Beyond the Third Option:

Adoption, Choice, and What Remains Unspoken

By Kimberley Rankin

During the Super Bowl, a commercial aired declaring, “Adoption is an option.” It opened with images of angry pro-life and pro-choice protesters, followed by scenes of a college graduation, as a voiceover says, “This is not what you envisioned. They’re telling you that you only have two choices. But the truth is, there are three.”

Watching this, my first thought was, what about the fourth option? What about family preservation? What about supporting mothers in ways that prevent separation from occurring in the first place?

Framed in language of truth and choice the advert presents its message as compassionate and empowering. But choices do not exist in isolation.

When adoption is framed as a solution through what can be gained, it is positioned as a positive outcome: a family formed, a longing for a child fulfilled, a problem seemingly resolved. This narrative privileges the gain of the adoptive family and the appearance of resolution it offers, while obscuring the circumstances that made separation appear necessary in the first place. In this framing, we rarely pause to ask why a mother is unable to raise her child, what support is missing, or what financial, social, or systemic pressures are shaping this so-called choice. Poverty, lack of housing, inadequate healthcare, stigma, and isolation are not personal failures. They are systemic ones.

Yet instead of addressing these conditions, adoption is repeatedly presented as the answer: final, redemptive, and marketable; raising the question of why systemic failures remain unaddressed within the very systems that shape these narratives.

Family preservation asks a fundamentally different question. What would it take to keep this child safely with their mother, within their family?

That support might include financial assistance during pregnancy and the early months after birth, stable housing, access to healthcare, trauma-informed counselling, practical childcare help, and time to decide without pressure or coercion. These are not radical proposals. They are humane, and commonly accepted forms of support in other contexts. The question is why, decades after the baby scoop and forced adoption eras, such support remains largely absent when adoption is presented as an option.

Billions of dollars circulate globally through the adoption industry, through agency fees, legal processes, marketing budgets, facilitators, and international systems. It is reasonable to ask what might change if even a fraction of that money were redirected towards supporting mothers to parent. What if the resources currently used to separate families were invested in keeping them intact?

What is almost always missing from the prevailing societal narrative around adoption is the long-term perspective of the mother and her child, who share a foundational loss but experience it through different, enduring wounds. Not the moment of placement, but the lifelong impact carried by the mother, and her child.

Adoption is not a one-time event. It is a lifelong experience. Separation does not end at placement. The emotional and psychological wounds of separation imprint and weave themselves into identity, attachment, relationships, and belonging. This reflects the lived experience shared by many adult adoptees.

To speak about adoption without acknowledging loss is to tell only half the story.

Adoption should not be presented as the third of two options. The remnants of the forced adoption and baby scoop era still linger, where coercion was mistaken for choice, and limited options were accepted as the only option. A decision made without full knowledge, informed consent, or genuine alternatives is not a real choice; particularly when the lifelong consequences are so often minimised or ignored. For many mothers, this “choice” has meant enduring grief, unresolved loss, and decades of silence. For many adoptees, it has meant carrying the impact of early maternal separation into identity, attachment, relationships, and emotional and psychological wellbeing throughout every stage of their life. Mothers deserve support, not erasure. Children deserve the chance to remain with their families wherever safely possible. And choice must include the option to stay together.

Until family preservation is named, and prioritised, presenting adoption as “an option” offers only a partial, incomplete picture that fails to reflect the full reality.

Perhaps the real question is not whether adoption is an option, but why separation is so often funded while support is not, and what it says about us as a society when removing children at birth or shortly after is treated as acceptable, while keeping families together is not prioritised.