Lola writes:
I would be ashamed to post the awful things you have on your blog. I hope you get flamed constantly! There are orphans in this world that need homes. Why don’t you adopt some and stop whining?! Learn what it’s like from the other side as an adoptive parent! You make me sick! You need therapy, not a blog. Being so anti-adoption may be good for your mind, but it certainly hurts all those kids in foster care. Don’t they deserve a home away from the abusive people that gave birth to them? Those kids are taken away FOR A REASON! Hello! Get a clue! You may be unthankful for being adopted, but ask a 10 year old in the foster system or in an orphanage if they want a Mom & Dad…ask a kid waiting to come home to the US in Haiti right now where they would rather be! I think you would be surprised by the answer!
Dear Lola,
Getting flamed is not an issue for me since I am paying for this website and am in constant contact with my webhost tech support.
I lived a life of torture and still am — at the hands of my adoptive family and natural family, too, not all, but enough to cause me considerable pain and anguish. Read my book for full details of the crimes committed against me by my adoptive family and others.
Lola, you are the one who is having an emotional reaction to my life. If you can’t take reading the terrible things done to adoptees (I’m not the only one) you are the one who needs therapy. There are thousands of adoptees and our natural parents who have been organizing since 1955 in America and around the world to expose the disgusting treatment we have received: examples: Adoptive parents who are lawyers have destroyed paperwork on their own adoptee’s birthparents. That’s a crime against that lawyer’s own adopted child! Adoptive parents who treat their adoptees like slaves and sex objects – like the rich couple who imprisoned a girl from a foreign country to do their household chores like Cinderella, and the Russian girl, Masha, was adopted by a pedophile and repeatedly raped and then she was freed and adopted by another woman who gave up on Masha and voided the adoption. So much abuse in adoption.
Lola, criticism from people such as you does not bother me. You only have an opinion of what you read. You do not know me personally and you do not know how this adoption has affected me and my children. They were also abused and mistreated by the relatives who mistreated me. The destruction of adoption lies and discrimination and prejudice scars adoptees and their children for life.
Lola, you can attack me all you want, but remember: in my book, I have published proof that our government has defrauded millions of adoptees by the practice of seizing our birth certificates, sealing them permanently, issuing materially false statements on a new, amended Certificate of Live Birth in the new adoptive name and naming the adoptive parents as parents of birth. This is fraud and perjury. If that happened to you, you might feel a tad bit offended, pissed off, and disgusted.
I was 18 years old when I had the shock of my life, and then my adoptive parents yelled at me, threw pots and pans at me, and acted as if I had done something horrific. No, I was found by siblings that they knew I had and they prevented me from a continued and meaningful relationship with them because my adoptive parents wanted me all to themselves. Any parents who would do that today would be up on child abuse charges. The only reason they got away with that is because my father signed relinquishment papers.
Do not blame my natural father for it, either. He was used, first by the good old Catholic Church and then by a child-stealer who was procuring a baby for her brother. No one helped my father in his grief that he lost his wife to an early death. No one helped my father keep his kids together. And all you, Lola, can think about are the so-called orphans in orphanages.
I have said this before but it needs repeating: Children who need homes can very easily have those homes through legal Guardianship and not adoption. Guardianship provides a legal guardian (a single person or a couple) who provide a safe, loving, and permanent home for children who need a home. If children cannot be raised by their natural parents, this is a far better alternative than total and complete adoption. Even “open” adoption is not a safe alternative due to the sealing of the child’s birth certificate and a replacement, “new” birth certificate in the child’s new adoptive name and adoptive parents named as parents by birth. Adoptive parents cop an attitude of ownership over the child and see the parents of birth as inferior.
With Guardianship, a child’s legal birth name, legal birth certificate, and status as the child of one and only one set of parents is protected. The legal guardian is under legal obligation to act legally and lovingly for the child as a parent would, as foster parents do, and as adoptive parents do, but they do not have the “advantage” of the law sealing the child’s birth certificate, replacing it with a new one with the guardians’ names on it and changing the child’s name and identity for all eternity.
In situations where the safety of the child is concerned, better to remove a child from the danger, but retain the child’s identity and relationships with that parent or parents. Adoption erases the existing problem as to why removal of children seems necessary, but, the adoptee faces lifelong harm from adoption and must face those issues later in life.
Yes, I am completely anti adoption. No adoption under any circumstances. Not even to save the Haitian children from starving to death after the earthquake. Good grief I hear that refrain already…Family Preservation at all costs, even if their parents are dead, there are other relatives who would be lost to them in adoption by foreigners.
I am not ashamed for anything I write. The only people who are flaming me are my own stupid family members who do not want me to write about my life. Foreign governments and Social Service Agencies throughout America and other countries are reading my website: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to name a few. Why? Because there are active adoption reform movements in those countries who have achieved what America needs: drastic reform in adoption.
I worked in foster care and in homeless shelters where I have seen kids removed from their parents solely due to poverty, not abuse. Even in the cases of abuse, those parents are still parents and those kids were born of those parents. By your way of thinking, Lola, adoption should totally erase the past and give these poor kids a new and better life. Wrong. Kids do not forget what has happened and they must cope with it all. Subjecting kids to the total identity change of adoption and forbidding them any knowledge of or contact with their own blood kin is child abuse. I’ve been at this adoption reform activism and advocacy for very near 36 years. I’ve worked in and around foster care, troubled youth, homeless families, crisis centers and disadvantaged families for my entire adult life. I went to court with an 18 year old that aged-out of the foster care system and went out on his own because he had no family. He bought me a rose from a street vendor because I cared enough to see him through that last year. He faced the reality of his life and was a strong young man. I did the same for an 18 year old young woman. She was all alone at the end of the court proceeding. Both of these kids went through foster care with their parents in what-ever state that left them incapable of taking care of their children, but both of these young adults had their birth identities intact, had their personal histories, had the rough experiences of foster care, but they also had a determination to press forward and do something with their lives. They also were free to establish some type of relationship with their parents, which they said was important for them to figure out. And they both thanked me for being at their sides when they stepped out of that court room to face the world. Adoption would have stripped them of their names, their birth certificates, and their families. Guardianship would have provided a home and loving family while giving them the right to their own birth identities. Guardianship conveys freedom, adoption conveys possession.
Oh yes, and lets all go over to Haiti to adopt all those poor orphans! That will solve these black kids’ problems, right? No it won’t! Being adopted by foreigners of a different race is an inner struggle for Transracial Abductees: go see their website under my Links page and here. They will face prejudice in this lily-white biased country of ours who hates Obama for being a “light-skinned black man”. You prospective adoptive parents who think it is the loving thing to do to go to Haiti and adopt their children — do you know what emotional damage that will do to these children who have lived through the trauma of an earthquake? They have seen their parents and other relatives die and you want to put a band aid on that by taking them away from that devastation? Do you not see that taking care of them in their own country is the best solution? I suggest you read some other blogs about taking kids for adoption out of Haiti. The Daily Bastdardette: HAITI: OPERATION PIERRE PAN POSTPONED; POLITICIANS PANDER. In that blog post alone, Bastardette has many links to a wealth of information. You will be shocked by what you read. World organizations are advising against adopting kids out of Haiti for the very reasons I have just stated, and more.
Lola, be thankful that you have led a most comfortable life. Do not suggest that I adopt! I wouldn’t do such a horrible thing to a child! My life was ruined because of adoption.
My goal is to change adoption laws and social policy so that what happened to me will never happen to another child, ever. To be lied to, to be prevented from knowing my own siblings, to be forbidden to grieve the death of my mother, to not ever be taken to her graveside — those are crimes of child abuse perpetrated upon me by my own adoptive parents. That is sick perversion and possession of a human being.
My adoptive mother is dying in a nursing home right now. She has not once acknowledged the damage she caused me. But she is happy that I used a photograph her brother took of me as an infant for my book’s cover. She gets tears in her eyes because she is happy that I have reached my goal of publication. Maybe she cannot accept the horror of the crimes she and others committed against me, but she is happy for me to be published and encourages me to attend the next AAC Adoption Conference. Mom has realized the importance of the falsified birth certificate as being fraudulent. She has realized that her actions and that of other adoptive relatives and my dead mother’s relatives “were cruel” to my natural father, she said so this past summer. My mother now knows the destructive words said to me by my loving adoptive cousins: “Joan, you OPENLY declare you have two fathers, so you must not love this father. We don’t want you here…” at my adoptive father’s funeral in 1982. I had been in a reunion with my natural father and many other relatives for nearly 9 years at that point. The hate directed at me from prejudicial relatives was their inability to let me live my own life.
My adoptive Mom has also lived the destructiveness and spiteful hate from my own full-blood sisters who not only attacked me because they (like you) did not want me to write anything about my adoption (see my horrible articles in the Buffalo News in MY ARCHIVES page) that they repeatedly abused my mother and my kids and my ex-husband by hate phone calls and hate mail and false child abuse charges. Normal people will let go and let the other person live free from contact. Continued harassment because I am an adoption reformer is completely out of line. There is no reason for my sisters to attack my adoptive mother, but they have. My mother is dying. We need to resolve what we can and live in peace, yet, my sisters are still out there harassing me. I have no contact with them for a number of years into our reunion, and do not want contact from them because of their destructive behavior to me, my children, my adoptive mother, and my ex-husband. Why would I want to build relationships with people who have mocked me for decades and now want in on the action because my book is published? Or because they now want to be a part of adoption reform when they mocked me for being in adoption reform since I was 18? They are filled with nothing but malicious slander and defamation toward me. Every word I write is the truth. Even my ex-husband and my young adult children will attest to the hateful behavior of my relatives toward me and to them. Even my adoptive mother deserves respect as my mother, instead, she was mistreated by my blood sisters by false child abuse charges claiming she was sexually abusing her own grandchildren! Adoption and its aftermath has negatively-affected entire family systems — but you, Lola, want to sing adoption’s praises!
Adoption, in its present form, has been and is, a destructive social and legal device that splits up families.
Lola, are you under 36? If so, I have lived more trauma since 1974 than you have as a non-adopted person. You sound like a young kid who does not know beans about adoption reform. Keep reading. Visit other adoption reform blogs. See the kinks on the side bars. These links will lead you to other links in adoption reform. Better yet, show up to our Conferences and really learn what it is like to be adopted and to lose your child to adoption:
Adoption Crossroads: Adoption Healing, Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, Origins Inc. Australia, Origins Canada are proud to announce: Shedding Light on the Adoption Experience VI an Educational Conference About Realities: The Lifelong Effects of Adoption and the Need for Family Preservation.
Lola, you are living in a fantasy world. You need to wake up and smell the coffee. It is people like you who make me sick.
FORBIDDEN FAMILY 
I also want to add that my birth family was poor but they loved me.
My adoptive family was rich, but both of my adoptive parents abused me.
The adoption industry took me of from a loving family to put me in an abusive family.
But, all they want the world to know it that they saved me of poverty
Oopss, I hit the Report button by mistake! Doesn’t matter, the report goes to me to moderate. AND I APPROVE OF THIS COMMENT!!!
The Savior mentality of the Christians who descend on orphanages really does need to be challenged. Your story is one more validation that “saving” a child from a life of poverty and placing that child in the hands of strangers, is a violation of that child’s right to self and family and familiar surroundings. Help the poeverty situation improve, give people the opportunity to build up, but ot remove children from poverty is to leave permanent scars for life.
Thank you for sharing, kimette.
Love your Bar Code!
My comment to Lola who wrote:
“You may be unthankful for being adopte, but ask a 10 year-old in the foster system or in an orphanage if they want a Mom & Dad.”
I once was a 10 year-old child living in an orphange. I was happy living at the orphanage; I had food, cloths,many friends to play with. But I still wanted MY dad, not another dad. (I didn’t want a mom, I knew my mom was in heaven). My dad was very poor, but it’s still with him that I wanted to live with, and I was hoping to be reunited with him. As a second option, I would have like stay at the orphanage with frequent visits from my dad.
Some people decided I would be better off with another set of parents, in another country. Bein with a new set of rich parents didn’t make me happy. I missed badly the orphanage and my family. I wanted to go back to MY home, which was where I came from.
I learned that 3-4 years after I was adopted, the orphange was closed down and all the remaining “orphans” returned to their parents. That is exacly what I wished.
You probably think of asking the question to a 10 year-old child living in an awful orphanage.
I have lived in such orphange prior to the orphanage where I was well cared. I would have probably answered I wanted to be adopted, but what I wanted the most was my dad and siblings. I didn’t want another dad, I didn’t want another family.
Adoption tore my real family apart; and the society wants me to be grateful for being adopted.
kimette, you make very good points from being in that situation of a child in an orphanage who was “rescued” and adopted. The loss of your family is a personal tragic loss. That should be recognized and validated. You should not have been removed from that orphanage and the famiy that visited you.
I will continue to defend the rights of Half Orphans and Full Orphans. The loss of oone or both of our parents should not be downplayed by others who claim to know what’s “best” for us.
Angela Horne (of about-orphans.blogspot.com) posted the following Comment on “California Bill 1325 (Beall and Cook) Discriminatory to Non-native American ADOPTEES”. It fits here, too:
Submitted on 2010/01/17 at 10:02pm:
Angela Horne:
Ridicule makes for a bad metaphor for parenting. If you are a ridiculer reading this I will say just one thing to you; it is not for adoptees or inf-suffers (people conceived by donated sperm or eggs) to explain themselves to you but for you to justify your lack of sensitivity. I will never be an apologist. Get cousneling for your issues noting that our issues are perpetrated by your attitudes — poor people don’t get upset if they have no chidren because there’s oneless mouth to feed.
All this over a poxy bit of paper! We see a planet falling apart, UNICEF saying to keep war-orphans from being adotped and adults thinking that grabbing one child will save the world when adoption is failing anyway with 143,00 orphans worldwide who are stuck away from mothers for whom orpanages give the child a chance to eat. Note Mercy’s Dad in Africa for onoe example of a system out of control.
Please ridiculers accept the point of view of those you claim to love. Respect us, because without respect you might as well get a pet to love such is the low level of real concern for the real human condition monitored here.
Adoptees want birth certificates that are honest, same as most of ther people have. YOur issues are not our problem but they are yours — counseling then..
Thank you, Angela. You are right, respect is needed for adoptees and our counterparts produced by IVF.
What saddens me most is that, for the now 36 years since my shocking reunion at age 18 and my involvement with the Adoption Reform Movement, is that there has been very little change in pre-adoptive and adoptive parent attitudes. Attitudes of adoptive parents in the 1970s was “gimmie, gimmie, gimmie” and “mine, all mine”. And their attitude to me has always been “you ungrateful little bitch!” Nothing has changed.
I am not grateful to have been taken from my existing family! That is kidnapping santioned by a signed piecce of paper because my father was tricked into signing relinquishment papers! Then, all the adults around me colluded to keep me away from my own blood kin, all the while, keeping my father out of thier secret deals to communicate around the sealed adoption in which my father was told to stay away! No one else abided by the law but him!!!
Listen, Lola, with your ChinaSweetiePie: adoptees do not like what you self-righeous child-steallers do. We are people with feelings. If you cared enough about the feelings of your little China Doll you would make China a better place to live for all Chineses people. You would fight the injustices there. Your Little ChinaSweetiePie will grow up devoid of her own people and culture and language because all of the adults around her conspired against her best interests to her family, her name, and her country. THOSE are values and rights stated by the United Nations Rights of the Child, of which, you have violated by adopting a child out of her own country.
What’s your China Doll’s real name? Where’s her real birth certificate? Do you have an Adoption Certificate that correctly documents that you adopted her? Or, do you have a “new” (fraudulent) birth certificate that states YOU gave birth to a CHINESE girl in America? THAT is morally, ethically, and inhmanly wrong! YOU should be ashamed of yourself! Go on, LOOK at that “new” birth certificate that the government gave you! I know it states you gave birth to that Chinese girl. SHAME ON YOU!!!
SHAME ON THE GOV FOR ALLOWING THIS FARUD TO CONTINUE!!!
Thank you VHM, and Erimentha, for your additions here.
Yes, knowledge is what is brought to the table when people study adoption for decades as we who have been victimized by adoption have done. Rooms filled with books, trips to conferences, support groups and legislative meetings.
Adoption in America MUST change. Public opinion, general mythology and assumptions can only be changed by people willing to do the hard task of opening themselves up to learn WHY adoptees and parents who have lost their babies to adoption are speaking out.
We do so because the system needs to change. All of it. Crisis pregnancy centers are baby mills. Family Preservation and Guardianship need to replace adoption as we know it in America. That has been achieved in other countries.
LOLA: it is you (and other pre-adoptive and adoptive parents) who are whinning.
Wow, Lola, go to an anger management class for the love of God. I don’t know why I am surprised when an ap goes ballistic about an adoptees’ opinion of adoption and being adopted, it happens all too often. I think Joan has very ably answered your comments about foster children needing homes and as for the orphans you refer to, if you did five minutes of research online you would find that most of the “orphans” in the world have living parents and families who are simply too poor to support their children. They are encouraged by so-called Christian organisations to place their children in orphanages to be adopted by Americans with the promise of a better life – what these people need is assistance to raise their children themselves, not to have their children stolen from them. The same goes for Haiti – this country needs their children to stay right where they belong, not be whisked away to the US before any kind of search for their real families can be done. Also for the record, most adoptees parents are not deadbeat drug addicts as you seem to think. Most of them are just plain down on their luck and are convinced by society that they are not worthy of being a parent. As for me, my adoptive parents are perfectly nice people but then again so is my natural mother. She worked her butt off to raise my half brother and half sister after she had to leave their father who was abusive to her. She is an awesome woman and I missed out on a great deal by not being able to grow up with her.
One way in which being adopted has actually affected me more as an adult than as a kid is dealing with the bitterness and rage of APs and PAPs. I don’t know if it’s fear that their little darlings will grow up to be adult adoptees, or just fear that they will grow up.
In most of the world, the term translated as “orphanage” doesn’t mean a place where all the children have no families. It means a place you can temporarily house your children if the family cannot take care of them at that time. Most of the children in Haiti’s “orphanages” were like that. We still don’t know who has lived through the earthquake, and now EVERYONE there is equally destitute and hungry. Shipping their children thousands of miles to strangers doesn’t serve the Haitians….it only serves the white APs who are so desperate to get their hands on other people’s children.
The more you think about it, the more disgusting it is. Lola, you are grossly uneducated on the subject of adoption. Spend decades studying it, the way we have, and then maybe you’ll have a glimmer of understanding.
I should have titled this blog post by the message that greeted me in my emailbox from Lola: “You should be ashamed of yourself!”
By the way, chinasweetiepie, when your adopted china doll grows up she may hate you for taking her away from her people. Give her all the love you can now while she can look up to you. When she realizes the truth of her adoption, she’ll fall into depression like the rest of us adoptees.
By the way, an adoptive mother of a Korean girl told me back in the 1980s that she was glad she adopted from a foreign country so she would never have to deal with her adoptee ever having a reunion and putting her through what I put my adoptive parents through. (I was found at age 18 before I could even plan to search). For adoptive parents to hold it against their adoptees should they ever have a search or a reunion with their blood kin, well, that also indicates just who is selfish.
Thank you, Molly, for your comments.
People in the general public hear statements and make assumptions about adoption throughout their lifetimes. This society bias against adoptees is pervasive. But the tides are turning. We are standing up for our rights. And so are our natural parents.
Lola.
I had a pretty good life as an adoptee. I was given everything I could wish for except one thing. My identity. Every time I wanted information about my history and genetics I was met with emotional resistance from my adopted mother. It was more about ownership of me than it was about my emotional health. I had to go through hoops to find my birth mother. I should have had that information from the beginning. My adoptive parents should not have tried to make me stuff my need to know down. A need that so many adoptees have, almost ALL at some point in their life. If they are saying they don’t need to know, it’s because that is the MESSAGE given to them. You have to be grateful and not ask any questions. So for years and years we stuff it down. At some point, and I think this happens more often than not, the differences between you and your adoptive parents are glaring. It’s not nurture, it’s nature for sure. You have these feelings, these opinions, these talents that appear from nowhere. And many adoptive parents so want a carbon copy. They were told at the adoption that we are blank slates. WE ARE NOT. We are hard wired. Some adoptees rebel terribly. Some become perfect because of the sheer terror of abandonment again. Yes, abandonment. I don’t care how you slice and dice it, that’s simmering deep down inside of every adopted child. And for some unlucky few, their adoptive life is hellish. So there you have abandonment into a life of hell and abuse.
So your knee jerk reaction to this blog shows no compassion, even though you feel fairly self righteous. According to what you have written, ALL adoptees should feel grateful no matter what. You are in serious error of your judgment and are speaking without any real basis of knowledge about what we go through.
Taking a child away from their historical roots is very very wrong. Most countries in the world do not have adoption, they feel so strongly about heritage. Babies are not blank slates, they are connected to history and genetics that go very deep.
Without anger, you simply must try to educate yourself on the other side of the coin. It’s not all about the birth mothers, it’s not all about the adoptive parents, it is ALL ABOUT THE CHILDREN. You are not a savior taking them away. You would be more of a savior donating your money, time and effort to keep them in their culture. Should you do that, I would bow to you.
Didn’t know you were a foster child, Mara.
Lola, in case you didn’t read far enough intothis website, or my book, but I am a Social Worker. I tried to work from within the system to affect change. Doesn’t work. The System is corrupt. By the way, I worked in a crisis center for 10 hours on 9/11. I’m not as ashamed about who I am as you seem to think I should be.
Mara’s right. Haiti needs help rebuilding their country. Their people need to stay right where they are.
Adoptive parents need to take a good, long look at themselves, and at how they “got” their adoptees. For every happy adoptive parent there is a mother stripped of her child, a father stripped of his child, and an adoptee devoid of her freedom to her birth certificate and birth family.
Happy you have a falsified document to prove you are a parent by “birth”? Gee, so much for honesty and respect for the truth.
Oh, Lola…Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back!!!! YOU and other ignorant, self-righteous adoptive parents make ME SICK.
I WAS a foster CHILD. My biological parents weren’t abusive. MY ADOPTIVE PARENTS WERE ABUSIVE. I know, from first-hand experience, that adoption is NOT ALWAYS WHAT’S BEST FOR A RELINQUISHED CHILD. I would have been better off in an orphanage or bouncing around in foster care!!!!
The children of Haiti need to stay in Haiti. Haiti needs it’s children for THE FUTURE of the country. These children need help finding their extended families, but most importantly RIGHT NOW THEY NEED THE NECESSITIES AND AID WORKERS. WHY DON’T YOU, “ALL-KNOWING” LOLA pack your bags and GO HELP THEM!!!!??? Ya, not a chance. You’d rather have one shipped to your doorstep. YOU MAKE ME SICK. YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A BABY-HUNGRY VULTURE.
Thank you, Gaye, for telling like it is.
Lola –
My adoption experience was very different from Joan’s but one thing we have in common was the state-sanctioned erasure of our births, heritage and culture. Joan found out she was adopted much earlier than I did. I was 31. My (adoptive) parents NEVER acknowledged that I was adopted – not even after I found out. It took me nearly 25 years to find my first mom and I’m glad she’s lived long enough for me to find her. Would it surprise you that even when adoptees are in contact with their families of origin, New York State (and most other states) still will not release the original birth certificate?
The Bible’s exhortation to care for widows and orphans, to care for the fatherless, should not be taken to mean that we should take those orphans from their widowed mothers and from their extended families and their culture in order to “save” them. Your average adoption fee would go a long way to feed, clothe and care for many more than just one of those “orphans” in their own countries – but adoptive parents wouldn’t get ownership rights, would they?
The fact that most prospective adoptive parents would never consider sending large amounts of money to an orphanage but are willing to give that money to lawyers and facilitators in order to obtain “a child of their own” speaks volumes. The fact that many prospective adoptive parents view older children in foster care as “damaged goods” and are only looking for an infant or toddler speaks loudly of “ownership”. Falsified “birth” certificates are just tangible evidence of this “ownership” focus.
What do you have against Permanent Legal Guardianship? It gives the child (this IS about the child isn’t it?) all the benefits of adoption but does not legally and physically sever the relationship with the family of origin and does not erase the child’s identity, family, and heritage. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Of course some “adoptive” parents would object to being “renters” and not “owners”. Get over it. It’s about the CHILD.