Dear Marci Auld Glass,

As promised, since you have deleted my posts that point to your faulty logic in your article published at The Presbyterian Outlook, I have turned my deleted posts into a blog post for all the world to see.

As usual, religious people boast their beliefs without backing up their statements. It is highly irresponsible of you to continue blathering on. It is my intent to show you, and others like you, how utterly ridiculous your beliefs truly are.

There is so much wrong here, in your essay, that I do not know where to begin.

Skipping through most of your religious gibberish, which is meaningless because it is all made-up nonsense, I will caution you to set aside religion to see the very real history of some of the words of adoption.

You said:

“Most people likely hear “gave him up” in reference to salvation. There is also a resonance with adoption. “Giving up” is adoption language. Children are given up for adoption. Adoption is not unrelated to God and God’s saving work in the world through the person of Jesus.”

Correction:

Most people who believe in the same religion as you do will see this in reference to salvation, and bla, bla, bla.

Again, put religion aside to pay attention to reality.

The history of adoption in America is plainly rooted in slavery. Slaves were PUT UP on the auction block. In the mid-1800s, when slavery ended, adoption began in America. Homeless children were swept out of New York City (at the beginning of my profession of Social Work – a sad, disgusting start) and put on Orphan Trains. These trains stopped in major cities heading West to farmland where the children were PUT UP FOR ADOPTION by being raised up on stages, platforms, auction blocks so that prospective adopters (purchasers) could better see the children and pick through them for the desired child of their liking. Adoption back then meant that the child was a helping hand, an indentured servant, not considered family, and some worked instead of going to school. Some were treated fairly well. Most weren’t.

This is history. Look it up.

My adoptive mother was born in 1916. Her mother died in 1918 of the Spanish Flu. My two year old future adoptive mother, along with her brothers, went to live in an orphanage. They stood on stages and platforms and sang for prospective adoptive parents who stared at the children. My mother was never adopted, and neither were her brothers, because their father paid for their room and board while he worked. The orphanage was torn down in the mid-1970s and the last residents were sent to foster care.

As for your comparing modern adoption to your religious beliefs, please don’t. This is going down a slippery slope. You are placing meaning where it doesn’t belong. Again, pay attention to reality.

So you see yourself (as an adoptee) as the solution to your mother’s unplanned pregnancy? Do you not see how hurtful (to your mother) that is? Your mother had to go through her pain in order for you to be adopted. It’s your god’s plan.

I see you begin to address your pain:

“The wound of my rejection exists alongside the gift of my adoption, and with my gratitude for my birth mother’s gift of releasing me to live my life. The many blessings in my life do not erase my wound.”

But you hide behind your religion without actually dealing with anything. You sing the praises of your god, say you are grateful for being a gift, but there is no substance to your words.

If I were to follow your logic, I should be grateful that: God knit me in my mother’s womb so she could die and leave behind 5 children – me being 3 months at the time – so that my adopters could adopt me, ending their 18-year dry spell of childlessness? Praise the Lord!

FUCK THAT SHIT!

My adopters continued to be childless – adopting me didn’t cure their infertility.

I lost my entire family because of adoption. I lost my name, my birth certificate, in order to gain a new name, a new birth certificate, and a new family.

According to your beliefs, those losses – and the converse (my father lost his newborn, my siblings lost their baby sister) – is perfectly okay because it was your god’s will.

Let me back up. My parents – NOT BIRTHPARENTS – were married for 10 years and had four children. Our mother was pregnant with me, her 5^th child, when she became ill with cancer. She was x-rayed and the tumor was a big as me. I was born two weeks later at 32 weeks gestation. A preemie. My mother died three months later. That was in 1956.

Your loving god told a priest to tell my father to give me up for adoption. Instead of being helpful, like enlisting Catholic Charities to come over to help my father to take care of his children, maybe give some diapers and clothes, maybe arrange babysitters and people to prepare food, at least for a year or so until a more stable arrangement could have been made. But no. Stupid Catholic priest told my father to give me away.

I am not mad at my father. I detest the priest.

And then, a woman came up to my father to say, “I know someone who will take your baby.”

Both of these conversations took place at my mother’s funeral – in front of her corpse.

Yes, this woman arranged for her brother to adopt me. Right in front of my dead mother’s body.

I was raised an only child. Eighteen years of naïve love for the parents who loved me dearly. But their love was conditional. I was theirs, as long as I didn’t know the truth, but they knew the truth and did not tell me. They betrayed my trust.

I was found at age 18 while still in high school by my older siblings. My full blood siblings.

Don’t think we had a lovely reunion. It’s not about a happy, or sad, or traumatic, reunion. It’s not about Jesus placing me in this family to be found later (according to you). It’s about the injustices I suffered, the injustices my siblings suffered, and the pain our father felt. It’s about being needlessly, and permanently, separated from my own family.

You said:

“Ultimately, the wound of rejection is a wound for which I am grateful. My adoption has been a blessing. I’ve always experienced my birth mother’s decision to place me for adoption as an act of love, a recognition that in the difficult situation in which she found herself, this was the best she could do for me. I feel like she released me to live the life I was meant to live. I am so grateful to have been adopted, and the wound that comes with it is one I gratefully bear for the gift of my life, the gift of joining my family.”

How do you know for sure your mother chose to give you away? That she rejected you? Maybe you were stolen from her at birth? Ripped from her body with force?

This being grateful for your perceived rejection borders on mental illness. You want to be a glutton for punishment?

And you are grateful that you gave away your own child to adoption? Geesh, lady, get yourself to an adoption conference to be de-programed. Look up American Adoption Congress for starters.

You said:

“…illegitimate” is not a word to describe a human life…”

Well now. Are you aware that it was the Victorian thought process that resulted in the adoption and birth certificate laws we have today? Yes, illegitimate bastards were considered to be scum of the earth back in Victorian days. Religious zealots had to dispose of the slutty mothers and find a way to humanize the bastards so the invention of modern adoption began in the 1920s. Slutty mothers could be discarded, fathers not held accountable, and the bastards would be reborn to a mother who was married – the bastard child had a legal father through adoption! The child’s actual medical record of live birth – the birth certificate – was rescinded, annulled, canceled and then sealed, and then replaced by an amended birth certificate with the names of the adoptive parents as if they gave birth to the renamed child.

Does any of this sound logical to you? Is this truthful? Do you enjoy living lies? Does your religion condone this? Isn’t lying a sin?

As for the definition of REAL PARENTS is concerned, I suggest you study biology. DNA proves who your parents are. If that were not true, then millions of people wouldn’t be spitting into cups and sending their DNA off to labs to get back their genetic family trees.

As for being raised by loving parents. Well, they were assigned as parents, you loved them as such, as I did mine, but the truth is, there is a split when someone is adopted. Nature vs. nurture. The social parents do all the social and psychological parenting, and that is where the confusion sets in. Foster parents and custodial guardians can do the same thing – love a child and provide a stable home – without forcing identity theft on a child and without forcing permanent cut-off from family. With foster parents and legal custodial guardians, the care givers know they do not replace the biological parents. In adoption, it is expected that all who live this lie play the game of delusional denial of the facts.

I speak here as a social worker and a mental health worker. Adoption sets people up to believe in false facts. When people believe in false facts, they are delusional, not grounded in reality. When people are not grounded in reality, they are mentally ill.

Get your head out of religion and into reality. For your own good.

Oh wait, you said:

“A few years ago, I got my birth certificate and started meeting my birth family. It’s astonishing, really, to consider. Members of my birth family answered a phone call from a total stranger – -me – and from that call, managed to expand their definition of who was included as a part of their family. …”

It’s as simple as that? Really?

How did you get your Original Birth Certificate? Was it god’s will? It just magically appeared, or you had to go through some legal channels? Join a search group?

You gloss over your reasoning for getting your OBC and searching for your natural blood kin.

Why is it important for you to have your OBC, to search for and reunite with, your natural mother and extended blood kin when it was your god’s will that you were given up and adopted? I thought you were grateful to be adopted? If so, then you have no reason to want to own your OBC, to reunite with your mother, because the one answer in your religion is, as the title of your article states, “Adopting a child mirrors god’s adoption of us all”.

If adoption is so wonderful, and you are grateful to be relinquished and adopted, and happy to have given away your own infant conceived out of marriage, then why on earth did you want your Original Birth Certificate and to be reunited with your mother?

Seems very hypocritical to me.

Your essay glosses over the agony of adoption, and the real hard work that goes into the lives of activists like me who pave the way for other adoptees, like you and your son, to be free.

That should have a mention in your essay, but the glory goes to your god who saved you and your son via adoption.

You have done a great disservice and injustice to adoptees and our natural parents by focusing on your god and not reality.