Activist Annie Wu, a Chinese adoptee, said she’s repeatedly heard the question, “What if you were aborted?” It’s an all-too-common hypothetical that anti-abortion proponents have lobbed at adoptees who publicly defend reproductive rights, particularly amid the recent fall of Roe v. Wade. 

​​”If my birth mother aborted me, that would be FINE with me. I would not exist so I would not care or be impacted,” Wu, a digital organizer with nonprofit PA Stands Up, wrote in an Instagram post. 

Many adoptee activists who support abortion rights say they are uniquely positioned in the crosshairs of the debate: Their very existences are often “manipulated” to advance anti-abortion views — with adoption framed as the moral alternative to abortion. They find themselves vulnerable to harassment, their experiences questioned or made light of, and their agency too often removed in the fight, they say. 

Wu, who said she’s received support from many in the adoptee community, said she has been accused of supporting “murder” and been asked hypothetical questions about if “someone was to walk up and kill you right now.”