Category: Adoption Trauma

Quick Words of My Own: The Message is More Important than Who Writes It

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Haiti's Orphans, International Adoption, Race and Adoption

While I have been unable to find my own words since the earthquake in Haiti because suddenly there are orphans, orphans, everywhere orphans, or so-called orphans, I have found comfort in the words of others. This is why I have directed my readers to other bloggers who have written about the adopt-an-orphan craze that is sweeping America and parts of the world.

At the time the earthquake hit, I’m dealing with medical, legal, financial and emotional fallout from my adoptive mother in and out of the hospital and nursing home. I should be on top of the world — the book I spent the better part of the last seven years writing is now published! Instead, I’m sunk in depression.

Also, it just so happened that a few of my online friends have had inspirations, but with  no blogs of their own, they have asked me to guest-post their works. I am happy to do so.

And, to my surprise, another avenue of correspondence led to yet more postings from afar: the United Adoptees International, a worldwide adoptees news group, sent me Press Releases to post on my blog. Many of my readers are adoptees and first parents who circulate through our known blogs and websites, and, many of my readers are adoptive parent organizations who do not want adoptees’ birth records open to us, and who are foaming at the mouth to adopt those poor Haitian orphans who actually want to stay in their own home country with their families. So, as a comfort to me, and as a service to those who have asked me to post their material, I have posted material from others.

The United Adoptees International, based in The Hague, The Netherlands, is especially dear to me. I will close this quickly written post with this quote from an email  received this morning from the media director:  “… is ok to post our messages on your blog. The more people read our signals the better.” Usually, my correspondence is with the Director of the UAI, but as he was out of office, I corresponded with someone else.

The messages are clear and direct: while do-gooder people have the intention to help Haiti or other poor countries by taking their children to a “better” place with more money, etc, those foreign-born adoptees grow up and feel isolated from their homeland. It is far more important for the message to get out and to be read by people I know are reading my blog because they don’t like the messages here, than for me to have long stretches of time between my own posts. Writers do have other obligations in life so I am happy to post the words of others in between my own works. As the owner of the website and blog, that is my choice.

Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.

Intercountry Adoption Highly Regarded by American Public Even as Numbers of Adoptions are in Free-Fall

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Haiti's Orphans, International Adoption, Race and Adoption3 Comments

Many of you may be wondering why I, a half orphan, am not commenting much about the situation in Haiti. The reason is because this hits too close to my heart. Unlike most of the talk of adoption in America that surrounds the morality or immorality about the ‘sins’ of unwed mothers and how we ‘must’ keep birth records closed to adoptees for the sake of protecting those not-married mothers, real discussion concerning half orphans and full orphans has been lost inside this moralistic mockery. I’m tired of being lumped into this adoption abyss that does not pertain to how I came into this world. But now, orphanhood or the assumption of full orphanhood, is being tossed around just as carelessly as illegitimacy has been, and still is. I find it difficult to find words to defend the rights of other children who face the same fate as I did because their parents have died in the earthquake, or their parents just handed them over because the poverty suffered in their homeland outweighed any rational decisions.

Many other adoption reformers are doing a much better job in research and writing about the children of Haiti, so I bow to their excellent voices. The Daily Basdardette: http://bastardette.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-jorge-pulleo-really-jewish.html, 73adoptee: http://73adoptee.blogspot.com/2010/02/will-haiti-incident-reform-adoption.html, Baby Love Child: http://www.babylovechild.org/2010/02/17/haiti-fails-its-children-releases-8-child-scavengers-on-nothing-more-than-their-worthless-word/, Family Preservation: http://familypreservation.blogspot.com/2010/02/scary-libertarian-view-of-adoption.html, and First Mothers: http://www.firstmotherforum.com/2010/02/lets-hear-it-for-haitian-government.html, to name a few, have many blog posts and updates, so be sure to follow them.

My email inbox carries correspondence from United Adoptees International to an Adoption Advocate organization called Chances For Children. Please read this letter so you may become more aware of what grown adoptees actually feel about being adopted. (edited with the author’s permission and instruction, although I left in European spelling).

Joan M Wheeler

~ ~ ~ ~  

Friday, February 12, 2010, 5:11 AM

Intercountry Adoption Highly Regarded by American Public Even as Numbers of Adoptions are in Free-Fall

To:

Chances for Children

Dear Adoption Advocates,

We have been referred to your organisations by several articles send to us by different contacts around the world. We would like to inform you, that there are many organisations run and managed by adult adoptees who are not sharing your opinion and visions.

Besides this, we would like to request you be respectful but with exclamation to be careful to rewrite topics like adoptions as last resort as you did on your website. The impact of such statements is devastating for ‘family preservation’ projects and alternative family care.

Adoption has become and industry and it seems that your statements about intercountry adoptions seem to support this development. United Adoptees International and many of our contacts would like you to consider equality and support for women and families all around the world before adoption comes into perspective as a misguided concept of humanitarian aid. Huge flaws in international laws and treaties are thus created which abuse the human rights of vulnerable families and children.

Many researches around the world show the great danger of ‘child trafficking’ for adoption instead of supporting long term solutions for countries and families. Adoption has become a facility for ‘wish parents’ (PAP’s, or Pre-Adoptive Parents) and the world of consumers while it was meant as an option for children without families and local support. Approximately 2 billion euro per year is going around to support the adoption cycle. With this money all children, families and countries could have been helped to develop long term solutions for the ones in need. But as long the international adoption lobby is marketing adoption as solutions for children (many of them still have families or direct relatives) without material welfare and finance, we take advantage of the weak and abuse the context and situation in which they are confronted with, instead of understanding the need of the people in those countries who are affected by poverty, natural disasters, and war, etc.

The UAI finds the way international adoption is set up and continued as one-way traffic which makes the rich buyers or traders of the poor. And if we really believe that material welfare and finance gives us the right to get the children we want, than let us open the whole world as a free adoption market and exchange children for those who can afford them. Meaning, Dutch homosexuals already adopt (mainly colored children) from the US, while the US doesn’t want them. At least, that’s what the US advocates and government accepts as an argument to let children from the US go to the Netherlands. But why do US pre-adoptive parents adopt from Haiti now?

In the meanwhile, thousands of prospective US adoptive parents are waiting for white babies from Europe and the EU is opening their EU boarders for exchanging children within Europe. But we are sure, that if the US PAP’s (Pre-Adoptive Parents) will pay enough money, they will be able to get white children (who have still parents and family in the EU) from Europe. So let us open the whole world for the demand for adoption?

Is this what your people and organisation really want? Or would you be able to act in an ethical way, and with dignity, and open heart and ears, to those who have been affected by this child-caravan called adoption?

We urge you to read some statements from Adult Adoptees and reconsider your vision and tone of voice in this topic.

Sincerely,

Hilbrand W.S. Westra

Chairman UNITED ADOPTEES INTERNATIONAL

United Adoptees International is registered by the Chamber of Commerce under no. 34299425, in Amsterdam – The Netherlands. The UAI foundation is applicable under Dutch Law and refers in all her activities to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Especially articles 8, 16, 20 and 21. The UAI strives for equality and justicefor adoptees and human dignity to all whom are affected by separation and adoption.

From UAI: Coloured Kids Not Welcome in the US?

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Systems, Haiti's Orphans, International Adoption, Race and Adoption

World is being deceived ?

Coloured kids not welcome in the US ?

While the Homolobby and the involved Adoption Agency in the Netherlands made clear last year, that the urgency is there to adopt coloured children from the US while they are not adoptable within US boarders, the US is lifting hundreds to thousands coloured children from Haiti right now.

The Dutch government and public were convinced that the necessity was there to enhance and extend US adoptions to the Netherlands in the interest of the children of colour.

No government ever demanded a thorough research nor included the opinion from adoptees of colour unless they supported the voice of adopters.

Neo Colonialism ?

It is a strange world where everyone forgot to look to the (natural) parents and adoptees and their needs. Instead, they keep the supply of children circulating as long the children are not theirs. And at the end, it looks that, the more colour you have, the easier the availability of these children for intercountry adoption exists.

If the conclusion is correct, than the long avoided debate about ‘possession’ and ‘power of decision’ by one part of the world colour ruling and deciding about other people of colour should raise questions. Some adoptees already wrote about mechanisms of neo-colonialism. To push the intercountry adoption issue towards this topic seems to be harsh and extreme, but it becomes day by day more difficult not to raise this question.

The hunt for children

With knowing all this and peace-corps and student recruiters scattered around the world to find new coloured children for the west, the question should be raised now; how valid are the adoptions from western countries based on colour ?.

Until now, no government has ever answered this question. But should it not become time now, the world should raise this question ?

United Adoptees International © 2010

Guest Post – Kinship Bonds, Adoption and Discrimination

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Trauma, Family Systems, Genealogy, Reunions are not bad
Kinship bonds cannot be diluted by the sealed original birth certificate. States began passing laws forbidding marriage between those males and females who were bound by close family ties such as father/daughter, mother/son, brother/sister, and first cousin/first cousin. The reason  given was that it was more likely that undesirable traits would be passed on to the resulting offspring between closely related parents. While the genes were not always recessive, these inherited DNA traits were not to be desired…. Any adopted persons, now adult age, have no evidence of existing kinship bonds to anyone whom they  would meet and could marry – – if their adoption was finalized in a state whose adoption records, including the original birth certificate, is sealed for life. Thus, it is legal for any of them to marry kin even though the law of the land forbids this – – for good reason (to protect the offspring). Adopted persons who live under this condition of the sealed record/original birth certificate, for a lifetime, are defined by the law, by implication,  of having a separate status. The blood tie is simply not in existance for them. Separated from the rest of the non-adopted population, these adults suffer discrimination.
 
Mary L. Foess
AAC, CUB, ORIGINS,Am-FOR, A.I.M, Truths in Adoption Triad, and Bonding by Blood, Unlimited

Racist Comments on Haiti Prompt Re-Post of Statement by Adoptees of Color Roundtable

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Haiti's Orphans

As the title of this blog post states, some very rude and ignorant racial slurs were left in my inbox this past weekend. I have closed all sections to Comments as a result. Also, though I am of mixed white ethnic groups, I fully support adoptees of color. Here is a re-print of their excellent statement on adopting Haiti’s earthquake victim children:

http://www.adopteesofcolor.org/?page_id=14

Statement on Haiti

Jan 25, 2010

This statement reflects the position of an international community of adoptees of color who wish to pose a critical intervention in the discourse and actions affecting the child victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We are domestic and international adoptees with many years of research and both personal and professional experience in adoption studies and activism. We are a community of scholars, activists, professors, artists, lawyers, social workers and health care workers who speak with the knowledge that North Americans and Europeans are lining up to adopt the “orphaned children” of the Haitian earthquake, and who feel compelled to voice our opinion about what it means to be “saved” or “rescued” through adoption.

We understand that in a time of crisis there is a tendency to want to act quickly to support those considered the most vulnerable and directly affected, including children. However, we urge caution in determining how best to help. We have arrived at a time when the licenses of adoption agencies in various countries are being reviewed for the widespread practice of misrepresenting the social histories of children. There is evidence of the production of documents stating that a child is “available for adoption” based on a legal “paper” and not literal orphaning as seen in recent cases of intercountry adoption of children from Malawi, Guatemala, South Korea and China. We bear testimony to the ways in which the intercountry adoption industry has profited from and reinforced neo-liberal structural adjustment policies, aid dependency, population control policies, unsustainable development, corruption, and child trafficking.

For more than fifty years “orphaned children” have been shipped from areas of war, natural disasters, and poverty to supposedly better lives in Europe and North America. Our adoptions from Vietnam, South Korea, Guatemala and many other countries are no different from what is happening to the children of Haiti today. Like us, these “disaster orphans” will grow into adulthood and begin to grasp the magnitude of the abuse, fraud, negligence, suffering, and deprivation of human rights involved in their displacements.

We uphold that Haitian children have a right to a family and a history that is their own and that Haitians themselves have a right to determine what happens to their own children. We resist the racist, colonialist mentality that positions the Western nuclear family as superior to other conceptions of family, and we seek to challenge those who abuse the phrase “Every child deserves a family”  to rethink how this phrase is used to justify the removal of children from Haiti for the fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Western and Northern desire for ownership of Haitian children directly contributes to the destruction of existing family and community structures in Haiti. This individualistic desire is supported by the historical and global anti-African sentiment which negates the validity of black mothers and fathers and condones the separation of black children from their families, cultures, and countries of origin.

As adoptees of color many of us have inherited a history of dubious adoptions. We are dismayed to hear that Haitian adoptions may be “fast-tracked” due to the massive destruction of buildings in Haiti that hold important records and documents. We oppose this plan and argue that the loss of records requires slowing down of the processes of adoption while important information is gathered and re-documented for these children. Removing children from Haiti without proper documentation and without proper reunification efforts is a violation of their basic human rights and leaves any family members who may be searching for them with no recourse. We insist on the absolute necessity of taking the time required to conduct a thorough search, and we support an expanded set of methods for creating these records, including recording oral histories.

We urge the international community to remember that the children in question have suffered the overwhelming trauma of the earthquake and separation from their loved ones. We have learned first-hand that adoption (domestic or intercountry) itself as a process forces children to negate their true feelings of grief, anger, pain or loss, and to assimilate to meet the desires and expectations of strangers. Immediate removal of traumatized children for adoption—including children whose adoptions were finalized prior to the quake— compounds their trauma, and denies their right to mourn and heal with the support of their community.

We affirm the spirit of Cultural Sovereignty, Sovereignty and Self-determination embodied as rights for all peoples to determine their own economic, social and cultural development included in the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the Charter of the United Nations; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The mobilization of European and North American courts, legislative bodies, and social work practices to implement forced removal through intercountry adoption is a direct challenge to cultural sovereignty. We support the legal and policy application of cultural rights such as rights to language, rights to ways of being/religion, collective existence, and a representation of Haiti’s histories and existence using Haiti’s own terms.

We offer this statement in solidarity with the people of Haiti and with all those who are seeking ways to intentionally support the long-term sustainability and self-determination of the Haitian people. As adoptees of color we bear a unique understanding of the trauma, and the sense of loss and abandonment that are part of the adoptee experience, and we demand that our voices be heard. All adoptions from Haiti must be stopped and all efforts to help children be refocused on giving aid to organizations working toward family reunification and caring for children in their own communities. We urge you to join us in supporting Haitian children’s rights to life, survival, and development within their own families and communities.

……………….

49 Comments follow on their website: http://www.adopteesofcolor.org/?p=6#respond

This one is my favorite:

“Comment by Leanne Leith — January 27, 2010 at 12:20 am”  

“Acts of benevolence by the color-blind privileged add yet another layer of violence to the personhood of vulnerable little people, compounding their losses. The redistribution of children of color is rooted in the marginalization of ethnic groups and the propensity to make fetish objects of their children. It is no charity to exploit a time of tragedy – or any time – to take a nation’s most valuable resource for personal gain.

It is a sad statement when those that capitalize on tragedy pat themselves on the back for their charity. The truly charitable would offer to help victims to help themselves. This feeding frenzy we are witnessing today by would-be child importers truly reveals the darkest aspects of man’s ability to rationalize the ugliest of acts.

It’s high time we respect the humanity of all peoples by preserving families and allowing them the dignity to build their own strong societies without the intervention of self-interested parties. THAT would be the action of an enlightened, advanced, civil society.”

And this one is second runner-up:

Comment by United Adoptees International — January 26, 2010 at 9:10 am  

“…It is time that Adoptees all over the world become active and participate in the international and national adoptiondebate at all levels of society and decision making government bodies and show that the time of Infantilization and the monopoly on adoption by adopters and their politics is over.

The adoption triangle starts with the (intersts of) parents, not the adopters. It seems that everyone in the adoption debate forgot that. Including the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption.

We can change the world. Not by sitting down and wait, but to feel the power flowing within in us and everyone who is capable to understand what is really going on.”

 

Haiti tragedy, adoptions

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Haiti's Orphans

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=125&article=67740

 

Haiti tragedy, adoptions

Stars and Stripes
Letters to the Editor, Wednesday, February 3, 2010

The New Jersey adoption community is not too surprised that an adoption agency may have skirted the laws to acquire healthy babies from Haiti (“Americans arrested on human trafficking suspicions,” article, Feb. 1). This particular organization is seemingly following (White House Chief of Staff) Rahm Emanuel’s motto, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

Agencies are no longer seeking adoptive parents but are rather seeking babies for desperate and sometimes high-paying couples.

Profit motive and secrecy will continue to plague adoption, but at least the American culture has evolved a bit. We no longer separate child from mother simply because the mother is unwed, a practice made popular by the Catholic Church. Today, it takes inhumane governments like that of China, or a natural disaster like in Haiti to grease the adoption machine and create a pool of adoptable infants. Some unethical brokers of adoption hardly care about the source of babies and some, like the New Jersey Bar Association, desperately fight to keep secrecy in adoption.

This only serves as a reminder that although the culture and practice may have changed, archaic laws from the 1940s still rule, placing biological families and their children at an unfair disadvantage.

Army Reserve Capt. Peter W. Franklin
AdopteesWithOutLiberty.com (AWOL)
Haskell, N.J.

California’s Relative CareGiver Law Recognizes Guardianship Over Adoption by Non Family Members

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems4 Comments

Even though this was made public in 2007, this bit of legislation – now is California Law – has just come to my attention (bold emphasis added): 

 CALIFORNIA STATUTE PUTS EMPHASIS ON PLACEMENT WITH EXTENDED FAMILY

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed the Relative Caregiver Bill (AB298) into law, allowing foster children greater access to permanent placement with extended family members. The statute allows for extended family members to be given legal guardianship as a preference over adoption by non-family members. In addition, the law – enacted in October – requires relative caregivers to be given information regarding the options of legal guardianship and adoption, including the long-term benefits and consequences of each option. To read the law, go to: http://www.legislat ure.ca.gov/ port-bilinfo. html and search by bill number.

            When I searched for the Bill under the above number, I could not find it. Fellow adoption reformer, Cully Ray, confirmed the correct Bill name and number to be Relative Caregiver Bill AB12 (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_0001-0050/ab_12_bill_20100128_history.html).  

             There have been recent amendments made to his law (269 pages can be found at: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_0001-0050/ab_12_bill_20100125_amended_asm_v95.pdf).

            There is even a newsletter. Again, I am late to this, but the information, though late to me, is valuable: Kinship Quaterly: A Resource Newsletter for Relative Caregivers in LA County Written by Relative Caregivers in LA County (PDF – Issue 1 Vol 1 Year 1).   http://dcfs.lacounty.gov/kinshippublic/documents/kinshipquarterlyvol1.pdf.
            This is hope for the children NOW who are faced with temporary family crisis of poverty, job or home loss, parental death of one or parents, or foster care placement, to not only stay together as a sibling group and a family, but to have the decency and respect of care-giving adults to acknowledge that a child’s family of birth comes before ANY consideration of coerced relinquishment to adoption, ANY “placement” for adoption, and that LEGAL GUARDIANSHIP is preferred BY LAW before adoption by a stranger is even considered.
            Imagine that: human compassion, respect, dignity for children who suffer family stress and loss, especially children who have lost one or both parents by death. Real, domestic, half and full orphans in California (USA) from the legal separation by adoption, and protected from the seizure and seal of their birth certificates, and protected from the falsification of facts on a “new” and “amended” birth certificate issued upon the finalization of every adoption.
              If the adults involved in coercing my father (in 1956) into relinquishing me, a newborn infant, to a closed adoption of distant relatives of my deceased mother, had been faced with a law to prevent such coercion, I would have been raised perhaps by my father, or by the distant cousin and his wife who actually adopted me — in a totally open and honest relationship with my father and my siblings.
             Instead, the resulting trauma of losing my mother of birth to her early death was compounded by my loss of my father and my full blood siblings because people thought that they were doing the right thing by: taking me off of my father’s already full plate of worry and obligation, giving me to a loving married couple who were childless for the first 18 years of their married life.
            My idylic childhood of 18 years as the only child of these loving parents in no way is a fair trade-off of the losses I, and my siblings and our father, had to endure for the sake of closed adoption. The love of my adoptive parents and most of my extended adoptive family, was conditional: I was never to know I had siblings, or blood kin, living in the same city. And to be socially shunned and mocked because because I accepted a reunion with my natural family…to this very day…
            Thank you, California, for officially recognizing the sanctity of a child’s family and birth identity.
           Added Information: NOTE — Bill number is AB 12, not AB 298:
           http://www.actnowinc.net/AMUSTREAD.html

ASSEMBLY- MAZE BILL AB 298

ASSEMBLYMAN Bill Maze, R-Visalia, has heard too many disturbing stories about relative caregivers being “strong armed” by social workers to either adopt a child — or risk having him or her taken away.

It’s not right.

“Relative caregivers should be our first line of placement,” said Maze.

The source of these horror stories is no mystery. California judges who are determining the fate of a child are guided by state law to give preference to adoption by a stranger over guardianship by a relative. Also, the federal government rewards the state with a $4,000 incentive payment for each adoption of a foster child above a baseline rate.

“Given the difficult task of finding adoptive homes for the many foster children who do not have a relative caregiver, it is hard to understand why we would want to threaten to remove a child rather than accepting a relative guardianship as a permanent plan and placement … yet existing law allows this exact scenario to arise on a daily basis,” the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles, which represents 20,000 abused and neglected youth, wrote in a recent letter to Maze.

As the law center noted, there are many reasons why a relative caregiver may prefer legal guardianship over adoption. “A grandmother or aunt might view adoption as ‘taking the child away’ from her own daughter or sister,” the law center wrote.

The law center is leading the push for Maze’s AB298, which would adjust state law to make clear that a child living with a relative guardian should be allowed to stay in that home when possible. The best interest of the child should be the guiding principle of these often excruciatingly tough custody decisions — and AB298 helps advance that goal.

 
           

Call for Signatures — Letter to President Obama, et al, From Family Preservation Advocate and The USA Adoption Community

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Haiti's Orphans, True Birth Certificate for Donor-Conceived

Re-post with permission from Family Preservation Advocate Blogspot, at: 

http://familypreservation.blogspot.com/2010/01/call-for-signatures.html

Saturday, January 30, 2010

 Call for Signatures

 I am hoping to get individuals and organizations to sign on to this letter. 

To sign, please send an email to email@AdvocatePublications.com with your name, connection to adoption, location and a brief comment, if you’d like.  Please pass the word via email lists, blogs, Facebook…

TO:        President Barack Obama
              First Lady Michelle Obama
              Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton
              Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius

RE:        Adoption Practices

FROM: The Adoption Community

Now that Haiti has declared a moratorium on the post quake rush to adopt its children, we must continue to protect the Haitian children from any continued hasty removals by predatory groups who might fly in once the airports re-open to scoop up children, no matter how well-intentioned, as we reflect on the course of future adoption practices.

Those of us whose lives have been irrevocably shaped by adoption offer our personal insight and ask you to listen to our voices and painfully gained wisdom. Adoption can provide a caring and safe home, but must always put the best interests of children first. Adoption should always be about finding homes for orphans and children who have no family members able and willing to provide safe care.  Unfortunately it has become more focused on finding babies or children to fill a demand of those able to pay high fees to obtain a child. Thus, for the sake of all children:

* We beseech lawmakers to not be influenced by lobbyists for the multi-billion-dollar adoption industry or by the religiously based organizations and agencies, no matter how well-intentioned, who wish to use the redistribution of children for financial gain or to recruit members of their faith. Follow the advice of child welfare experts and NGOs with no motivation other than what is truly best for children.

 * We call for an end to federal programs that promote and encourage adoption, e.g. tax credits,  Children in foster care are being used as pawns to get such laws enacted and renewed and then be left behind while prospective parents use tax credits to adopt from elsewhere.

 * We encourage the formation of a federal department of Family Preservation that would allocate funds to help families in temporary crisis, whether financial or otherwise, receive the assistance they need to remain intact. Programs such as in-home care have proven highly successful and more cost effective than foster care removals which put children into high risk situations. 

 * We seek federal protection of the constitutional right to parent one’s own children that are currently being violated by state laws such as Putative Father Registries.

 * We insist on restoration of the rights of all adopted persons in regard to the discrimination they face in accessing their own birth certificate. We demand that the Federal government prevent states from issuing falsified birth certificates that state that adopted children are born to their adoptive parents, and that often change not just their names but their date and place of birth. This is state committed fraud and violates the basic right of every human to their identity. 

Signed:

Signed:

1. Mirah Riben, mother who lost a child to adoption, New Jersey

2. Gaye Tannenbaum, New York adoptee

3. Caroline Collins, adult adoptee currently living in Texas

4. Aileen Brown, Mother that lost her baby to the adoption industry at 16 years old and ignorant of the effects adoption would do to herself and lost child, who would like to prevent it from happening to other families, Wisconsin

5. Rosalind Maya Lama, Lost a child to the foster care and adoption industry in New York
currently reside in California

6. Cathi Robinson, Natural Mother, Missouri

7. Roe Ruggerio Callahan, Philadelphia, PA

8. Amanda Woolston, Tennessee Adoptee residing in Pennsylvania

9. Bonnie Taylor, WV. Birthname (Teresa Elaine McKinsey) Born in York PA, adopted in Baltimore, MD Found birthfather (Gary Lee McKinsey-deceased), still searching for birthmother (Juanita Carson-McKinsey-Dunkelbarger-?Brashear).

10. Hannah Hope, natural mother, Essex, UK

11. Amy L. Loring – Lima, NY – Natural Mother

12. Celeste Billhartz, adoptee, Ohio

13. Samantha Franklin, Reunited Adult Adoptee, Oklahoma

14. Janet Sousa,  adoptee and search angel.  Owner of The Eyes Wide Open Registry, an online Emergency Medical Locators for Adoptee’s registry – Tampa, FL

15. Robert Wilson Harrington McCullough Haight, adopted person, Missouri, still denied access to his Original Birth Certificate

16. Lorraine Dusky, reunited natural mother in New York

17. Sandy Blais, Adoptee – Canada – please it is time to stop repeating the mistakes of the past that we should have already learned from.

18. Susan Gill, reunited natural mother, Nebraska

19. Laurie Staley, Michigan adoptee, adoptive mom

20. Alyce M. Jenkins, adoptive mother and adoptive/family rights advocate , NJ

21. Mari Steed, Intercountry adopted adult (Ireland, reunited); Birthmother, Pennsylvania sealed-records system (reunited)

22. Rupert Wolfe Murray

23. Dana Lowrey, adopted person, mother to a son lost to adoption, Reunited with all family members, Roseville California

24. Theresa Hood, Pennsylvania-born adoptee residing in New York, denied access to my original birth certificate

25. Barbara Pasternak, CT. I’m a Mother who had no choice when I lost my son to adoption 50 years ago. An adoptee is not, should not, be a commodity.

26. Bonnie Parmelee, mother to a son relinquished in late 80’s, happily reunited. NY

27. Julie Kelly (reunited adult adoptee) Vancouver WA

28. Lori Trevino, reunited natural mother, Wisconsin

29. Ibbaanika Bond, a natural mother of a child on which an adoption was unsuccessfully attempted.
Kansas City, Mo.

30. Joan M Wheeler, birthname Doris M Sippel, New York Adoptee reunited 36 years,  I’m a half orphan, but sealed and amended birth certificate laws are meant to hide illegitimacy. I did not need to be “legitimized” by adoption. I needed to be raised with full knowledge of, and socialization with, my siblings, and father. Guardianship, not adoption; Family Preservation, not family separation.

31. Mara Rigge, Trinidad, California, Adoptee, Reunited With Natural Mother.

… … … … … …

As the author of this blog, Forbidden Family, and the author of the Book by the same name (see Widget at the Left) in which I state very similar legislative proposals on a Federal Level, I, Joan M Wheeler, suggest to add the following (no, this is not a contest as to who gets the prize for “winning” — this is to say that many of us have been saying the same thing for decades, without being heard). My proposals for Federal Legislation or a Constitutional Amendment are paraphrased from my book:

 –         to the proposed Federal Department of Family Preservation: whether financial or otherwise, Please add: “to protect our own domestic half and full orphans…”

 –         after Putative Fathers Registries, Please add: “and federal guidelines to discourage religious and social service programs (Crisis Pregnancy Centers) that encourage the relinquishment of infants from young mothers.”

 –         after, We seek federal protection of the constitutional right to parent one’s own children, Please add: “We seek federal protection of the constitutional right to our name at birth and our birth certificate at birth, and the right to be raised by our parents with our sibling groups intact.”

 and

–          “We seek federal protection to promote legal Guardianship instead of adoption to protect a child’s right to her name at birth, birth certificate at birth, and the legal right to continued social contact with parents, siblings, and extended family.”

 It might be helpful to add that the Amended Birth Certificate issued at the finalization of adoption should be an Adoption Certificate that details facts of adoption.

Press Release: Layers of Trauma for Haiti’s Orphans: A Webinar featuring Dr. Bruce Perry

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Haiti's Orphans, The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
PLEASE FORWARD TO APPROPRIATE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS
Adam Pertman, Executive Director

Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute

 

 Layers of Trauma for Haiti’s Orphans: A Webinar featuring Dr. Bruce Perry
 
Monday, February 1st, 2010 from 7:00 to 8:00 PM Central Time
(a recorded version will be available subsequently)

 

This free webinar features Bruce D. Perry M.D., Ph.D., the Senior Fellow at The Child Trauma Academy. He will discuss the likely impact of the many traumas children coming home from the orphanages in Haiti have experienced.

The webinar will help prepare families who are now awaiting or have already received placement under the United States’ expedited program.

Dr. Perry will cover the impact of the multiple traumas on this group of kids, explain what parents can expect, and give advice on how they can ease the transition for their child. The webinar will have practical advice for adoptive parents, adoption professionals, and interim caregivers.

Please forward this invitation to any family awaiting a placement from Haiti as well as staff and/or interim caregivers for these children. In order to give priority to families who will benefit the most from this live webinar, we ask that you refrain from inviting those who are just starting to explore the option of adopting from Haiti.

Dr. Perry will address specific trauma-related questions from the audience as time allows. We ask that you submit questions in advance through the registration form.

PLEASE NOTE: this session is intended for those families who were in process of adopting from Haiti prior to the earthquake and are therefore receiving an expedited placement of their child. The Haitian adoption process itself as well as advice for those looking to start the process of adopting from Haiti will not be covered.

This webinar is brought to you by Adoption Learning Partners, the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the Joint Council on International Children’s Services and Heart of the Matter Seminars.

To register, please click the register button below:

click here 

 

Local Woman and Pre-Adoptive Son Survive Earthquake; Boy and 5 Other Orphans Arrive Miami

On By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Genealogy, Haiti's Orphans

Buffalo, New York, USA

1-28-2010

The experience of surviving the earthquake in Haiti is indeed traumatic. I’m glad she and her soon-to-be-adopted-son are alive. They will be coping with that horrendous experience for the rest of their lives.

But that’s not the whole story.

What troubles me is the unsettling details of this boy’s journey from Haiti, to Miami, Florida and then to an undisclosed location, and soon to be in my home town. The pre-adoptive mother is a teacher for a school just down the street from my home. The pre-adoptive father is a lawyer (go figure). They live in a southern suburb of Buffalo.

No indication of where the other 5 children are going when they leave Miami.

One of the Pod-casts below states that there are 254 US families in line to adopt Haitian children. Does this mean these adoptions were already in process? Or are these new families who rushed in immediately after the earthquake?

With all the coverage of adoptions that were in the process before the earthquake, and after, I find this story troubling. Local media sensationalizes and glorifies this couple. Comments of “how wonderful of you to adopt…” and, strangers saying “thank you” to them as if this couple is protecting the larger society’s interests somehow. This just adds more fuel to the fire – to the myths of savior adoptions – that we in the adoption reform community must dispel.

This couple, indeed, had developed a relationship with this three year old boy over the course of several visits and extended time. Links to the pod-casts and newsprint article below tell their story.

It is clear that they had “attached” to each other — not “bonded”as so many people say. Bonding is actually a scientific term. Bonding ONLY happens between a pregnant mother and her child. Bonding is the reciprocal relationship between that mother and her child and NO ONE else. Bonding continues through pregnancy, the birth process, breastfeeding, eye contact, body smells and touch, and continues for about three months. Socialization with the father and other siblings and other family members BEGINS while the infant is in utero as the sense of hearing familiarizes the pre-born infant with voices. Socialization and attachment occur AFTER birth. (Ken Watson, lecture at an American Adoption Congress circa 1989).

So, now, we have a little boy called Geoffrey by his adopting parents. We don’t know anything about his name at birth, the name he went by before his adopting parents came along and spotted him in an orphanage. We don’t know anything about his parents of birth; if he has any siblings nor do we know if he has any extended blood kin family, as in cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Nothing is said about his birth certificate in Haiti. Nothing is said about what the adoption process does to his personal identification papers, or his loss of connection with any of his blood kin family, or his loss of his native culture and language. Instead of being a Haitian citizen, he will now be erroneously be identified as an “African-American” by sight-analysis alone.

It is simply assumed that Geoffrey is his American name.

But what happens with his Haitian birth certificate? Is that placed under seal, as any domestic adoptee’s birth certificate is sealed forever from all domestic adoptees? From what I know about foreign-born adoptees, a “new” birth certificate will be made in his new adoptive name, and his parents of birth will be replaced, legally, by the names of the two people who are adopting him.

Something is wrong with that picture.

Should anyone be allowed to alter the material facts of life for a minor child? This is stealing his right to his name, his country and place of birth, his true blood parentage, and his human right to his name at birth and to his parents and family of birth.

We, in America, still hold onto the myth that adopting parents replace the parents of birth. In reality, they do not.

Other countries, such as The Netherlands, recognize the importance of a child’s birth identity. While the child still loses her legal right to her birth name, and takes on the legal right to be given a new adoptive name, such an exchange is legally documented with an Adoption Certificate, not a NEW “Certificate of Live Birth”, as we do in the United States.

One cannot, or should not, tamper with anyone’s facts of life and papers documenting birth, adoption, marriage, death.

The adoptee must cope with the realities of a dual identity in the face of legal documentation that proves she, or he, has only one set of real parents. The legal paperwork contradicts what each and every adoptee must emotionally deal with every day for the rest of her life after being “rescued” by “wonderful” and “generous” adopting parents.

The United Nations Rights of the Child states:

  • Article 7 (Registration, name, nationality, care): All children have the right to a legally registered name, officially recognised by the government. Children have the right to a nationality (to belong to a country). Children also have the right to know and, as far as possible, to be cared for by their parents.
  • Article 8 (Preservation of identity): Children have the right to an identity – an official record of who they are. Governments should respect children’s right to a name, a nationality and family ties.
  • Article 9 (Separation from parents): Children have the right to live with their parent(s), unless it is bad for them. Children whose parents do not live together have the right to stay in contact with both parents, unless this might hurt the child.
  • Article 10 (Family reunification): Families whose members live in different countries should be allowed to move between those countries so that parents and children can stay in contact, or get back together as a family.
  • Article 11 (Kidnapping): Governments should take steps to stop children being taken out of their own country illegally. This article is particularly concerned with parental abductions. The Convention’s Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography has a provision that concerns abduction for financial gain.
  • Article 16 (Right to privacy): Children have a right to privacy. The law should protect them from attacks against their way of life, their good name, their families and their homes.
  • Article 20 (Children deprived of family environment): Children who cannot be looked after by their own family have a right to special care and must be looked after properly, by people who respect their ethnic group, religion, culture and language.
  • Article 21 (Adoption): Children have the right to care and protection if they are adopted or in foster care. The first concern must be what is best for them. The same rules should apply whether they are adopted in the country where they were born, or if they are taken to live in another country.
  • Article 22 (Refugee children): Children have the right to special protection and help if they are refugees (if they have been forced to leave their home and live in another country), as well as all the rights in this Convention.

It is interesting to note that the United States has NOT ratified the international treaty of The United Nations Rights of the Child. Could it be because we Americans profit by the multi-billion dollar adoption business that deals with the trade of human children from one family to another, from one country to another, without giving FULL consideration and respect due to the rights of the very children Americans are so quick to snatch up?

I urge all people who read this post to read the very important statement issued yesterday by Adoptees of Color Roundtable. This is clearly an appeal by adoptees of different races who oppose the rush to adopt Haiti’s children by white, affluent people. There IS racial discrimination in America, and these Haitian children, whether we want to admit it or not, will face the indignation of racial tensions even with the best of intentions of their adopting parents.

Now, here is the information on the couple from Buffalo, New York (USA) who is in the process of adopting a Haitian toddler:

 Series of 3 NPR Pod-casts tell their story:

 A print story appeared 1-27-2010 in The Buffalo News online, Comments needed.