August 29, 2012

My broken heart

Can't.Stop.Crying.
My broken heart

Dissident Voice ~ American Babies Exported for Adoption

Excellent article written by Mirah Riben at Dissident Voice ~ Thank you, Mirah, for your strong voice of advocacy! 

"As in any other industry, adoption businesses serve the needs of their paying clientele, which in this case are those seeking children. Despite our staunch cultural belief that all adoptions occur in “the best of interests of the child,” even home studies are conducted by private contractors paid for by the prospective parents. To say there is a conflict of interest is a misnomer as no one is protecting the interests of anyone other than the paying customer, least of all the rights of the children whose lives will be irrevocably changed and forever impacted by the transaction.

They are relegated to commodities in a demand-driven marketplace."

American Babies Exported for Adoption

August 22, 2012

Adoptees Bittersweet Journey


Adoptees Bittersweet Journey to find Mom
Stuart Rintoul  The Australian August 22, 2012

CHARLOTTE Smith was 28 when she began the journey to find her mother. The reunion, when it came, was fairytale joyous, but also fragile.

Learning that her mother loved her and had always hoped they would be reunited, "poured warmth into the cold, dark void inside of me", but sparing her mother the loneliness she felt as a child also left much unsaid.

"I found myself feeling as if I was walking a tightrope and if I should say or do anything out of step all would be lost," Ms Smith wrote recently in the Australian Journal of Adoption.
"I would have beautiful, magical afternoons with her in the nearby bushland that she loved so much, then go home and cry for hours without really knowing why."
Ms Smith's mother was 16 when she became pregnant to an American boy. Her parents were living as Australian expatriates in Beirut and to hide the shame of the girl's pregnancy, she was sent to England, where Charlotte was born and adopted out.
 
Her experience of adoption is one of hundreds traced in a new report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, which comes as NSW premier Barry O'Farrell announced the state would join others in issuing an apology to victims of forced adoptions.
An estimated 150,000 Australian babies were taken from their mothers, mostly young and single, from the 1950s to the 1970s. In 1971-72 almost 10,000 children were adopted in Australia, compared with 384 children in 2010-11.

Mr O'Farrell said it was time "to face the past and reflect on those unlawful and unethical actions".

NSW Family and Community Services Minister Pru Goward said an apology would help the many women and children who feel "haunted and devastated".
The AIFS report, Past Adoption Experiences, which looked at both forced and unforced adoptions, found a strong desire among those who experienced the system of closed adoption, which sealed a child's birth certificate and effectively hid the identities of the mother and child, for greater acknowledgment, recognition, awareness and education.

It found that mothers whose children were adopted continued to be affected by feelings of grief, loss and shame and experienced lower levels of life satisfaction than other women.
The report, based on a survey of 1500 people and 60 focus groups and interviews nationally, found that adopted children were often left with problems of attachment, identity and abandonment and also had lower levels of wellbeing and higher levels of psychological distress.

Almost 70 per cent of adopted children who took part in the study said that being adopted had resulted in some level of negative effect on their health, behaviour or wellbeing and that services were inadequate to meet their needs.
Those effects included hurt from secrecy and lies surrounding their adoption and a subsequent sense of betrayal, identity problems, feelings of abandonment, feeling obligated to show gratitude throughout their lives, low levels of self-worth and difficulties in forming attachments.

AIFS researcher Pauline Kenny said while previous reports on the trauma experienced by mothers whose children were adopted had pushed for better support services, "that hasn't eventuated" and there were still significant systemic deficiencies in dealing with adoption trauma.

For Ms Smith, adoption meant being passed into the hands of a loving family, but feeling unloved and torn between "the false self" that pretends to have been born into the adoptive family and "the forbidden self" that longs for truth and identity.
She said that when people learned she was adopted, they invariably responded by asking one of two questions - did you end up with a nice family? (meaning was it a happy ending?), or Did you find your birth mother? (meaning was it a happy ending)

August 17, 2012

Things I Wish I Had Known

I have a dream clouds
                                       © Photographer: Arneke | Agency: Dreamstime.com

 
Things I wish I had known:

   I didn't need to feel rejected as a child and young adult wondering HOW a mother could give her child away (ie. "place for adoption") because of "Love". 

I wish I had learned much earlier about the societal history of shame
(see Ann Fessler's book, The Girls Who Went Away),
and a financially driven, supply & demand based industry that explains the reason most babies become "available" for adoption.

My mother didn't "place" me because she loved me.
She certainly didn't reject me.
She surrendered her own motherhood/child because of a society that rejected her, and
only accepted me if I was removed from her and my original, true identity.

 I didn't have to be confused by the myth that it must be God's will for me to lose my mother, family, identity, and original life so I could be "chosen".
To gain my new family, life, love, and blessings.

I grew up trying to force this idea into my head & heart, but it was completely incongruent with life, truth, and the adoptee's reality.

I lived with emotions of extreme guilt for feeling disloyal, wondering how I could really love my adoptive family if I had feelings of loss and longing.

I was relieved to "wake up" and realize that, like Joseph, when he was reunited with his original family, I also concluded,
"What the ENEMY meant for evil (separation, loss), God eventually turned for good."

I didn't have to be fearful and distrusting of God anymore because it was impossible to understand (what adults tell most adoptees for their own benefit) how God PLANNED and WILLED for me to be adopted.
He didn't orchestrate it.

I once heard an eye-opening sermon by Pastor Dick Bernal ("Jubilee Christian Center"). 
 He was talking about scriptures in the New Testament that spoke of us being "adopted" as God's own children. After doing an in-depth study on the word translated into "adopted", he found that the original meaning in the Greek language more closely resembled "reunited" or "reinstated."

First John even uses the Greek word "sperma" to describe us as God's beloved children. The Prodigal Son certainly wasn't his Father's "adopted" son, he was his biological offspring. 

 It was comfort to this adoptee's soul to hear this revelation. 
 That God didn't NEED to "adopt" me as His child in the same sense "adoption" is used today.

The scriptures also teach that anything hidden in darkness and secrecy cannot be truly made whole.

Yet adoptees' records and birth certificates are sealed by laws which perpetuate this shame and injustice.
Even "open adoption" is not legally enforceable by law, and certainly doesn't negate the profound loss every adoptee experiences.

I wish I had known that, just like Wilbur Wilberforce, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jean Patton,  
that it takes a lot of courage, fortitude, and perseverance to keep voicing an "unpopular" opinion, but a lived experience.

That I don't have to feel like the lone duck and the odd-one-out.
 I can stand up to criticism, with courage. That someday the cost will be worth it.

Until the monetary & marketing aspects in adoption are removed, and every adopted individual in America is restored their God-given right to own their original birth certificate and identity, adoption will continue to be simply an enterprise of human-selling.
Children who truly need loving homes will be overlooked and discarded.

Loving and capable Mothers will continue to be pressured to "do the right thing" and relinquish their precious offspring to those willing to pay.

And adopted individuals will continue to be seen as perpetual children in the eyes of the law and society, being treated with contempt and shame for wanting the same right as every other American citizen, for themselves and their children after them ~ simply to know their true genealogy, identity, medical history, and family line.

August 16, 2012

Family Ties: Adoption and Magical Thinking

Family Ties: Adoption and Magical Thinking: There is a very interesting discussion going on this week over at the New York Times website Motherlode in response to an article entitled A...

Love Is Not a Pie: Shrugging Off the Shoulds and Shouldn'ts of an Ado...

Love Is Not a Pie: Shrugging Off the Shoulds and Shouldn'ts of an Ado...: Your adoptive family should be enough for you. You shouldn't long for anything more. You shouldn't be curious. You shouldn't feel connect...

August 8, 2012

Adoption in the Media: What Do Pregnant Women, Killers and Crying Babies Have in Common?

Very thought-provoking, indeed! I think it is true that the media is not to blame for the societal thoughts on adoption, but it does play a role (hence, "I'm having their baby"). Adoption is based on loss and is certainly not, nor should be, just "another way to build a family". It should be a last-resort, not a business. Adoptees should not be stripped of their birth certificates and live in a state-sanctioned witness protection program their whole lives. We are commodities, still. I applaud the media when they report the truth that children are "adopted" children of their parents. I know that isn't popular, but why hide the elephant in the room? Adoptees are just that, for the benefit of those whose names are put on our "amended" (falsified) birth certificates "as if" they gave birth to us, when they didn't. That distinction is part of us and our families forever. www.PeachNeitherHereNorThere.blogspot.com
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Children: The New Underdog

Children: The New Underdog | New Feminism

Children have no voice setting public policy. They are legally, physically and emotionally dependent. They cannot vote. They cannot form non-profits, produce surveys or express their preferences. Their rights are severely limited, by the law of the land and by the intimacy of family operations. They live and die as charges of adults they did not choose – much like the old (and firmly rejected) status of women, indentured servants and men without property.
It was once the prerogative of women to be the voice for children in society. “Women and children” were clumped in social policy discussion, with the women – the early feminists – battling for laws to protect children, their development and the stability of their families. Women championed temperance in efforts to protect children, especially children living in poverty, from the devastation of alcoholism. Women championed child labor laws, eliminating the commercial practice of exploiting children for near-slave labor. Women championed charitable and governmental welfare so that mothers and children abandoned by men could survive and live. The chronicle of women’s accomplishments on behalf of children made and shaped U.S. history and fodders a rightful criticism that patriarchal accounts of history are simply prejudiced against the role of women in modern life.
Have women abandoned children?
Why are women so willingly advocating now for rights to terminate unborn children, rights that redefine parenthood to suit adult sexual orientation, rights redefining marriage as an adult-centric relationship, rights giving legal recognition to three or more adults over a single child, and even rights to genetically modify children to suit adult desires – all without a whimper of concern for the impact upon the children? Children have literally no voice in the experimental social policies that are fundamentally altering the natural conditions under which children have been nurtured for centuries. Today, redwood trees and gray wolves have more effective advocacy and protection from invasive changes to their natural environment than children do.
Let me say, first, that it is ludicrous to argue that children do not need a voice – that they are malleable creatures who will grow and thrive in whatever conditions adults thrust upon them. Children, by common sense, have definite needs and they no more “adapt” to changes made without regard to these needs than do redwoods or wolves. Culturally, we all seem to agree (so far) that children should not be the secret sexual objects of coaches or priests – but beyond that, dialogue on social policy issues seems to strategically avoid asking, “What is the impact upon children?” We seem far more interested in what it takes to nurture a sapling or cub than we admit to knowing about how to nurture emotionally healthy human children.
Who will take up the voice of children – those little creatures locked into human configurations they did not choose, increasingly endowed with genetic history that will be hidden from them, expected to adjust their development and affections to an array of adults with legal demands and self-gratifying expectations upon them?
A major source of “voice” for these children is slowly – but steadily – emerging in the memoirs, articles and documentaries presenting to the public the reflections of children who grew up within experimental circumstances. Three examples come immediately to mind: Dawn Stefanowicz’s frank and generous account – Out From Under: The Impact of Homosexual Parenting; Jennifer Lahl’s interview-based Anonymous Father’s Day; and, most recently, Robert Oscar Lopez’s article “Growing up with Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View.”
Each of these focused, earnest pieces share with anyone willing to listen the reflections of adults who grew up in truly modern circumstances: Ms. Stefanowicz with a sexually active bi-gay father; Ms. Lahl’s interviewees as offspring of purchased or “donated” sperm and undisclosed fathers; Mr. Lopez without male adults of influence. Each of these accounts offer insight into the world of the modern child – through the voice of an adult now developed, focused and readied to share the effects of the social experiment upon them.
These voices arise against the torrent of disapproval adults invested in the experiment can summon. Like the Catholic Bishops and Penn State administration, adult investors in movements like marriage equality or commercial enterprises like reproductive technologies seem trigger ready to invalidate, discredit or denigrate the experience of these real people who suffered real harms as literal guinea pigs. It is a terrible reality that Lopez, for example, could not find a shred of sympathy or validation for being cut off from male influences in his developing years – and what that came to mean in his life as a struggling teen and young adult – until making contact with an academic sociologist who published a widely circulated study about children raised in same-sex family settings (which, that too, the marriage equality investors would discredit and bury.)
These struggling brave voices need help, support and encouragement – just as the victims of clergy and coach abuse needed community validation and encouragement. These are the voices of the new “underdog” – the children abused, neglected, manipulated, lied to and deprived of claim to caring, child-centered environments in which they might have what they need – just like the struggling sapling and the vulnerable gray wolf cub. That these voices seem threatening to policies or products that dominate adult agendas makes them cruelly vulnerable. Like any underdog, they come from a position of no power, subject to social distain and public lynching.
It is a chilling reality, that their voices, the voices of children raised in social experiments, have become the new underdog.

August 7, 2012

They Use Our Love For Each Other Against Us

Adoption Lies Adoption Victims: They Use Our Love For Each Other Against Us: I think the true face of evil is to use someone's love for another against them. And it is rampant in adoption. First they use it on the b...