For the last two days, I’ve been writing in response to a Tweet and a blog post, both referencing a blog post from the pro-life movement.

The Tweet is:

https://twitter.com/adopteelaw/status/1578570380574269441

Not sure how to preface this story other than . And the unseen money behind all of this is mind-boggling. https://t.co/tIWKbeHAEl

— Adoptee Rights Law (@adopteelaw) October 8, 2022

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The adoptee’s blog post begins:

https://theadoptedones.wordpress.com/2022/10/08/in-adoption-loss-never-truly-ends/

In Adoption, Loss Never Truly Ends.

08, OCT, 2022

This morning I woke up to a tweet by @adopteerights.com

A tweet that chilled my soul.

A tweet that foretold the desire by some to make many more babies available for adoption.

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Here is the link to the offending blog post from the pro-life movement:

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/supporting-adoption-in-a-post-dobbs-america/

Supporting adoption in a post-Dobbs America

Article by CHARLIE CAMOSY who interviewed Elizabeth Kirk. She is the director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at the Catholic University Columbus School of Law, where she also teaches family law. She is an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

October 7, 2022.

See the link above to read the full article.

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In response, I wrote my comments in five parts. I signed up for a free registration to the above link to comment.

I expect my comments will be deleted because no one really wants to hear the truth about adoption. The buyers do not want to hear from the product. So, I posted all of my comments here as a back-up, and at the above link as comments at The Adopted Ones Blog.

Part 1

Because society views all adopted people as perpetual children, some adopted adults refer to themselves as “an adopted child”. In this article, Elizabeth, calls herself “an adopted child,” even though she is an adult. “Adopted child” rolls off the tongue easily. One really has to think before speaking, especially about adoption. The correct term is “adult adoptee”. Or, to be more specific, Elizabeth Kirk could say “I was adopted by my step-father when I was a child.”

Elizabeth doesn’t mention anything at all about her biological father. He sired her so he is her father, even though she doesn’t want to admit this fact of her life. Sure, she loves her step-father-turned-adopted-father. I love my adoptive father, too, but to ignore the facts of life is to ignore life itself.

Every single one of us was sired by a father, gestated inside our mother, and birthed by our mother. These are facts.

Adoption is a legal transaction that does not replace birth. These are facts.

And yet, for every single adoption – including the adoption of step-children – the adopted person’s birth certificate is revoked, sealed, and replaced by a false-fact birth certificate that replaces the adoptee’s name of birth with the new name of adoption, and replaces the names of the natural parents with the names of the adoptive parents. This gives the impression that these people gave birth to the re-named child.

This is a denial of the facts of life.

This is lying.

Lying is a sin.

Part 2

Catholics promote advertising through websites that they want to adopt “your baby”. This is trolling for vulnerable women to give up their babies to the possession of adopters to avoid abortion. This is targeting women for their babies. The end result is the destruction of a family for the purpose of owning someone else’s baby. This is also coveting someone else’s baby, which is a sin because coveting someone else’s spouse is a sin.

There is no mention in this article of lifelong trauma imposed on the mothers who relinquish their infants to adoption. And no mention of the fathers, as if they aren’t important. And, conveniently, no mention of ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Why would anyone willingly inflict stressful and traumatizing events on a newborn? Babies feel pre-verbal loss of mother as all-encompassing body and brain trauma. The child grows up in fear, yet doesn’t know why there is lingering anxiety and panic, or unexplained illnesses. The infant given away at birth or as an older baby or as a young child feels this as abandonment, even when adopted by parental care givers who love this child. Adverse Childhood Experiences develop into medical issues or mental health issues later in life. This trauma is also passed down to the adopted person’s children through a process that changes gene expression: epigenetics.

Why would you intentionally cause life-long emotional trauma on babies and children? Why would you want to cause emotional pain for natural mothers and fathers? Or our siblings?

Part 3

I was born the 5^th child to married parents in 1956. My mother died of cancer when I was three months old. A Catholic priest told my father that “the baby needs two parents.” Neither the priest, nor Catholic Charities, offered help to my father to keep our family together. No offering of food, clothes, diapers, child care, or respite care for my father who had to go to work while his older children were in school.

This is not being Christian.

No one in their right mind today would tell a father of a newborn and four older children under the age of 9 to give up his newborn daughter to adoption.

Thirty years after meeting my natural father for the first time, he was recovering from open heart surgery. He sat in a wheel chair when I walked in to his room in a nursing home. He cried, “If someone would have told me what would happen to you, if someone would have told me how to keep you…”

I knelt down in front of him, took his hands in mine, and said, “I never held it against you, Dad. You were in an impossible situation. You were used.”

I loved my natural father, and my natural mother. I also loved my adoptive parents.

The ugliness of adoption is there and must be dealt with. This is a burden I wouldn’t inflict on anyone.

Part 4

In 1956, my name at birth and (Catholic) baptism was Doris Michol Sippel. I carried that name and birth certificate for the first 15 months of my life. I was legally adopted at age of one year and one week, but my birth certificate remained intact for another three months. My Original Birth Certificate was then replaced with a new birth certificate that stated I was born as Joan Mary Wheeler. My natural parents’ names were swapped out and replaced by the names of my adoptive parents, as if they had sired me and birthed me.

In 1959, my adoptive parents asked their lawyer to contact the church in which I was baptized to have a new baptismal certificate issued in my adopted name of Joan Mary Wheeler. The priest wrote up a new baptismal certificate with my new name and the names of my adoptive parents, as if my actual baptism didn’t take place.

The priest lied.

The State Bureau of Vital Statistics lied.

My Catholic adoptive parents lied.

Lying is a sin.

My baptismal certificate was falsified to show proof that I was baptized so that my adoptive parents could send me to Catholic schools.

According to Cannon law, a person can be baptized only once. So, to have a 2^nd baptismal certificate in my legal name of Joan Wheeler is morally wrong. I was baptized in the name of Doris Michol Sippel in the eyes of their god. Joan Wheeler was never baptized, yet her baptismal certificate says she was baptized as Joan Wheeler. That is not true.

My Original Birth Certificate was revoked, sealed forever, and replaced by a false-fact birth certificate created so that my adopters could say I was their child. I was their adopted daughter. They were not responsible for siring me, gestating me, nor birthing me. Their names did not, and do not now, belong on my birth certificate. Their names are on the court order of adoption, which is the truth.

It is morally wrong for anyone to claim on a government-issued birth certificate that they sired, gestated, and gave birth to a child when they didn’t. This ought to be illegal – to lie on an official birth certificate. But, in adoption, since the 1930s, it is perfectly legal to lie on a government-issued birth certificate.  

This law must change. Adopted people have the moral, ethical, and human right to the truth of our births. We should have the legal right to one – and only one – birth certificate like all non-adopted people.

Are you paying attention, Elizabeth Kirk? You call yourself a lawyer in family law? Do you really understand adoption and vital statistics laws?

I don’t think you do.

Part 5

I legally reclaimed my name in 2016. But my legal birth certificate remained in the name of Joan Wheeler. Why? Because the final step to changing one’s name requires the State Dept. of Vital Statistics to place the new legal name on a new amended birth certificate with the names of the “parents of record”, which, in my case, my “parents of record” were my adoptive parents. I certainly did not want a new, amended, birth certificate stating that my adopters, Edward and Doloris Wheler, gave birth to me as Doris Sippel!

In 2019, I sued New York State and won a partial victory. I won the right to replace the names of my adopters with the names of my natural parents on a new legal birth certificate. My Original Birth Certificate is still revoked and sealed. The court order of adoption still stands as proof of my adoption.

Adoption is child abuse by forced separation at birth from mother, and father, siblings, extended family, family history and culture. Adoption is identity theft. Adoption is unnecessary lifelong trauma for both mothers and their infants.  Family preservation, kinship care, and legal custodial guardianship provide legal protections for the child who truly needs a home.

I’m sure you’ll delete my comments here.

But don’t worry. I posted my comments on my blog with a link to your blog post calling for the inhumane removal of infants from their mothers at birth.

Stop inflicting your beliefs onto other people. A woman’s body is hers and not yours. Whatever she decides to do with her pregnancy is none of your business.