Eight facts about adoption from Lorraine Posner Zapin.
1: Infants are not “gifts” to bestow on people who cannot have them.
2: Waiting 10 yrs or 20 or 50 does not entitle one to a baby born to another or make someone more worthy to have that baby.
3: Most natural mothers have been subjected to some form of coercion.
4: When a child is lost to adoption it has NOTHING to do with God.
5: The only reason a baby is lost to adoption is that there is insufficient support of a mother in crisis.
6: The percentage of women who happily surrender an infant, experience no regret and peacefully zip along in life is less than 5 per cent.
7: The concept of an adopted child being “the same as” a natural born child is a myth.
8: Adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Category: Religion and Adoption
My Take on Texas woman who sexually abused adopted daughter, forced her to be surrogate gets 33 years in prison
I’ll let the title and opening paragraphs of this story give you your first impressions:
Texas woman who sexually abused adopted daughter, forced her to be surrogate gets 33 years in prison
Laura Castillo, 33, left, was sentenced to 33 years in prison for forcing her adopted daughter to carry husband Eusebio Castillo’s children. Eusebio is awaiting trial in Bexar County. (Bexar County Jail)
A Texas woman arrested with her husband for subjecting their adopted daughter to more than decade of sexual and emotional abuse has been sentenced to 33 years behind bars.
And this
Alvarado, now 28, told police the couple had been abusing her since she 9 years old. Around that time, she’d been taken away form her alcoholic mother to live with her relatives on an Army base in Hawaii. The Castillos would go on to legally adopt her.
In an interview with San Antonio-Express News, Alvarado recalled how Eusebio would climb into her bed and molest her in the middle of the night. When she turned 13, he started to rape her, she said.
Castillo initially dismissed the girl’s abuse allegations and would go to participate in forced threesomes with Alvarado and her husband, the victim recalled. The ongoing assaults resulted in three children, all of who were raised to believe Alvarado was their older sister, not their mother.
You can read the full article for the other details.
Now for what’s missing.
How were the births handled? Did Abigail Alvarado go in to the hospital alone to give birth? Did she name the father? Did she insist that the father is unknown? Was the young mother threatened by her adopters, Laura and Eusebio Castillo, to tell lies to the doctors as she gave birth, and on the children’s birth certificates?
The birth certificates of these three children should state the truth, if not naming the father, then the mother – the real birthing mother. If those children continued to believe the story that the older woman was their mother, by the time they become young adults and their birth certificates become known to them, they would discover the truth of who is their real mother.
And then there is DNA and medical necessity.
Then there is the age factor. Laura Castillo is 33 years old. Her adopted niece is now 28. That’s a close age range for someone so young to adopt a 9 year old child. That would have made Laura Castillo 15 years old when she and her older husband, Eusebio, adopted the niece of one of them. Which one is the biological aunt or uncle – Laura or Eusebio? How old is Eusebio?
But back to DNA. This case proves my idea that DNA testing of an infant at birth should become mandatory law – not mere hospital policy – but State and Federal law. If mandatory DNA testing is done on every infant born, then the identities of the mother, and father, will be confirmed.
But hold on. As I wrote this blog post earlier this morning, a friend in adoption reform called me about something else. I brought this situation to her attention. She told me that pharmaceutical companies own the DNA people willing give to online companies to trace DNA to provide information on from where a person’s ancestors originated, and to provide connections to close genetic relatives.
I did not know that our private DNA is not our own. I did not know that Big Pharma claims they own the DNA of individuals.
While I’m trying to settle that shock, I’d like to know the rest of this story.
Is the mother still the mother of her children, or did the State remove these children into foster care?
Are the victims (Abigail Alvarado and her three children) of these two master-minds of depravity (Laura and Eusebio Castillo) provided with therapy free of charge? Are the therapists competent?
The young mother, Abigail Alvarado, certainly needs help to cope, but her three children do as well. They will have to deal with this for the rest of their lives.
This will affect future generations, too – medically, socially, psychologically, emotionally and perhaps financially.
Another thought: Gotta love the role religion played in this. How ignorant people must be to believe such ridiculous crap as the dribble coming from the mouths of two people who started a church in their back yard? Who would believe that the first-born child is a healer? And who would be stupid enough to donate thousands of dollars to this church who uses a child in this way?
The family moved to Texas in 2001 before settling in San Antonio, where they established the St. Peregrine Chapel behind their home. They solicited thousands in donations from those who believed Alvarado’s first-born was a healer. … They duped dozens of people into believing the little girl was a “Miracle Child” with the power to cure cancer.
Obviously not much education, or common sense, in this community at all.
Is this entire situation the result of uneducated people, and/or the result of mental illness?
To me, this tragic situation is more evidence that adoption distorts people’s already twisted minds. If their niece at age 9 needed a home to be safe from her alcoholic mother, then there should have been safeguards to allow only temporary legal custodial guardianship. This would also include visitation with and knowledge of her mother.
It is unclear from the scant details if 28 year old Abigail Alvarado’s mother was able to become sober from alcohol and if she is in contact with her now adult daughter and her three grandchildren.
The whole thing is a sham from the start.
On that note, I’m wondering about the now-28 year old adopted daughter’s real birth certificate. Her name appears to not have been changed upon adoption. This is unusual. Was her birth certificate confiscated and revoked, sealed, and then replaced to name her adopters as if they actually conceived and birthed her? This is what happens, by law, in adoption. Did the adopters allow her to keep her own name while the State carried out the law to replace her birth certificate with a false one? That is what happens in adoption. The new, amended – falsified – birth certificate is proof that these court-appointed guardians are assigned as legal parents. But you wouldn’t know they were legally signed because the falsified birth certificate names them as parents by birth.
What does this lie do to the minds of people who adopt – especially ones with already twisted minds? These lies on a false-fact amended birth certificate perpetuates the belief that someone else’s daughter magically became their own child. The adopted niece not only has a false identity as the biological daughter of her adopters, this was an in-family adoption, so this means that her three children also have false identities as well. This is because their mother’s identity was officially falsified. If she were allowed to keep her full original name (and that seems to be the case), her parents’ names are falsified on the amended birth certificate issued after adoption. Therefore, the father of the children is factually Eusebio Castillo, but legally he is their grandfather. And, depending on who is the blood relative (Laura or Eusebio, the aunt or uncle by blood, one of the pair is the biological aunt or biological uncle of the adopted daughter/niece. This makes one of them the biological great aunt and uncle of the three young children.
If you are having trouble following this, so am I. If I somehow have managed to incorrectly map-out the relationships, will someone from my readership correct me?
I think you can see my point. Adoption distorted this family’s perception as to who is who in their rightful place on the family tree. A therapist will need to help them diagram this out on paper.
Problems started in this extended family long before this adoption and before its twisted forced rape and surrogacy occurred. Treatment for alcoholism in the 28 year old’s mother, temporary separation of mother and child may or may not have been warranted (not enough information here), but certainly, family reunification should have been the first priority.
The second priority should have been to prevent compounding the problem by allowing this adoption.
Then, if legal custodial guardianship was, in fact, needed, then safeguards should have been put into place to protect the now-28 year old niece from further harm. Did anyone conduct a home study on these two adopters before finalizing this adoption?
There is no remedy here. Prison time will only remedy the crimes. The victims will be addressing these issues imposed upon them for the rest of their lives.
The situation provides more evidence that Adoption Must Be Prevented.
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My Response to Marci Auld Glass’s “Adopting a Child Mirrors God’s Adoption of Us All”
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 5th 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.
FORBIDDEN FAMILY 