“Adoption day is too often thought of as just this wonderful, nice, rosy thing. But I hope people will rethink what adoption is like for both the mother who gives up the child and for the adopted person,” Lorraine Dusky tells the Post.

In her book “Hole in My Heart: Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption” the birth mother recounts the experience of giving a child up more than five decades ago.

In the 1960s, Dusky was a 22-year-old bright-eyed Midwesterner who landed her dream job as a journalist in Rochester, New York.

Not long after arriving in the newsroom, she found herself in an affair with an older coworker that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy.

She quit her job and holed up in her apartment before giving the child up for adoption. 

Dusky was traumatized by the process of severing ties with her daughter and keeping the birth and adoption secret.

“By 1966 my baby and I were being scooped up whole into the awful net of laws designed to sever our bond,” she writes.

“We were never supposed to know one another. “

Nonetheless, she embarked on a quest to find her daughter, with whom she reunited after soliciting the services of a black market researcher from an adoption “underground railroad.”

To her surprise, Dusky found that her daughter, Jane, had always known she was adopted and was eager to meet her, too.

Dusky channeled her journalistic grit into an activism campaign to fortify the rights of birth parents and adoptees — and she went after the New York State law that prevented adoptees from accessing their original birth certificates.

“It was the beginning of people searching for their roots,” she recalled.

“I decided the only way to change the law was for people like me to come out of the closet.”

In 2019, then-Governor Cuomo changed the law, allowing adoptees to access their long-sealed birth records.

It’s a feat so significant to Dusky that the legislation is framed on her wall. 

“Do I sometimes think I made the wrong decision, that I should have … found a way to keep my daughter? Of course,” she writes. “But I did what I did and have tried to make amends for it with the tools given me — writing about the injustice of closed adoption, about its pitfalls and sorrows and the long, slow burn of its aftermath.”