This Is What No One Tells You About Adoption "We have been trained to see adoption as a fairy-tale ending to a tragic story." Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images I was adopted at three weeks of age and grew up in a loving family. My parents told me from the very beginning I was adopted, but I had no access to information about my origins because closed adoption was the norm in the United States well into the 1970s. Back then, most birth parents signed away their rights to contact their child (often unwillingly), and the child’s original birth certificate was amended, with the adoptive parents’ names replacing the birth parents’. As a baby, my origins were literally erased.