In April of 2018, an adopter named Amey wrote a blog post – The Anti-Adoption Movement – What Does It Look Like?
I will open this post with a hats-off to adoptee Marilynn Huff who made an extraordinary comment to Amey’s post in that blog post’s comment section on adoptees’ birth certificates. Marilynn’s comment is one of the best I’ve ever read, including my own writings.
I will break down Amey’s blog post one phrase at a time.
Under the heading “Adoptees” Amey said:
Adoptees often resent the idea that they were “given up” for adoption. I hate that phrase. We say “placed’ or “made a plan.”
It doesn’t matter what YOU say – that you hate the phrase “given up” – that “We” (meaning infertile people, or adopters) say “placed” or “made a plan” – what matters is how adoptees experience the permanent separation that adoption actually is. The adoptee, as a newborn or an infant too young to have verbal and mental cognition, experiences the sudden loss of Mother as a terrifying break. This Primal Wound is internalized as the infant cries out for Mother. (Read The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier). The Primal Wound creates brain damage in certain areas of the brains of infants who are taken at birth from their Mothers. On this basis alone, adoption should be seen as extreme child abuse. With new studies being done, hopefully, it will be, and we will see a stranger movement to end adoption as we know it on a global scale.
Be sure to read this blog post and be sure to read the comments for links to scientific studies.
Amey said,
Maybe the birth parents had a problem with substance abuse or were young and not ready to parent. It doesn’t matter. The adoptee still feels unwanted and alone.
Again, it does not matter what the parental circumstances are at the time of birth, the newborn is traumatized by sudden removal of the nurturing mother within whom the infant lived for nine months. The pre-born infant hears mother’s voice and knows her emotions, and is influenced by her emotions. The pre-born infant is happy when mother is happy and feels anxiety and distress when she is nervous or angry. These are proven facts.
The pre-born infant feeds by mother’s food intake – both mother and baby share a symbiotic relationship. The unborn infant needs mother for sustenance, nutrients (in addition to feeling her love), and even receives her bacterial microbiome as she passes through the birth canal during birth. There is now evidence that the infant and mother exchange body and brain cells. The mother’s cells live on inside her offspring’s body and brain, and conversely, the infant’s cells also live on inside the mother. Scientists believe that these cells aid in immune functions.
Such phrases as
the birth parents had a problem with substance abuse or were young and not ready to parent
are a form of distancing the natural parents from their child. This is dissociating, detaching, and distracting from the primary relationship. These words are weapons meant to evoke emotions in observers who then internalize the message that adopters are then “better than” the child’s natural parents. This psychological twisting is then passed down to the adoptee who grows up feeling indebted for being saved from a life of hell with unfit parents. This distorted message permeates society’s belief that adoption saves infants and children.
I hope you, Amey, can now see that your last two sentences in that first paragraph:
It doesn’t matter. The adoptee still feels unwanted and alone
are quite true of the facts of life as experienced by a newborn or an older baby.
The first sentence in Amey’s next paragraph states:
Adoptees sometimes feel that everyone who makes this decision is selfish, while everyone says that they are selfless.
This reflects upon adoption as it happens in today’s society. Adoption has been warping and changing over the last 9 decades. When I first joined the Adoptees Rights Movement in 1975, nearly a year into my reunion with my natural family, I met mothers from the Baby Scoop Era. Here is a blog post I wrote about honoring their contributions.
I might add that you, Amey, should try to avoid words such as “everyone.” There are many adoptees out there who do not see relinquishment, or surrendering, a newborn or older child as selfish. Many adoptees understand that many mothers and fathers of adoption loss are not given proper counseling of all options available, and this includes ways to sustain keeping their child.
As a social worker, I worked in homeless shelters where our clients where homeless mothers with children or were entire families. We had a checklist of goals that we helped our clients obtain one by one – including parenting classes, finding apartments, finding employment and child care – so that the young mother and/or father could raise their own infant and older children.
Still, I have seen just the opposite – where certain social workers are hell-bent on removing children from their parents just to fill their monthly quota of “placing” children for foster care and adoption.
By using your words of “selfish” and “selfless,” I can only guess you are part of the Brave Love Movement. This Christian movement is deleterious and demoralizing to the expectant mother and the mother who has just given birth. It goes against natural to feel obligated to strangers to “make an adoption plan”- specifically because a pregnant woman or teen is already a mother. Her first and foremost obligation is to the infant she is carrying. Pre-birth adoption plans are immoral and ought to be illegal.
It is sad that modern adoption practices, even those that promote and practice open adoption, make it a point and a goal to instill unnatural feelings and beliefs in the minds of pregnant teens and young women. The idea that it is “unselfish” to give your infant to strangers is brainwashing. Many of the women who now boast that they, too, are proud mothers whom selfishly made an adoption plan for their baby, will one day wake up to the horror of what they’ve done. When they do wake up to realize that they were tricked and coerced into giving their babies to strangers, we will see them in the Anti Adoption Movement.
I’ve seen the jewelry line for Brave Love. I’ve seen T-shirts for pre-adoptive-parent- wanna-bees that state “Paper Pregnant” or “My baby is in Nepal” (for those who are waiting for a baby who will be born to a poor woman in a baby farm who will get paid to gestate a baby for strangers so she can use that money to sustain herself and her family).
Such baby farms exist so that wealthy gay men, lesbian women, heterosexual couples, or even single men and women can make a baby through buying sperm and eggs via contract and then rent the womb of a poor woman for their selfish motives of making a baby at extreme means for the pleasure of experiencing parenting.
Buying and wearing a t-shirt that state the words “paper pregnant” with the drawing of a pregnant belly is an advertisement of the absurd ego-mania that exists in today’s wanna-be-adoptive-parents. Only narcissistic, selfish women with too much money to spend would demean themselves to the point of walking around wearing such a t-shirt, let alone actually using a vulnerable young pregnant woman for the sole purpose of taking her baby upon birth.
Amey, your next sentence:
The Expectant or Birth Parents don’t want to parent; the adoptive parents only want a baby.
seems to accept the myths that are out there today. Most unexpectedly pregnant girls and women actually do want to keep their babies and to parent their child. True, there are some mothers who are, indeed, drug addictions, or are involved in crime, or are completely detached to their pre-born infant. I saw a few of these mothers in the homeless shelters I once worked at. There are mental illnesses that won’t allow a mother to be a mother. There are addictions and criminal behaviors that warrant the removal of newborns or older children from such parents.
Children born to these mothers and raised in foster care in safety carry with them their own birth certificate. They may be raised together with their own siblings. One or two of those siblings may eventually be adopted. However, the one who ages out of foster care maintains the birth certificate created upon her birth, even when her parents are dead beats, drug addicts, in prison, or do not want to have anything to do with their children. Meanwhile, the siblings who were then adopted are given new names, new birth certificates, and new parents. The siblings are still full-blood siblings but are not legally siblings.
Amey, I must challenge you to re-examine your words:
The Expectant or Birth Parents don’t want to parent
How do you know that? According to the natural mothers I communicate daily with on Facebook and on their websites say that they wanted to parent their baby, but many were coerced and many were de-babied during birth by harsh birthing methods of the attending physician and by nurses who took the baby immediately upon birth.
Amey, your next words:
the adoptive parents only want a baby.
say it all. Wanting a baby and then using a pregnant girl or young woman to meet your desires is the worst form of anti-woman, anti-feminist beliefs and behavior. Rich and powerful women should not abuse and use disadvantaged pregnant women to satisfy cravings to be a parent. Coveting another woman’s baby and actually going through with the plan to obtain her baby for your benefit is a very selfish act.
And your next words, Amey:
In an infant or young child adoption, they are the only people in the triad who don’t get a choice. Other people make it for them, decide what is best because they’re too young to understand. They resent that, too.
Of course adoptees resent the actions of adults who made life-altering choices and made legally-binding contracts over them when they were too young to say no. The world is now facing a great uprising. Adoptees are gathering together to not only voice opposition to what was done to them, but to end adoption altogether.
Then your next paragraph, Amey, is about adoptees:
And it doesn’t matter if they had a wonderful home life with an adoptive family. Often, they’ll say that they love their adoptive parents, but that they resent them for taking them away from their birth family. They recognize that they were given opportunities that they might never have had, yet they feel incomplete, never whole.
Yes, many adoptees do feel this way. It is a burden to walk through life knowing that you may have had “a wonderful life” and that you do love your adoptive parents, and at the same time feel that loss, feel that resentment. While many adoptees have been raised in economically superior adoptive homes, adoptees are split in half feeling guilty for wanting to know their natural parents and to know why they were not kept. Yes, many adoptees know that they were bought at a high price – thousands of dollars – $25,000 or $50,000 or $75,000. When the realization sets in as to the truth of baby-selling, baby-trafficking, and that adoption agencies make their living this way, many adoptees are disgusted as to the means they became adopted.
And yes:
For them, the loss is more powerful than the gain.
Amey, your next section is about Expectant Parents. I will only say this – that pressuring expectant mothers and fathers into a pre-birth matching contract with adoptive-parent-wanna-bees is just that – unwanted and unhealthy pressure for both the pregnant mother and her unborn child.
Your next section, Amey, is about Birth Parents is actually correct in your assessments of the situation for many natural parents.
You are correct in assessing that many Adoptive Parents are:
Adoptive parents are affected by the anti-adoption movement, but I find that they are more often Anti-Open Adoption. I think it’s pretty obvious that this isn’t me, but I understand the sentiment.
This “Anti-Open-Adoption sentiment exists because many adopters feel that they are the adoptees ONLY parents. Many adoptive parents do not want to know that there is another set of parents who has more than genetic ties to the adoptees in their care. They believe that the adoptee owes them loyalty and elegance. Often times, these types of adoptive parents are very possessive over their adoptees. Some actually believe the false-facts stated on the amended birth certificate – they are living in a delusional fantasy, believing that they gave birth to someone else’s child.
Amey, now I will tell you what happened to me.
My mother was dying of cancer while pregnant with me. During her 7th month of pregnancy, my father took his wife to the hospital. She was very sick. It was two days after Christmas 1955. The doctors x-rayed my mother’s abdomen. There they saw me and a cancerous tumor the same size as I was. Two weeks later, in early January 1956, I was born at 8 weeks gestation – two months premature. My mother died on March 28, 1956, at age 30.
My 31 year old father was left with a deceased wife and five children. His parents were old and sick. He was an only child, so he had no family to lean on. His wife’s siblings were married with several young children, and a few had newborns of their own.
At my mother’s funeral, two things happened very close to one another. The parish priest came up to my father and said, “The baby needs two parents.” A few minutes later, a woman approached my father and said, “I know someone who will take your baby.” My father was given no options. No one offered help to keep his family together. My father was a deeply religious man so he followed the priest’s suggestion. He contacted that woman and arranged for her brother and his wife to come and get me. When he gave me to my future adoptive parents, he also gave them my birth certificate, baptismal certificate, and my clothes. I was 4 months old.
My father married his second wife very soon after. His second wife helped take care of my four older siblings. Meanwhile, my adopting parents lived just one block over and three blocks up away. About nine months later, they moved six miles to the north.
By the closed adoption practices of the time, my father was told to never contact my adoptive parents. He was to stay away from me. My adoption became final when I was one year and one week old. My name was changed. My birth certificate was revoked, sealed, and replaced by one that states my new name, and my new parents – as if I was born to them in that hospital. The Catholic Church even changed my baptismal certificate.
It is these lies and cover-ups that I resent.
I also resent my adoptive parents’ possessiveness.
In 1974, at my age of 18, I was found by siblings I did not know I had. My adoptive parents knew I had siblings, but they did not tell me. They knew where my mother was buried but never told me. Why? Because I belonged to them. I was theirs.
There is much more to my adoption/reunion story; too much for this blog post. That is why I wrote a memoir: Forbidden Family: An Adoptee’s Struggle for Identity.
There are many reasons why I am anti-adoption. I did not need a new home. I already had a home. I had parents. I should have been allowed to grow up knowing my Mom died and visiting her grave. I should have had my siblings and my father with me. Adoption took all of that away from me.
What did I gain from adoption? I was raised an only and lonely child. I had my independence. I had material middle-class things that my siblings did not have. This created resentment in them when we were reunited. While I loved my adoptive parents, I mistrusted them ever since 1974 when I learned that they lied to me for the first 18 years of my life. I spent the next few decades as the adoptee who belonged to two families, who had the burden of integrating two identities, and the burden of taken the brunt of everyone else’s opinions as to what I should feel and what I should do. It was bad for me to be an anti-adoption activist.
All four of my parents are dead now. I have no contact with any abusive relatives – that means my siblings as well as extended family by blood or by adoption. I do have close relatives on both sides…
My life was ruined because of adoption. I am very resentful, and I will fight to my dying breath to end the revocation, sealing and replacement of adoptees’ birth certificates. I join thousands of adoptees around the world who say that adoption should end.
I will close with this thought:
Amey, your last token of a misguided message is this meme:
I don’t know who this person “Tupac Shakur” is, or was, but that meme is extremely hurtful. My mother died when I was three months old. That loss was the single most devastating event in my life. My mother’s death led to my adoption. I am not grateful for this.
On the other hand, maybe the meme is right. I lost my name, my family, and my birth certificate all because of adoption. I am supposed to be grateful and happy. I am not.
Adoption has left me fighting for my civil rights to my factual birth certificate. I fight not only for myself, but for millions of adoptees worldwide. I fight for the humanity of all pregnant girls and women, and for all mothers, and fathers, of adoption loss.
As for adoptive parents – you reap the benefits of adoption. I don’t see any of you running to legislators to turn in those amended birth certificates to demand adoption certificates instead, nor do I see any adoptive parents demanding that the revoked and sealed birth certificate of the child in your care is reinstated. I don’t see any adoptive parents willing to, and actually returning the child back to the natural parents after they rebuild their lives.
Why? The answer is because you now have what you want: ownership of someone else’s child.
That just about sums up the need for the anti-adoption movement.
FORBIDDEN FAMILY 
Wow … I have to say I’m speechless. As someone who was a foster parent to a newborn and ultimately adopted I don’t know how to process the demonization of “adopters” and of adoption process in general. You paint a very ugly picture that leaves no room for the “adopter” and the adopted to evolve to some successful outcome. I would love to do the right thing as I intended when I originally became a foster parent … so tell me what I should apologize for first? Should I apologize for my selfish act of being a foster parent? Should I appologize for trying to reunify this baby to his jobless & homeless parents. Should I be the one to apologize for all the “adopters” that used perfectly fine language like “Birth Mom” or “Mom” & wore silly tshirts as a tent pole to garner love and support for the new addition & challenges they will be taking on by adopting. Should I apologize to the 2 other children she previously abandoned (not given up, not tricked, not taken away) abandoned! When no other family member would accept their child … is that my failing as well. When they quit their son & asked me to adopt him when he got sick & had to have a feeding tube put in …. should I have apologized again & politely said no?
When I’m telling him his truths that you demand (which I will to an extent) … at what age does it make it less painful for him to hear his parents gave up on him when he got sick & outright disappeared from the state with no further communication? What age is best to share his father was a convicted rapist? Is there a special way to reveal that his mother & father have 7 siblings between the 2 of them in addition to their parents …. and not one of them is in communication or wanted anything to do with raising their baby.
You have successfully laid out a future roadmap of bitterness, anger & resentment for my son for which you are ultimately blaming me for (oh wait … am I allowed to call him my son?). I wouldn’t want to inconsiderately use a title that didn’t belong to me. And for clarity doesn’t the over played “self identifying” movement allow me to promote myself to “mom” ya know …. if that’s how I … “self identify”? Or should I appologize for that also & teach him to refer to me as adopted mom or as his lifetime babysitter.
Your horrible adaptation of adoption, “adopters” and whatever innocent signs, labels, or tshirts they wear to rally excitement & support from their family is one sided, ignorant, bitter and defeatist.
This is not a black & white issue. Your simplification of the process & never adopt solution is naive. Where is the data that shows not adopting & essentially raising the child I have as a common law son is better? Where does it say that keeping his name and essentially raising him as an outsider from my family is the ideal?
I’m sorry you had a horrible experience … Im sorry your father was not strong enough to stand up for you and keep you … but instead of making me feel bad for stepping in to give this baby a home & admonishing the process from which he came to me – tell me how to lesson that pain … tell me how to love him so he feels like he belongs to a family vs being raised as an outsider without my name …. and instead shackled to a past that didn’t want him.
Right now all your telling me is that there is nothing I can do to do right by this child as an “adopter”… and THAT to me is something to be angry about.
The ugly picture I paint needs to be painted to prevent adoptions from happening. Adoption is necessary ONLY when a newborn is completely abandoned in fire stations, or police stations or, worse yet, baby dump boxes. But then, again, DNA can now be used to find the abandoning mother and father so that they can receive the help that they need as well.
I am fully aware that parents often abandon two or more children and many are incapable of being parents to their children. In those cases, as I’ve said before, kinship care, foster care and custodial guardianship are preferred over adoption. These forms of alternative parental care protect the child’s rights while adoption removes the child’s rights to name, family, birth certificate…
You could have been legal guardians but instead you chose to own someone else’s child. That is what adoption is: ownership of another person’s child. Your body did not produce this child so your name does not belong on a falsified birth certificate. You can’t be an honest parent when adoption starts on lies.
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Lots of non-adopted people are raised with the knowledge that their fathers are convicted rapists. I know of a young father who has three children born to his former girlfriend who took off while pregnant with the third child. She was in some type of psychosis and stabbed another pregnant woman to death. The authorities removed the twins into protected custody and the mother gave birth in jail a few days later. The father drove 300 miles to take full custody of his three children after the judge awarded him that right. That was ten years ago. These three children know that their mother is in prison for murder. They love their mother and she loves them. That’s called reality. Hiding reality by adoption does not change reality.
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No, you are not allowed to call him “your son” because you are a legally-appointed guardian who does not replace his parents. If you were a guardian and not an adopter, the reality would never be covered-up. The child would still have his name of birth and his birth certificate, and he would not have a new birth certificate that changed his identity to “your son.” I maintain that this aspect of adoption causes delusions in the minds of adopters. My advice: accept reality. You are not his mother. You are his legally appointed guardian who can be affectionately called “mom” but you are not his mother. You can fulfill the social and emotional role of mother, but you are not his mother and you can never replace her.
Ha! There goes that babysitter bullshit again! That is exactly what my adoptive mother screamed at me in 1974 when I was 18 and newly found by sisters she never wanted me to know. When an adopter flings the word “babysitter” in an adoptee’s face that means that the adopter knows that the truth is that care-giving for someone else’s child is just that: care-giving. A foster parent knows she doesn’t replace the child’s parents. A legal guardian knows she doesn’t replace the child’s parents. Love is definitely there! But for adopters to claim that they are parents is delusional! You are legally appointed guardians to take care of a child who needs a home. That is your responsibility to do that job! If you want to call that babysitting, then go ahead!
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I never said to raise him as “common-law son”. You are being irrational. Go look up legal custodial guardianship.
Oh yes, when an adopter insists on changing the child’s name and birth certificate, that is a clear sign that that adopter wants to own that child! You can provide a loving home without owning someone else’s child.
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I did not “have a horrible experience”. Stop parroting the words you hear out there! My entire family suffered. …
How can you love that boy in your care? If you know how to handle the horrible mess with gentleness and kindness then do that. It seems to me you are already doing so. You cannot ease his pain. You can be there for him when he has tears, but you cannot take it all away. Accepting reality is the only solution with age-appropriate words. He does not need YOUR name to be included in your love and family!
Here’s an example from my life. My adoptive parents took care of a little boy for two years long before I was born and adopted. He loved them and they loved him. His mother got married and wanted him back. But my future adoptive parents loved him so much that they requested to keep in touch. The two sets of parents continued a friendship until their senior years. My foster brother loved his foster mother and was with her up until she died in 2011. He loved his foster mother and he loved his mother and his step-father. But his foster mother did not adopt him to love him.
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Go ahead and by angry! I don’t care. What I care about is what your adoptive son might feel as he grows older. If you handle situations with as much honesty and integrity as you can, then you’ve done your best. But you started this with insisting that he change his name. You changed his identity without his consent. No one should have the right to alter a child’s birth certificate! Your name belongs on an adoption certificate. Hopefully, he will handle the details of his life with courage and compassion for the parents who chose not to love him. He did not have one bad experience; he has many unpleasant situations and experiences to deal with throughout his life.
jamzmom
Have you ever attended adoption conferences held by the American Adoption Congress? I highly recommend that you attend. Here is the link: https://www.americanadoptioncongress.org/conference_information.php
You will find help there.
You will also find help in the many books available out there. Here is my list of books. But there are many more books out there than what I have.
https://forbiddenfamily.com/books-on-adoption-reproductive-technologies/
jamzmom
Here are links to the two best books an adoptive parent ought to read:
http://nancyverrier.com/the-primal-wound/
and
http://nancyverrier.com/coming-home-to-self/
You are right on so many levels and wrong on some as well – unless you have any articles to address these issues!
It sounds to me like you are saying that ALL adoption is evil! That in itself is evil – given those mothers who find ways to adopt their babies out to protect them from the monsters who are abusing them and their babies! That and abortion is the ULTIMATE form of child abuse – NOT ADOPTION. Adoption in such cases is vital!
There are also mothers out there without families who are so severely handicapped either mentally, physically or emotionally that it would be impossible for them as long as they are in that state to be able to raise their precious babies!
The reality in all of this is that we human beings need true, God-given therapeutic family education, to help people understand the eternal principles (laws) of familial responsibility and stewardship through learning how to love and have compassion one for another. This is what we need to be taught on an international level instead of the new world order anti-Christ, anti-responsibility anti-family garbage they spew out in public-government agency school systems!
Adopting children out in these instances is COURAGEOUS LOVE not the motherly abuse it seems that you accuse them of! Mothers who have no idea and/or see no feasible way to extricate themselves from those abusive relationships but find adoption to be the only possible way to protect and preserve the lives of their precious little ones!
What you are doing here in your extreme areas of thinking is providing FODDER for rapists and abusers throughout the abortion kingdom to continue to proclaim that abortion is somehow a more “compassionate” alternative because their child’s suffering would be prevented because you, an adoptee says that adoption is the ultimate form of child abuse!
Legal custodial guardianship protects the child’s right to her name, her birth certificate, her siblings, her extended family. Adoption removes a child’s natural born identity. Adoption revokes and seals and replaces her birth certificate with a false-fact birth certificate that fictitiously states that the child was sired and birthed by two people who were not there at the moment of conception and they were not responsible for the child’s birth. Adoption prevents the child from knowing her parents and siblings.
Adoption is NEVER vital! Removing a child from harm IS vital. Providing a safe home in foster care or guardianship or kinship care is much preferred over adoption’s total and permanent violations of the child’s rights.
Abortion is the Christian idea of child abuse. In many cases, abortion is needed, especially when a woman is pregnant with a non-viable baby that is malformed.
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I must remind you that I am a social worker. I know perfectly well that there are unstable mothers and fathers as well as those who cannot take care of themselves, let alone a baby. I will repeat: kinship care and guardianship protect the child’s rights to her own family, her name, her birth certificate.
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I am an ethical atheist. There are plenty of us out there! There are no “god-given” anything that I abide by. Humans are most important, not your god.
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Wow, talk about your extreme areas of thinking! Ha! You make me laugh.
I love what you wrote! I posted a reply to her reply but she has not allowed it to post. The reference to Led Zepplin is that she took their graphic from their fourth album as her website logo. This is it i cross posted it on the adoption facebook page i belong to:
Marilynn Huff shared a link.
Conversation Starter · November 12 at 6:48 PM
Led Zepplin IV graphic Adoption Lady comments open – my reply longwinded to her reply on the topic of anti-adoption:
“I want to thank you for being willing to discuss what it means to be anti adoption. I feel you’re concern for the ones you adopted and do understand that your goal is just to do a great job of raising them. I also get that you don’t want the people you adopt to grow up to be people who are against adoption. You don’t want for them to feel they lost out by being raised by you. I have great news and bad news. It’s almost certain that they will become adults who are against adoption. The good news is it won’t have anything to do with how you or your spouse behaved while raising them. You are not the author of the adoption laws that placed your names as their parents on a falsified birth certificate that would hold them hostage the rest of their lives. You did not author the laws that obliterated their right to financial support from their parents, their right to inherit from and through them or their rights to military and social security death benefits should their parents pass prior to their 18th birthdays. You did not write the laws that annhilated their legal kinship within their own families, their right to their relatives birth, marriage and death certificates, their rights to berevement leave or their right to claim a disabled relative as a dependent on their taxes, or their right to sponsor foreign relatives for citizinship, You did not author the laws of adoption that sequester and concelal them from their relatives so that they run the risk of themselves or their offspring reproducing with relatives closer than the third degree. As long as you can say that you would gladly have served as their guardians with no desire to be referred to as their parents, then you have nothing to worry about if the people you adopted grow up to be among the millions of adopted people who are adamently vehimently against adoption in all circumstances. You have to realize that adoption in its current legal form is never necessary. Guardians can do everything parents are supposed to do without the parental title and without legally superseding and replacing the person’s parents which obviously legally changes everything about the person whose being adopted. You say that you love the people you adopted and if you do that means you love them as they are for who they are not who you want them to be or who you might become if they had beenyour children rather than someone else’s. You have to not want to be their “mother” because wanting to be their “mother” erases everything they are as human beings, all their rights and their whole identity. It is not possible to be the child of two different women. The issue with anti adoption is identifying people by who raised them rather than who made them because its is identity theft.. As long as you are not guilty of wanting to steal their identity by claiming to be their mother they won’t be able to call you selfish and any anti adoption feelings will be focused on the law not you and not your husband.
You can be open and communicative with their parents all you want, that just makes you a nice person The extent to which you participate in the falsification of their identity is going to be the real test of whether your actions play a roll in their future anti adoption opinions. Look if your birth certificate was falsified and your identity and rights were reduced and transferred to some family that raised you because they did the work of raising you and you had to pay for their effort by loosing the truth of who you are wouldn’t you be pissed off? Even if those people were super nice to you? You did not ask them to be nice to you. You were a kid you had needs to be met and they met them and how unfair would it seem that you had to pay them back for the rest of your life by calling them mom and dad and by not having your real name and real identity and rights within your own family? Why should a person have to loose everything they are just because their parents fkd up and can’t raise them? It’s not their fault their parents are struggling with illness addiction or an abusive nature. Anti adoption is pro parental obligation and pro equal rights. If you want to talk about the anti adoption movement you have to acknowledge that the anti-adoption position is that guardianship is the alternative to adoption when parents can’t be trusted to raise their own young. The reason is that their young’s rights are left intact and that if their parents ever pull their acts together sufficiently to take care of their young they will have to do so. Nobody should remain with a guardian unless its absolutely necessary for their safety. If the parents were terribly young or in school or were addicted or sick the need for guardianship ends when those problems are resolved or grown out of. Current adoption laws worry too much about the heartbreak of the people who adopt if they invested a bunch of time and money in raising an adopted person for several years only to have to hand them over to a parent who finally gets their act together but the truth is that the need for the adoption ended and so should the adoption because it was never supposed to be about the people who are adopting it was supposed to be about meeting the needs of a child whose parents were incapable of doing so. Current adoption laws are written for fear that nobody would adopt or be a guardian if they thought that the parents would come back for their children once their problems were resolved. Therein lies the resentment, hatred, and emotional element of anti adoption. That forced separation only to satisfy the hearts and feelings of those willing to do the heavy lifting of parenthood while the actual parents find themselves, grow up, get well etc. Imagine the resentment that exists when the reason the adoption occurred is completed and they can’t have their parents or child back. That is the emotional side of it unrelated to law. If the parents are willing and able to raise their kids and its prevented to make the people who adopted happy then that is the basis for any venom and anger you read about. Avoid being party to that and you’ll be OK. Yes love can make a family but love can’t erase a family. You would not miss the kids your raising if you had not raised them but their family will miss them regardless because they miss who they really are for who they really are. Nobody else would do for them and for the adoptive party anyone else would have done because their love is based on who they groom them to become, not who they are for real. That may be hard to wrap a brain around but the first time an adopted person is loved for who they truly are is the first time they meet a relative who says they never stopped loving them even though they had no idea who they’d become.
I tried reading the article, but couldn’t get past the second paragraph when the author used the terms “expectant” and birth mother” interchangeably.
Right, Mirah. Modern adoption has morphed into this strange entity in which adopters and wanna-bees use language that diminishes motherhood. It used to be that a mother is a mother until the adoption is finalized. At that point, the mother became relegated to “birthmother” and the adoptress became elevated to “mother.” Now it is the notion that a mother is the vessel through which the only important mother demands to relegate motherhood to pregnancy and birth. Then it’s all about the adopters.
Right Mirah. She’s trying to be so progressive but the child claiming dribbles out like rinse watter from the numb lips of a dental patient who simply has no ability to feel what is happening within themselves and no idea where what’s coming out of their mouth is going to land.
Damn! Marilynn! Wish I had said that! You must put that on a t-shirt to combat the “Paper-Pregnant” slogans that are out there!