face.

And it doesn’t stop there. Let’s not forget the control of lineage, the obsession with bloodlines that has led to this very crisis. For centuries, men have been hellbent on controlling whose genes survive, who inherits the family name, and who gets to carry on their legacy. It’s all about maintaining power and preserving the family line – yet, when faced with infertility, they reach for adoption as a cover. They manipulate the system to make sure no one ever questions their virility or their right to pass on their name, even when the child they raise isn’t biologically theirs.

But here’s the irony – the very system designed to uphold their control is falling apart because of it. They want control, yet they turn a blind eye to the children being ripped from their roots and the families destroyed to feed their egos. This entire industry of adoption is built on the shame of men – the shame of where they put their sperm, the shame of their inability to reproduce, and the shame of their refusal to acknowledge the consequences of their actions. And instead of dealing with it, they’ve turned adoption into a smokescreen for their failures, a way to mask the real cost of their need for control.

The real tragedy? We let it happen. We sit back, allowing the system to perpetuate because it’s easier than facing the ugly truth. We don’t want to dismantle the power structures, we don’t want to hold men accountable for where they put their sperm, and we don’t want to tackle the root causes of why children are taken from their birth families in the first place. Poverty, social inequality, a lack of reproductive rights – those are the problems we should be addressing, but we’re too fucking scared to face them head-on.

Instead, we cling to this sanitized version of adoption, pretending it’s a solution when, in reality, it’s a smokescreen for exploitation. We slap a Band-Aid on the wound, congratulate ourselves for “saving” children, and move on, never once stopping to question the human cost of what we’ve done. But that cost? It’s rising. And unless we have the courage to rip off the Band-Aid and confront the bloody mess beneath, we’re going to keep paying it, over and over again.

Until we have the guts to blow this system up – to challenge the patriarchy, to stop commodifying children, to address the real societal issues that lead to adoption in the first place – we’ll continue to be complicit in this machine of human exploitation.

And that’s on all of us.

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Shane Bouel
Thoughtless Delineation

Using creativity to lift standards of ethics & morality by questioning half-truths and denouncing the conservancy of inhumane ideologies.