A reflection on Elisha Marr’s “Pronatalism in Adoption Seeking: Characteristics of Contemporary Women in the US” (Adoption Quarterly, 2026)
Pronatalism, adoption, and the hidden cost to adoptees. We talk a lot about why people adopt. We talk far less about what happens to children when the reasons aren’t entirely about them.
A recently published study in Adoption Quarterly by sociologist Elisha Marr sheds important light on the demographics of adoption-seeking women in the United States; and in doing so, it quietly illuminates something the adoption community has long struggled to name. When societal pressure, rather than child-centered intention, drives the decision to adopt, adoptees can carry the weight of that pressure for a lifetime.
I know this not only as a reader of research, but as an adoptee. I was brought into a family that already had two biological children. I grew up loved, housed, and cared for. I also grew up knowing, in the wordless way children know things, that I occupied a different category. Not a lesser one, I was told. Just different. But different, when it is never spoken of, has a way of feeling exactly like lesser.
The study examines pronatalism: the deeply embedded cultural expectation that all women should become mothers, and how it shapes who seeks to adopt and why. The findings are rich and nuanced. But read through the lens of adoptee experience, they raise questions that go beyond demographics and into the emotional architecture of adoptive families.
Adoption as a Social Obligation, Not a Child-First Decision
Marr’s research draws on a foundational tension. In a pronatalist society, motherhood is framed as the natural endpoint of a woman’s life course; it follows marriage, education, and financial stability as an expected milestone. When biological reproduction isn’t possible, or when it feels incomplete, adoption becomes what the literature describes as “not quite as good as having one’s own”: a consolation path, a way to still check the box.
This framing has profound implications for adoptees.
When a child is adopted primarily to fulfill a social role; to complete a family, to satisfy the expectation of motherhood, to signal that a couple has arrived at the appropriate life stage; that child enters the home already assigned a function. They are not simply a child who needs a family. They are, consciously or not, a solution to a problem that was never theirs to solve.
Children are extraordinarily perceptive. They sense when their presence is contingent on what they provide rather than who they are. And when the problem they were brought in to solve reasserts itself; when grief resurfaces, when the fantasy of a completed family collides with the reality of a child with their own needs and history; the adoptee can find themselves in a precarious emotional position, blamed for a gap they were never equipped to fill.
In my own family, this showed up not in cruelty but in expectation. My biological siblings were allowed to simply exist. They could be difficult, demanding, disappointing in the ordinary ways that children are, and their place in the family was never in question. I understood, without anyone saying it, that I did not have that same latitude. I was expected to be grateful, easy, appreciative. Good. As though being good was the rent I paid for belonging there. Looking back, I can see that dynamic clearly now. At the time, I just worked harder and asked for less and told myself that was normal.
The Child as Mirror of Failure
One of the more painful dynamics that can emerge in pronatalism-driven adoption is the way an adoptee can come to represent, in the eyes of their adoptive parent, the very loss the adoption was meant to erase.
Marr’s research confirms what clinicians have long observed: women who have experienced infertility, pregnancy loss, or fertility treatment failure are significantly more likely to seek to adopt. This is not inherently problematic; grief and hope can coexist, and many parents who have walked through infertility go on to build deeply loving, secure adoptive families. But when the grief is unresolved; when the adoption is pursued before the loss has been genuinely processed; the adoptee can become, inadvertently, a daily reminder of what couldn’t happen biologically.
This dynamic becomes even more complicated in families where biological children already exist. The adoptee is not simply a reminder of infertility; they are a living comparison point. The biological children carry the family’s blood, its stories, its physical resemblances. The adopted child carries none of that. And in a culture that equates biological connection with realness, that difference can quietly shape every interaction in the household, even when no one intends it to.
This can manifest in subtle and not-so-subtle ways: an overcorrection into perfectionism, an inability to tolerate the adopted child’s differences from the family’s sense of itself, or a kind of emotional withdrawal when that child’s needs feel too foreign, too complicated, too much. In more serious cases, it surfaces in the language parents use: describing their adoptive child as “different” in ways that always seem to carry a faint undercurrent of less, or struggling to extend the same instinctive grace to the child they chose that they give freely to the children they made.
For adoptees, being the embodiment of someone else’s unfinished grief is a burden with no clean resolution. They cannot un-be-adopted. They cannot become the biological child the family might have imagined. And they are rarely given language to name what they are experiencing.
Secrecy as a Symptom
Historically, adoption secrecy was institutional: sealed records, falsified birth certificates, the erasure of origin as policy. But Marr’s research gestures toward something that keeps secrecy alive even in an era of greater openness; namely, the shame embedded in pronatalist ideology itself.
If motherhood is the expected, natural outcome of womanhood, then choosing or needing to adopt carries an implicit mark of deviation from that norm. Adoption, in this framework, is not a different and equally valid path to family. It is something to be minimized, folded quietly into the family story, mentioned briefly and then set aside.
In my family, my adoption was not a secret exactly. It was simply not a subject. It existed the way an old scar exists: visible if you looked directly at it, but never pointed to, never discussed. I learned early that bringing it up made the adults around me uncomfortable. So I stopped bringing it up. I protected them from their own discomfort by swallowing my curiosity, my questions, the completely ordinary human need to know where I came from. I became skilled at pretending that my origins did not matter to me, because it was clear they created a problem for everyone else when they did.
That is a profound thing to ask of a child: to manage the emotional discomfort of the adults responsible for their care, to make themselves smaller so that the family story can remain tidy. And it leaves a particular kind of mark; not a dramatic one, but a quiet, cumulative one. The sense that your full self is too much. That the parts of you that predate this family are inconvenient. That you are welcome here, but only the version of you that does not ask difficult questions.
Research on adoptee outcomes consistently shows that this kind of identity suppression; the learned habit of not asking, not wondering, not claiming the right to your own story; is among the strongest predictors of poor psychological wellbeing in adulthood. The silence is not neutral. It has a cost, and the adoptee pays it.
The LGBTQ+ Adoptive Parent Finding: A Different Relationship to Motivation
Interestingly, Marr’s data reveals that lesbian and gay women are more likely to seek to adopt than heterosexual women; and in some cases, more likely to consider adoption as a first choice rather than a fallback after failed fertility treatments.
This matters for adoptee wellbeing in ways worth exploring. Research on LGBTQ+ adoptive families has generally found that these parents tend to approach adoption with a different kind of intentionality: not as a consolation prize for biological reproduction, but as a chosen and valued path. The motivations, as Marr notes from other literature, are often explicitly child-centered; rooted in a desire to provide a home for a child who needs one, and shaped by a personal experience of chosen family that reframes what kinship can mean.
This does not mean LGBTQ+ adoptive families are without complexity; they face their own structural barriers, discrimination, and unique challenges. But the motivational difference is worth naming. When adoption is genuinely desired rather than reluctantly substituted, the child at the center of that decision is more likely to experience their placement as intentional welcome rather than compensatory function.
It raises a question the field of adoption practice has been slow to ask directly: should motivation; not just demographics or financial stability; be a central part of how prospective adoptive parents are assessed?
What Pronatalism Costs the Adoptee: The Hidden Harms
Drawing together what Marr’s research implies alongside what adoptee voices and clinical research have documented, several patterns of harm emerge.
Identity fragility. When a child is adopted to complete a family rather than to welcome a person, their own identity; their origins, their birth family, their history before the adoption; can feel threatening to the family system. Adoptees in these environments often learn to suppress curiosity about themselves in order to protect their parents’ sense of completion. I did this for years. I told myself I didn’t need to know where I came from. It took a long time to understand that I had simply been trained not to ask.
Conditional belonging. The unspoken contract in pronatalism-driven adoption can feel, to an adoptee, like this: you belong here as long as you are easy, grateful, and good. When they struggle; as all children do; the belonging can feel precarious. For a child who has already experienced one family separation, that precariousness is not abstract. It is the ground they walk on every day.
Grief that has nowhere to go. Adoptees carry real losses: the loss of birth family, of origin culture, of the life that might have been. In families where those losses are minimized or unacknowledged, there is no room to grieve them. The adoptee learns to fold their grief away and present a face of gratitude instead. But grief that has nowhere to go does not disappear. It surfaces later, often in ways that are hard to trace back to their source.
The burden of gratitude. Pronatalism frames adoption as a gift given to a child in need. This framing; pervasive in culture and sometimes explicit in families; places adoptees in the position of perpetual debtor. Expected to be grateful for having been chosen. Expected to understand how lucky they are. What this framing obscures is that the adoptee did not ask to need a family. They lost one first. Gratitude for the second does not erase the loss of the first, and being asked to perform that gratitude without space for the grief underneath it is an unfair burden to place on a child.
The sibling comparison. For adoptees raised alongside biological children, pronatalism adds another layer. The biological children are the real article; the proof that the family works, the carriers of its blood and story. The adoptee exists in implicit comparison to them, and that comparison; rarely spoken, always present; can quietly communicate that they are the lesser version. Not quite as good as having one’s own.
Moving Toward Intentional, Child-Centered Adoption
None of this is an argument against adoption. Children need families, and families are built in every imaginable way. But the data Marr presents is a provocation worth sitting with. If adoption-seeking is significantly driven by pronatalist pressure; by infertility, social expectation, and the cultural mandate to mother; then the adoption system has a responsibility to do more than verify finances and conduct home visits.
It has a responsibility to ask harder questions. Why do you want to adopt? Have you processed the losses that brought you here? Do you understand that this child is not a solution to your grief, or a complement to the children you already have? Are you prepared to hold space for their story; all of it, including the parts that existed before you; alongside your own?
I needed someone to ask those questions on my behalf. Most adoptees do. We arrive in our families as children, without the language or the power to advocate for our own complexity. We need the adults and the systems around us to do that work before we get there.
Adoptees deserve to be wanted for who they are; not for what their presence completes, resolves, or proves. We are not the endings of other people’s stories. We are the beginnings of our own.
Working With an Adoptee Who Understands
I wrote this not only as a clinician but as an adult adoptee who lived these dynamics firsthand. At the Anxiety and Trauma Clinic of Ontario’s Adoption Trauma Clinic, I offer evidence-based therapy specifically for adult adoptees navigating the long reach of relinquishment and childhood adoption: the identity questions, the complicated relationships, the grief that was never given a name, and the exhausting work of belonging somewhere when belonging never felt fully safe. Using approaches including NARM (Neuro-Affective Relational Model), somatic therapy, and relational healing, I work collaboratively with clients toward a renewed sense of self and connection. Sessions are available virtually across Ontario and in person in London. If any part of what you’ve read here resonates with your own story, I’d be glad to hear from you. You can book a free introductory session or reach out through the contact form at londonanxietytrauma.ca/adoptiontraumaclinic.
This post draws on: Marr, E. (2026). Pronatalism in Adoption Seeking: Characteristics of Contemporary Women in the US. Adoption Quarterly. DOI: 10.1080/10926755.2026.2686667