| Tucked inside my Private Messages on Facebook was a comment left on May 1, 2017 by Jennifer Marsh, a woman who was upset over my blog post about wanna-be-adopters, Jeremy and Jenny. Too bad I didn’t see this sooner as I would have published Jennifer’s comment back when she messaged me. Jennifer felt compelled to find my Facebook profile so she could write to me in a private message (we aren’t connected on Facebook, so she had to leave the message in my “Message Request” folder). However, Jennifer lacked personal conviction to comment on the blog post itself. So I will publish her comment here. Her words are in quotes; my responses are written after her words.
May 1st, 11:08pm
No, Jennifer, you don’t understand my life at all. “A bad experience” implies only one such experience, yet, my life, just as yours, has been full of many experiences, happy and sad, easy and hard, traumatic and terrifying, wondrous and loving, and many ordinary experiences of daily life. Are you referring to my reunion as a bad experience? My reunion has had many upsetting events, but also many positive experiences as well, including ones that are occurring right now and will be in the future. I’m still in reunion, still experiencing adoption, with a variety of relatives and friends. These experiences range from positive, negative and neutral. Just as your life experiences are to you. First and foremost, if you read my original blog post at all, you would have read that my mother died when I was an infant. That is a tragedy, for me, for my four older siblings, for our father, and for my mother’s siblings and their spouses and their children. You did not acknowledge my mother’s death as a profound loss for me and my family. Instead, you lumped all of my life experiences into one big category: “I understand you have had a bad experience regarding your adoption.” My mother’s death was, and still is, a major loss affecting me even now, 61 years later. Her death was not “a bad experience” equal to that of an argument, a bad day at work, or missing the bus. Adoption itself is a traumatic event that permanently separates a baby (or older child) from her family, replacing family with strangers. Adoption changes the child’s identity, revoking and sealing her true birth certificate with a legally false one. Adoption is an irrevocable contract made over a minor child who has no say in the matter. My life experiences of being found by siblings I never knew I had, facing cruel mistreatment by extended adopted family and natural family because of their misinterpretations of adoption and what they believe I should and should not do, led me to join thousands of adoptees and mothers of adoption loss in the adoptee rights movement. Adoptees and parents of adoption loss are leaders in educating the general public and trying to prevent yet another unnecessary permanent separation. You, Jennifer, need to re-read my blog post to see the impact of adoption on the world’s adoptees, and the world’s mothers and fathers. We all have had “bad experiences” due to adoption. Our lives have been ruined because of adoption. That is why we work to end adoption as we know it. If adoption is so wonderful, Jennifer, why don’t you give up your children for a stranger to adopt? Oh wait; you adopted “your” children. So what, that doesn’t’ matter. They need to be re-homed so someone else can raise them. You don’t need these children. Come on; give them up so that another waiting couple could raise them better than you can. And these kids don’t need your name as mother on their birth certificate. Re-home them so that another mother can be named on a new birth certificate. Who cares about facts when you have your lord and savior, money, and love.
My original blog post about Jeremy and Jenny Advertising to Adopt is harmful only because you claim it is. It is not threatening at all. It is, however, an educational tool for fools who will see it as harmful and threatening. To those of us within the adoption reform movement (also known as the adoptee rights movement), see my blog post as a necessity that counteracts the stupidity, vulgarity, and ignorance of the two people who advertised in “Tri-Cities, TN, Yard Sales, Trades & Wanted” looking for someone’s baby to adopt.
Yeah? Really? From what they post on their websites http://www.meetjeremyandjenny.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/JeremyandJenny/ and online in this news article Jeremy and Jenny Graves do not seem to be suffering much at all. They have everything; the only thing missing is their dream child. (Look closely – Jeremy and Jenny are so desperate to adopt someone else’s child that published their own full names and address and phone number online, as well as publicize the adoption agency. But you, Jennifer, claim that I caused them harm by writing my blog post to educate them? Jeremy and Jenny, and others like them, need to accept reality: they are infertile. Grabbing up someone else’s child will not cure them of their infertility. |
“Not everyone has had a bad adoption experience. I can point you in the direction of many who have beautiful stories as well as sad ones.”
Yes, oh yes, I’ve heard these wonderfully happy adoption stories. For every adoptee who is blissfully happy, I can point to an adoptee who is living in denial, who buys into the legal lie, who is detached from acknowledging the truth – that the unknown is a part of them, whether they admit it or not.
Keep in mind, for each and every adoption – including open adoption – there is a mother and a father who are legally stripped of their parentage as if they never gave birth nor sired their child. Their names are stricken off of their child’s medical record of live birth – the long form birth certificate verifying that the birth of their child took place. Removing the validity of this document and replacing it with a false-fact birth certificate is not something to be celebrated.
“It is not your place to judge someone else when you don’t know the whole situation.”
Judge Jeremy and Jenny? My dear Jennifer, I wrote my blog post based upon their own words and actions – advertising to adopt someone else’s baby in a classified ad for “Yard Sales, Trades & Wanted” and on their own website and Facebook page and online in a news article.
These people, and others like them, including you, are trolling the Internet, looking for pregnant girls and women for the sole purpose of taking their baby from them to fulfill their own selfish need of parenting someone else’s baby, and/or additional children. There is nothing holy, or kind, or humane about Jeremy and Jenny’s actions. They want to remove a baby from her or his mother for their own benefit.
Does Jesus condone this?
I don’t know, I’m asking you. And, I’m asking Jeremy and Jenny. And I’m asking all other wanna-be adopters. How do you justify begging for a pregnant girl or woman to give up her baby so that you can reap the benefits of parenting her child?
As an atheist, I’m repulsed by religious people claiming that Jesus calls them to adopt.
“Nor is it appropriate to assume that anyone who can get pregnant should raise their own child.”
Oh, there you go, telling me, a social worker, that there are women who shouldn’t raise their own children. I know perfectly well that there are women and men who are unfit to parent the children they gave birth to and sired. That does not change the fact that they are parents deserving of respect and caring. They are the parents.
Family Preservation and Adoption Prevention should be the first priority. All steps should be taken to help a family overcome poverty, and the other situations you imply: drug addiction, crime, etc.
Jennifer, you speak of stereotypes; and yet, Jeremy and Jenny’s website and Facebook page clearly do not mention unfit parents whose children are in danger. Jeremy and Jenny are looking for a pregnant girl or woman so that they can convince her to give up her newborn to them to adopt.
Infant adoption is child snatching. So is adopting an older from foster care.
In every single situation, adoption is not necessary. Legal guardianship can provide for a loving home to a child in need of care without destroying family in the process and without destroying the child’s identity.
And let’s face it, a newborn needs the mother she was born to, and suffers when removed from her mother. But you, Jennifer, and Jeremy and Jenny, do not comprehend simple biology, psychology and human development.
“There are such things as open adoptions, ones where adoptive and biological mom’s parent together.”
Oh please, I know more about open adoptions than you do. Open adoption does not solve anything. In fact, open adoption results in: the child’s birth certificate revoked and sealed by the state government and a replacement birth certificate issued naming the adoptive parents as parents of birth. The child’s natural parents are relegated to legal strangers. No open adoption is legally enforceable. Adoptive parents can, and do, close the adoption and prevent any contact between child and their natural parents.
“My own family is like this.”
If you are satisfied in lying to yourself and to your adopted children, then I feel sorry for you. You can love a child without demanding that the child loses everything – family, name, birth certificate. But you want adoption to erase the truth. You want to live in your delusions.
“My kids biological mother is welcome in our home and is considered a part of the family.”
How very kind of you! But she must go home when it is time for her to leave. You are definitely in control of her child. Nice. How do you think she really feels? What about the father? Is he welcome, too?
I know all about advertising to adopt, not only by talking with mothers who have lost their children to open adoption, but my own research. I sat in on a workshop held by a lawyer here in Buffalo, New York who instructed couples how to put an 800-number phone in their home (this was in the early 90s when there were no cell phones). She said, “Don’t talk about the father, he’s not important anyway.”
Yeah? The father is not important to wanna-be-adopters, but the father is the child’s father. Like it or not, facts are facts.
Adoption – even open adoption – is nothing more that child trafficking. Adoption is a multi-billion dollar industry that lines the pockets of baby brokers by providing the product – a baby – to be bought and sold.
“What has this done for my kids, well they have more people who love them! They are spoiled with attention, love, and affection.”
Well, if it is only love you are concerned about, have at it! The more the merrier! Just wait until your little adoptlings grow up. They will ask questions. They will not feel loved when they develop their own brains. They will see the charade you invented for them. They will question the meaning of a false birth certificate and false family created by your greed and they will resent you.
“We do not keep secrets.”
Haa haa haaa! What do you think adoption is? Adoption is based upon lies – lots of them! Trickery to obtain the child, false identity for the adoptee, false hope and confusion instilled as the child grows up, and much, much more. Everyone believing in the falsehoods continues the game.
“I am sorry you had a bad experience but not everyone has had or will have the same bad experience.”
Jennifer Marsh, you are not sorry for anything. You left a Private Message in my Facebook Message Box. You didn’t even have the courage to stand up and claim your own message in the public comment section, so I made it public for you.
Yes, every adoptee has totally different life experiences than I have had. And all of us have come together to form organizations around the world to stand up against this glorification of adoption.
“Please consider removing this blog post, you have done so much damage to two people you do not know, and who do not deserve it.”
No, I will not remove my blog post. I have not done any damage.
Yes, Jeremy and Jenny do deserve to be told that advertising to adopt someone else’s child is morally and ethically wrong. They deserve to be told the negative consequences of adoption on the infant who is removed from mother for no other reason but the selfish motives of the adopters, and the negative consequences of adoption on the mother who then becomes a “birthmother” who is not her child’s legal mother. Let’s not leave out the fathers who may or may not be told that their infant has been given up for adoption.
If I can save just one infant from being adopted, if I can save one mother from falling victim to rich white people coveting her unborn baby, that is a good outcome.
And you, Jennifer, left a link in that Private Message to me to a YouTube video about a young mother who surrendered her son to adoption?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBraT8F4mQ0&feature=youtu.be
As if I need to be persuaded to your point of view?
Honey, I’ve been involved in the adoption reform movement since 1974. I see the light of hypocrisy and of religion used to justify “the will of god”. In reality, your religion is used as a weapon to guilt mothers into believing that surrendering to their god means surrendering their child to adoption.
As an adoptee who was given away, and from what other adoptees feel, I can tell you that there is nothing that can erase those feelings of not being wanted by your parents.
Yes, my father did want me, but a stupid Catholic priest convinced him, at my mother’s funeral, that giving me away was the best choice he could do.
No, the best course of action would have been for the Catholic Church, for Catholic Charities, to find a way to help my father through the rough times so that he could have kept his newborn after his wife died.
Go crawl back into your hole, Jennifer Marsh. If you feel the need to comment, do not hunt me down on Facebook to leave a cowardly comment. Stand up and be public in your convictions.
FORBIDDEN FAMILY 
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