SOS Cautions Against Premature Adoption of Haitian Children

On January 20, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, Haiti's Orphans

Email received today: Date: Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 5:22 PM

SOS believes that brothers and sisters should always stay together.

Dear Joan,

Nature was cruel enough to turn children into orphans in a matter of minutes. But mere minutes cannot determine the future of these orphaned children. The global community must now be responsible enough to take the time to determine these children’s fates.

You may have seen in the last several days a planeload of orphans from Haiti making their way to Pennsylvania, undoubtedly to be adopted by parents in the U.S. This is a wonderful story of survival, rescue and adoption. But it’s not the whole story…

These particular children already had adoptive parents waiting to raise them with love and security. They presumably had been through the process that determined that no close relatives existed to take them in. Haitian children who have just lost their parents in the earthquake have not been through any such process.

In the weeks ahead you will see many stories about what should happen to these children. This is our position.

Our Position on this Sensitive Issue:

* SOS Children’s Villages believes in the rights of every child, including orphaned children.

* We believe that a coordinated approach needs to be taken by relief agencies in Haiti to identify, register and document unaccompanied children as quickly as possible.

* We believe in the earliest possible reunification between children and their families.

* We caution ALL ORGANIZATIONS working in Haiti against making premature decisions on permanent care (adoption) of orphaned children.

* We believe that siblings should always stay together.

* We believe that a parental figure should always be present.

* This is absolutely a sensitive and complex issue … but decisions made now will impact these children for the rest of their lives. Shouldn’t the first consideration be family ties — brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles? If there is a chance at reunification with parents or close relatives, isn’t that the best option?

If there is a chance that siblings could stay together and grow up together, isn’t that better than being split apart?

SOS Children’s Villages will remain in Haiti for the long-term. We will provide secure, stable homes for orphans as they mature. We will prepare them for lives as independent adults. Please support SOS as we pave the way for a brighter future for these orphans. Sponsor a Disaster Orphan now.

Heather Paul
Executive Director

SOS Children’s Villages – USA
1001 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Suite 1250
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 1 888-SOS-4KIDS or 202-347-7920

Email from Lola – An Adoptive Parent Repulsed by This Blog!

On January 16, 2010February 9, 2015 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee False Baptismal Certificate, 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, Obituaries16 Comments

Lola writes:

I would be ashamed to post the awful things you have on your blog. I hope you get flamed constantly! There are orphans in this world that need homes. Why don’t you adopt some and stop whining?! Learn what it’s like from the other side as an adoptive parent! You make me sick! You need therapy, not a blog. Being so anti-adoption may be good for your mind, but it certainly hurts all those kids in foster care. Don’t they deserve a home away from the abusive people that gave birth to them? Those kids are taken away FOR A REASON! Hello! Get a clue! You may be unthankful for being adopted, but ask a 10 year old in the foster system or in an orphanage if they want a Mom & Dad…ask a kid waiting to come home to the US in Haiti right now where they would rather be! I think you would be surprised by the answer!

Dear Lola,

Getting flamed is not an issue for me since I am paying for this website and am in constant contact with my webhost tech support.

I lived a life of torture and still am — at the hands of my adoptive family and natural family, too, not all, but enough to cause me considerable pain and anguish. Read my book for full details of the crimes committed against me by my adoptive family and others.

Lola, you are the one who is having an emotional reaction to my life. If you can’t take reading the terrible things done to adoptees (I’m not the only one) you are the one who needs therapy. There are thousands of adoptees and our natural parents who have been organizing since 1955 in America and around the world to expose the disgusting treatment we have received: examples: Adoptive parents who are lawyers have destroyed paperwork on their own adoptee’s birthparents. That’s a crime against that lawyer’s own adopted child! Adoptive parents who treat their adoptees like slaves and sex objects – like the rich couple who imprisoned a girl from a foreign country to do their household chores like Cinderella, and the Russian girl, Masha, was adopted by a pedophile and repeatedly raped and then she was freed and adopted by another woman who gave up on Masha and voided the adoption. So much abuse in adoption.

Lola, criticism from people such as you does not bother me. You only have an opinion of what you read. You do not know me personally and you do not know how this adoption has affected me and my children. They were also abused and mistreated by the relatives who mistreated me. The destruction of adoption lies and discrimination and prejudice scars adoptees and their children for life.

Lola, you can attack me all you want, but remember: in my book, I have published proof that our government has defrauded millions of adoptees by the practice of seizing our birth certificates, sealing them permanently, issuing materially false statements on a new, amended Certificate of Live Birth in the new adoptive name and naming the adoptive parents as parents of birth. This is fraud and perjury. If that happened to you, you might feel a tad bit offended, pissed off, and disgusted.

I was 18 years old when I had the shock of my life, and then my adoptive parents yelled at me, threw pots and pans at me, and acted as if I had done something horrific. No, I was found by siblings that they knew I had and they prevented me from a continued and meaningful relationship with them because my adoptive parents wanted me all to themselves. Any parents who would do that today would be up on child abuse charges. The only reason they got away with that is because my father signed relinquishment papers.

Do not blame my natural father for it, either. He was used, first by the good old Catholic Church and then by a child-stealer who was procuring a baby for her brother. No one helped my father in his grief that he lost his wife to an early death. No one helped my father keep his kids together. And all you, Lola, can think about are the so-called orphans in orphanages.

I have said this before but it needs repeating: Children who need homes can very easily have those homes through legal Guardianship and not adoption. Guardianship provides a legal guardian (a single person or a couple) who provide a safe, loving, and permanent home for children who need a home. If children cannot be raised by their natural parents, this is a far better alternative than total and complete adoption. Even “open” adoption is not a safe alternative due to the sealing of the child’s birth certificate and a replacement, “new” birth certificate in the child’s new adoptive name and adoptive parents named as parents by birth. Adoptive parents cop an attitude of ownership over the child and see the parents of birth as inferior.

With Guardianship, a child’s legal birth name, legal birth certificate, and status as the child of one and only one set of parents is protected. The legal guardian is under legal obligation to act legally and lovingly for the child as a parent would, as foster parents do, and as adoptive parents do, but they do not have the “advantage” of the law sealing the child’s birth certificate, replacing it with a new one with the guardians’ names on it and changing the child’s name and identity for all eternity.

In situations where the safety of the child is concerned, better to remove a child from the danger, but retain the child’s identity and relationships with that parent or parents. Adoption erases the existing problem as to why removal of children seems necessary, but, the adoptee faces lifelong harm from adoption and must face those issues later in life.

Yes, I am completely anti adoption. No adoption under any circumstances. Not even to save the Haitian children from starving to death after the earthquake. Good grief I hear that refrain already…Family Preservation at all costs, even if their parents are dead, there are other relatives who would be lost to them in adoption by foreigners.

I am not ashamed for anything I write. The only people who are flaming me are my own stupid family members who do not want me to write about my life. Foreign governments and Social Service Agencies throughout America and other countries are reading my website: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to name a few. Why? Because there are active adoption reform movements in those countries who have achieved what America needs: drastic reform in adoption.

I worked in foster care and in homeless shelters where I have seen kids removed from their parents solely due to poverty, not abuse. Even in the cases of abuse, those parents are still parents and those kids were born of those parents. By your way of thinking, Lola, adoption should totally erase the past and give these poor kids a new and better life. Wrong. Kids do not forget what has happened and they must cope with it all. Subjecting kids to the total identity change of adoption and forbidding them any knowledge of or contact with their own blood kin is child abuse. I’ve been at this adoption reform activism and advocacy for very near 36 years. I’ve worked in and around foster care, troubled youth, homeless families, crisis centers and disadvantaged families for my entire adult life. I went to court with an 18 year old that aged-out of the foster care system and went out on his own because he had no family. He bought me a rose from a street vendor because I cared enough to see him through that last year. He faced the reality of his life and was a strong young man. I did the same for an 18 year old young woman. She was all alone at the end of the court proceeding. Both of these kids went through foster care with their parents in what-ever state that left them incapable of taking care of their children, but both of these young adults had their birth identities intact, had their personal histories, had the rough experiences of foster care, but they also had a determination to press forward and do something with their lives. They also were free to establish some type of relationship with their parents, which they said was important for them to figure out. And they both thanked me for being at their sides when they stepped out of that court room to face the world. Adoption would have stripped them of their names, their birth certificates, and their families. Guardianship would have provided a home and loving family while giving them the right to their own birth identities. Guardianship conveys freedom, adoption conveys possession.

Oh yes, and lets all go over to Haiti to adopt all those poor orphans! That will solve these black kids’ problems, right? No it won’t! Being adopted by foreigners of a different race is an inner struggle for Transracial Abductees: go see their website under my Links page and here. They will face prejudice in this lily-white biased country of ours who hates Obama for being a “light-skinned black man”. You prospective adoptive parents who think it is the loving thing to do to go to Haiti and adopt their children — do you know what emotional damage that will do to these children who have lived through the trauma of an earthquake? They have seen their parents and other relatives die and you want to put a band aid on that by taking them away from that devastation? Do you not see that taking care of them in their own country is the best solution? I suggest you read some other blogs about taking kids for adoption out of Haiti. The Daily Bastdardette: HAITI: OPERATION PIERRE PAN POSTPONED; POLITICIANS PANDER. In that blog post alone, Bastardette has many links to a wealth of information. You will be shocked by what you read. World organizations are advising against adopting kids out of Haiti for the very reasons I have just stated, and more.

Lola, be thankful that you have led a most comfortable life. Do not suggest that I adopt! I wouldn’t do such a horrible thing to a child! My life was ruined because of adoption.

My goal is to change adoption laws and social policy so that what happened to me will never happen to another child, ever. To be lied to, to be prevented from knowing my own siblings, to be forbidden to grieve the death of my mother, to not ever be taken to her graveside — those are crimes of child abuse perpetrated upon me by my own adoptive parents. That is sick perversion and possession of a human being.

My adoptive mother is dying in a nursing home right now. She has not once acknowledged the damage she caused me. But she is happy that I used a photograph her brother took of me as an infant for my book’s cover. She gets tears in her eyes because she is happy that I have reached my goal of publication. Maybe she cannot accept the horror of the crimes she and others committed against me, but she is happy for me to be published and encourages me to attend the next AAC Adoption Conference. Mom has realized the importance of the falsified birth certificate as being fraudulent. She has realized that her actions and that of other adoptive relatives and my dead mother’s relatives “were cruel” to my natural father, she said so this past summer. My mother now knows the destructive words said to me by my loving adoptive cousins: “Joan, you OPENLY declare you have two fathers, so you must not love this father. We don’t want you here…” at my adoptive father’s funeral in 1982. I had been in a reunion with my natural father and many other relatives for nearly 9 years at that point. The hate directed at me from prejudicial relatives was their inability to let me live my own life.

My adoptive Mom has also lived the destructiveness and spiteful hate from my own full-blood sisters who not only attacked me because they (like you) did not want me to write anything about my adoption (see my horrible articles in the Buffalo News in MY ARCHIVES page) that they repeatedly abused my mother and my kids and my ex-husband by hate phone calls and hate mail and false child abuse charges. Normal people will let go and let the other person live free from contact. Continued harassment because I am an adoption reformer is completely out of line. There is no reason for my sisters to attack my adoptive mother, but they have. My mother is dying. We need to resolve what we can and live in peace, yet, my sisters are still out there harassing me. I have no contact with them for a number of years into our reunion, and do not want contact from them because of their destructive behavior to me, my children, my adoptive mother, and my ex-husband. Why would I want to build relationships with people who have mocked me for decades and now want in on the action because my book is published? Or because they now want to be a part of adoption reform when they mocked me for being in adoption reform since I was 18? They are filled with nothing but malicious slander and defamation toward me. Every word I write is the truth. Even my ex-husband and my young adult children will attest to the hateful behavior of my relatives toward me and to them. Even my adoptive mother deserves respect as my mother, instead, she was mistreated by my blood sisters by false child abuse charges claiming she was sexually abusing her own grandchildren! Adoption and its aftermath has negatively-affected entire family systems — but you, Lola, want to sing adoption’s praises!

Adoption, in its present form, has been and is, a destructive social and legal device that splits up families.

Lola, are you under 36? If so, I have lived more trauma since 1974 than you have as a non-adopted person. You sound like a young kid who does not know beans about adoption reform. Keep reading. Visit other adoption reform blogs. See the kinks on the side bars. These links will lead you to other links in adoption reform. Better yet, show up to our Conferences and really learn what it is like to be adopted and to lose your child to adoption:

American Adoption Congress

Adoption Crossroads: Adoption Healing, Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, Origins Inc. Australia, Origins Canada are proud to announce: Shedding Light on the Adoption Experience VI an Educational Conference About Realities: The Lifelong Effects of Adoption and the Need for Family Preservation.

Lola, you are living in a fantasy world. You need to wake up and smell the coffee. It is people like you who make me sick.

Happy Adoption Day 53 Years Ago Today

On January 14, 2010 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 Systems, Genealogy6 Comments

Happy Adoption Day, my eyeball. The only ones happy were my adoptive parents.

Fifty three years ago, today, at age 1 year, I lost my legal right to be a part of the family I was born into. I lost my legal right to have the birth certificate that documents my birth. I won the legal right to own a birth certificate that says I was born to a woman who factually adopted me: that is misrepresentation of material facts, which is fraud.

Fifty three years ago, today, my dead mother lost her right to be my legal mother. Bad enough she faced dying knowing that she’d leave behind five children, one of whom was a newborn, but she did not know that adoption would not only take away that newborn, but adoption would prevent her from forever being named on her child’s legal birth certificate.

Fifty three years ago, today, my father walked away from Surrogate’s Court in Erie County Hall, Buffalo, New York, a defeated man. He did what was told to him. He gave away his newborn because a Catholic priest said these words to him at his wife’s funeral ten months previously: “The baby needs two parents.” On top of that, a woman whom he did not know came up to him at his wife’s funeral and said, “I know a couple who will take your baby.”

And to this day, there are members of my dead mother’s family who believe that my father “didn’t want” me.

My father gave me up because he believed I would have a better life with two parents. At the time he relinquished me, he was a single father of five children. There was no help to keep his family together, only vultures swarming to descend and take away the children. “I’ll take the boy”, said one brother of my dead mother. But my father said no. My mother’s brothers got mad at him. My father was an only child. He had his sickly aging parents to help him. His own cousins had children of their own and did not help him keep his family together. Relinquishing me, letting me go, was his only option to save the rest of his family, and himself.

To expect a man in deep, profound grief to make life-altering decisions for his child and himself at a point of personal crisis is cruel. If he had been told the truth: that his dead wife’s family would hold this against him for eternity, that they would spread filthy rumors about him, that the adoptive family into which he relinquished his child would continue ongoing relationships with select members of his dead wife’s family and continue the gossipy rumors, all the while HE was told to stay away, he would never had agreed to relinquish his child to such an adoption. If my father were told that relinquishing his daughter to this permanent adoption would result in the utter destruction of his daughter’s personal papers, personal identity, emotional and psychological well-being, and that adoption would destroy her birth certificate, he would never have agreed to relinquishment and the adoption of his child. My father does not understand the true depth of destruction that adoption has caused me: he does not want to know because the pain is too deep.

That pain is what the adoptee experiences. That pain is not worth the benefits of Happy Adoption Day.

I am a defeated person, a shell of what I could have been. To live my life each day knowing that the very people who professed their love for me, who devoted their lives to me as my adoptive parents, loved me so much that they willfully and knowingly kept me apart from my own father and my own sisters and brother, kept me apart from my own cousins and from even knowing where my dead mother was buried, just so that they could have the luxury of raising a child “of their own”, knowing that my adoptive parents told so many lies to me for the first 18 years of my life, to know all of this was done “for my benefit” makes me so sick I want to vomit.

My adoption wasn’t love. It was possession.

I am supposed to feel grateful. I am supposed to feel happy that I wasn’t raised with my father and my siblings because “what kind of life would you have had with them?” This is the indoctrination said to me, the adoptee, by my adoptive parents and believed by extended adoptive family and the general public’s accumlated “knowledge” of adoption.

The adoptive cousins with whom I have had meaningful relationships in childhood have been what I cling to. Though we are not blood, we know each other as cousins. There are blood cousins with whom I share closeness also.

But there is also this pervasive undertow of deception, rumor and gossip. What was it that my adoptive mother said to me just a few weeks ago as she lay in her nursing room bed? “Oh, by the way, there are people who believe that you had affairs with two of your adoptive cousins.” What? Who the hell is spreading this filth around? Again? Still? Many people in my extended adoptive family and natural mother’s family, that’s who. They are the ones who are sick. Manipulative. I want no part of perverted minds. I am tired of being the brunt of their jokes.

While Jaycee Duggard has had the unfortunate experience of having been raped repeatedly by her abductor, having two children by him, she is not alone in her captivity. How can I possibly cope with the misinformation and gossip that is said for decades among family members because they “think” or “believe” something is true?

I was raised in a beautiful middle class home in the suburbs of Buffalo, an only child, with all the attention my adoptive parents could give me. It was conditional love: I was never supposed to know my own siblings and certainly not my own father and I should never know about the truth of how my mother died. My happy childhood memories come with a price: no childhood with my own siblings. Yet my adoptive parents had theirs. I loved my parents. I loved my extended adoptive family. Only to find out at age 18 that my life was one lie built upon another. After my Reunion, a shock that sent me into oblivion for years, I was expected to bounce back, to recover, to build my life as an adult as if this shock did not “bother” me. I was accused of “living in the past” and “being obsessed with adoption” and “pulling that stunt” and “knowing my siblings all along”. The ones who “pulled that stunt” were my adoptive parents and extended adoptive family. The ones who were mad that I “was living in the past” had the luxury of knowing their own personal histories while growing up. The ones who accused me of “knowing my siblings all along” were guilty of preventing me from knowing my own flesh and blood: my adoptive parents and all who backed them in their secrecy and deception.

What is it that the psychologists say that Jaycee Dugard must undo? Is it called “Stockholm Syndrome”? Perhaps other adoptees have not had a life so entrenched with turmoil as I have had, but other adoptees sure do have sealed and falsified birth certificates. Many adoptees and adoptive parents will be screaming: “What? She can’t be comparing adoption to what Jaycee Dugard experienced!”

Oh, yes, I can.

I was held prisoner in my sheltered home for 18 years in an idyllic life away from the “crappy” life my siblings lived on the opposite side of the city. (again, indoctination from my adoptive parents against my own family of birth). I should feel grateful I didn’t live with them because they had rags for clothes, or so I was told by my adoptive mother after I was found by siblings she so intensely did not want to me ever know. Who gets to torture an adoptee like that? I feel very much that Stockholm Syndrome fits my life, too. I was abducted from my own family by adoptive parents who selfishly kept me to themselves, knowingly and willfully depriving me of relationships with my own siblings. That is nothing less than child abuse. Beyond the mixed feelings of love for adoptive parents who “took care of me”, there are a myriad of conflicts I must cope with on a daily basis: the circulating rumors of sexual misconduct, feelings of being tricked by so many people whom I am supposed to love, feelings of wondering what other misconceptions people built up around me because they knew my blood family and I did not, feelings of shame and guilt because other relatives do not approve of my life.

There was a definite rift in my life when I was found by siblings I never knew. Certain members of my adoptive family sank away from me as if I were a leper. I am one person, people. If I am as bad as my relatives say I am, then I surely do deserve the hate mail and the obscene phone calls that have permeated my life since 1974 because I dared to accept a reunion with my father and my siblings. Form my point of view, this is gang-mentality against one adoptee.

Check out the Page on this blog “My Archives” to see the “dreadful” adoption reform newspaper articles I wrote. These articles are my way of defending the rights of adoptees, the rights of the donor-conceived, and the rights of our natural parents. I stuck up for Mary Beth Whitehead, the infamous surrogate mother, and her daughter. I got hell for that from my family members, people who are not in my direct social circle. I wrote against sperm donation. I got hell for that, too, again from family members who did not approve of my public statements against procedures that harm the chidlren created by these means. The general public’s stupidity is to be expected, but to be mistreated by my own families in the form of hate mail and hate phone calls and whispers behind my back and dirty looks and snide comments — all from my own families because I did what was right for me. This is the life of an adoptee well hated for being who she is: an adoptee advocating for humane change in the restrictive, discriminatory and de-humanizing adoption practices in America.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for all the hate and disrespect I have been given because I was born to a woman who died and then relinquished to adoption, was found by siblings I never knew and was hated for that, endured criticism because I was slow to recover or did not do what other people wanted me to do: get over being adopted, I would have rather been born a bastard. Bastards get more respect than this adopted half orphan has ever received.

Happy Adoption Day — Fifty-three years of hell.

Are you catching the drift as to why I am anti-adoption?

Guest Post: AB 1325 Calif Assembly Judiciary Committee Taking Comments Til 1/22/10

On January 13, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Psychology, Family Systems, Genealogy1 Comment

I’m happy to fill this post request:

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:17 PM

Hi Joan,

Could you please post the link below?

The California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee is taking comments until January 22, 2010 on the discriminatory bill AB 1325 “Tribal Customary Adoption”.

This bill will allow ONLY NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN in the state of California to be adopted WITHOUT THEIR PARENT’S RIGHTS BEING TERMINATED.

The California Assembly Judiciary Committee needs to be reminded that what’s good for one nationality of adoptees should be good for ALL ADOPTEES. All children should be allowed to be adopted without their parents having to terminate their parental rights! IT IS DISCRIMINATION TO ALLOW THIS FOR ONE ETHNICITY BUT NO ANY OTHERS!!!!!

Native American adoptees already get their original birth certificates when they turn 18 years old!!!! This preferential treatment needs to stop NOW.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday is approaching and it reminds me and sickens me how far away his dream still is.

Here’s the link if you want to comment:

http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/invitationstocomment/commentform.htm

(Just put W10-06 for legislation to be commented on.)

—- Guest Poster

… … …

My observations: This doesn’t sound like adoption at all, but rather, legal Guardianship, which is a viable alternative to adoption. As we know, total and complete adoption severs a child from her family of birth and from her legal identity at birth, which means sealing the birth certificate and issuing a new one. However, with this California proposal, Native children in need of a permanent home and family will not lose their birth family nor their birth certifcate. This should not be called “adoption”. It would seem to me that the correct term for this is “Guardianship”.

Yes, I find this offensive. I am very much for Native American rights, but not at the expense of others. Non-Native adoptees are forced to live lies, forced to give up their rights to their family of birth and relationships with them, and forced to live a new identity for the sole purpose of providing a child for adoptive parents to love “as their own”.

Identity confusion, loss of civil and birth rights, severance of relationships with blood kin, are not benefits of being adopted. These, and other losses, are suffered by adoptees, and our children. Perhaps the entire country of The United States of America could take this California Bill seriously to recognize the very real identity issues that all adoptees, not only Native Americans, experience. All adoptees deserve the truth of our heritage and continued relationships with our people.

—- legitimatebastard

California Bill AB 1325 (Beall & Cook) Discriminatory To Non-Native American ADOPTEES

On January 10, 2010January 6, 2014 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Family Systems11 Comments

This came to me via an email. Sender is protected by no name indicated. —–

Joan,

Yes, please share this Bill with everyone you can. This bill can BE USED TO FURTHER OUR CAUSE IF USED OFFENSIVELY. IT REALLY IS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FAILING TO STAND BY ALL ADOPTEES AND LETTING THE STATES PICK AND CHOSE HOW THEY ARE GOING TO TREAT US. I say this over and over… But there is NO “except for adopted persons” clause in the US Constitution. This could be an issue that would go all the way to the Supreme Court if argued properly.

… … …

Letter to the California Legislators:

Sent: 1/10/2010 11:26:56 AM Pacific Standard Time

Subject: AB 1325 (Beal & Cook) Discriminatory To Non-Native Americans

Dear California Assemblymembers:

It has been announced that AB 1325 (Beal & Cook) will go into effect in July, 2010. This bill will allow adoptions to occur without the termination of parental rights for Native children.

Why is it that Native American children relinquished for adoption are treated BETTER than non-Native American children relinquished for adoption in this State?

Why is it that ICWA protects their rights to their identities via their original birth certificate and their rights to Tribal membership? Why do they get to know who their biological parents are when they turn 18?

Now, AB 1325 takes this preferential treatment for Native American children relinquished for adoption one step further. Why is it that MY representatives in the Assembly refuse to release MY ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE TO ME? I am 40 years old.

Please explain to me how my civil rights are less important than the civil rights of Native Americans. I look forward to a response from at least my representatives in the 1st District.

Thank you for your time,

Sincerely,

(Name Withheld From this Post)

Here is the Tribal Alert:

…

Sorry, Mara, Washington DC Gave Me a Better Birthday Present Than You Did!

Yeah, Mara, The US Dept of State AND The United States Department of Justice top your miniscule adoption voting poll on “Should Kids Given Up For Adoption Have Their Rights Defended in Court? (CASA)”.

See, the Big Guys on Capital Hill have been reading my website, either secretly or blatantly, for months. Perhaps years, well, since I began blogging in June of 2007.

Hmm, The US Dept of State. The US Department of Justice. What are they looking for? Ammunition to use against adoptees? Pieces of the truth to use to actually change laws to end the tyranny against adoptees?

Are these US Federal government agencies solidifying adoption and birth certificate law to give back, or keep locked up, civil rights for adoptees and our natural parents?

If our birth certificates are really state by state issues to be handled by individual state governments and are not Federal issues, why, then, is the Federal Government reading my website?

Hey, Feds: stop giving me a bad name. You already took away my birthname, my birth family, and my dignity as an American citizen. Are you gonna confiscate me, too? You know, stupid people will get the wrong impression of me. I am being honest, folks. I am not committing fraud: my government committed fraud against me.

What about the barrage of government and military installations that stampeded my website in November 2009 to read about me, that baaad adoptee, that horrible, ungrateful bastard adoptee who was misquoted by an ABC news reporter who put quotes around her words as if I said, “would have preferred to live in foster care rather than be adopted…”?

No, I never said that, but again, a stupid reporter hell bent on getting out a biased article for National Adoption Month rather than accurately quote the adoptee for what she truly said, gets paid to spread wrongful information.

Well, that article sent THE PENTAGON and the US DEPTARMENT OF STATE and NAVAL and MARINES and lots of offices around WASHTINGTON DC flooding my website. Insurance companies, universities, foreign governments, social service agencies, adoption agencies and our dear friends: the NCFA – the National Council For Adoption.

So, in the wee hours of the morning, I wrote a blog post about the alternatives that could have been done had I had a defense attorney standing up for my rights as an infant being “put up for” and “placed for” and “relinquished for” adoption. THAT post sent The US Department of State and the US Department of Justice snooping around my website!

Are you kidding me? People, namely mindless relatives, think I’m doing illegal activity! Wish they’d mind their own business.

Hey, Hillary, snap to it! Adoptees are sick and tired of being slaves to the adoption-centric country and world we live in! Get to your job and straighten out America’s sick, perverted adoption and birth certificate laws. Take care of the lives of your own people right here in America before you go off traveling the world influencing foreign policy. We need you right here, defending the rights of your own citizens.

Adoptees cannot get Passports, or Enhanced Drivers’ Licenses, unless we prove who we are. We cannot prove who we are unless we get our “Original” birth certificates. We cannot get our sealed “original” birth certificates because our Federal and State governments confiscate our Certificates of Live Birth and replace them with fraudulent Certificates of Live Birth when we are adopted. And we cannot ever see or own a certified “original” birth certificate because some government official, or lawyer, is afraid we adoptees, no we dirty bastard adoptees, would commit fraud. Say what?

And don’t give me this crap from the Birther Movement trying to oust President Obama because they want to see his real birth certificate. If you Birthers would focus your attentions on the real issues of millions of adoptees who cannot access our true Birth Certificates, then we might live in a true free country. Stop focusing your energies in the wrong places and start focusing on doing justice for millions of enslaved Americans who were born here, or adopted and brought here, by their adoptive parents.

I’m speaking to you, people in The Pentagon. What threat do I pose to this country? Is it because I point out the truth of adoption in this country? I am not the only adoption activist to do so. Are you buzzing around other adoption activist websites and blogs, too? Are you gonna ban my book from being read because I published scanned images of my real and false Certificates of Live Birth issued by the State of New York?

Jeese Louise! Do your jobs and correct the mistakes perpetrated against adoptees since falsified birth certificates became the law of the land in 1930 to erase bastards’ beginnings from the sandstones of time. Chop our names and images off of the pyramids and temples of the ancients because we low-lifes are not worthy to know the truth.

I am not a bastard! I was born to married parents! My birth, and the births of my fellow adopted citizens, illegitimate bastards or orphans or adopted step children, are not births to be criminalized.

Children are not chattel! Children look to adults to take care of them and protect their rights. Adults need to grow up to do right and just action. Unseal adoptees’ birth certificates and stop issuing falsified documents just because the government says it is okay to do so.

Liars. Cheaters. This is America! The Land of the Free!

Listen up, US Dept of State! You are in together with The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. This Convention not only allows for falsified birth certificates for all intercountry adoptees, it requires pre-adoptive parents to obtain a “new” birth certificate for the child they wish to adopt before the adoption takes place! Who drew up these international treaties? Falsifying birth certificates BEFORE or AFTER an adoption is not right and just action, but it is legal. And because it is legal, this practice must be moral, otherwise, people wouldn’t do it. Nor would they blindly “believe” in adoption.

The United Nations urges all nations, even the poorest of the poor, to register the births of all children for the safety and civil rights of all children. Why should nations follow the suggestions of the United Nations and UNICEF, when the US Department of State and The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption requires the destruction of those birth certificates by overriding them with “new” birth certificates made in the child’s new name and the names of the intended adoptive parents? Might not justice be best served by telling the truth on official government documents of birth and adoption? Might it not be best to honor the births of all children by eliminating adoption all together? The same end result of providing a home for a needy child can be achieved with Guardianship, rather than adoption. Unless, of course, if the goal really is to provide children for waiting pre-adoptive and “intended” adoptive parents, then right action and moral action is to strip the child of her birth identity and replace the low-life’s origins with adoptive parents who are better suited to be parents.

Sorry, Mara, but you despicable bastard have been displaced. The US Department of State and the US Dept of Justice in Washington DC definitely beat you out as giving me a better Birthday present than you did. You only spurred me to speak about kids having attorneys in court to stand up for their rights, but these agencies spying on me gave me the impetus to speak out against the worldwide destruction of adoptees’ birthrights. You’ve been outdone, Mara.

Tomorrow, we go back to change dot gov where we can pick apart President Obama’s misstatements on “making adoption more available”. Adoptees’ work is never done. I’ve been neglecting my page on that website for far too long.

What’s a birthday for if you can’t sit on your ass all day and write activist blog posts harassing the US Federal government and international law-making bodies?

Thanks, Mara. You started it! Best Birthday present ever!

Birthday Vandalism, President Millard Fillmore, and Adoptees

On January 7, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Baptismal Certificate, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Systems, Reunions are not bad, True Birth Certificate for Donor-Conceived

I just got back from a very unusual birthday celebration at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York: US President Millard Fillmore was born this day 210 years ago. I attended a memorial service at his gravesite to honor him.

There was a wreath presented by the current US President’s Representative, and other government officials, as well as dignitaries from educational institutions that owe their beginnings to Millard Fillmore. Since Millard Fillmore was a Unitarian, the minister of the Buffalo Unitarian Universalist Church gives the invocation prayer. Today’s service was not as cold as in other years. There was no bitter wind or snow falling. TAPS was played by a lone trumpeter and a military flag guard opened and closed the ceremony.

The first year I attended was 21 years ago. I brought my toddler daughter. A TV camera took her picture as she played in the snow. Then, the TV reporter asked the guests why they were there. The usual important people gave their usual official comments on this President’s contributions to end slavery and start hospitals and the University of Buffalo just 13 years after the British burned the village of Buffalo to the ground in 1813. In 1989, I was trying to duck the reporter, but he caught me and asked me why I was there. I said, “I share Millard Fillmore’s birthday and I was born in the hospital named after him. I am also a member of the church he belonged to. I came here to honor a man who became the 13th President of the United States”. The reporter thanked me.

I went home and watched the News at dinner time. Less than 5 minutes later, the phone rang.

“Hello, Joan. You pig! What the hell are you doing, talking to a News Reporter and plastering your face on TV?! You are an ego-maniac and have no business showing off!”

That call came in from an adoptive cousin. She and her sisters and their mother have hated me for “OPENLY declaring you have two fathers” since 1974.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to die. Because THEY out number me, they have the power. I am alone. Can I not celebrate my birthday in the way I choose? Who are THEY to judge me? What harm have I done to THEM? THEY do not approve of my reunion with my father — a man THEY have never met — a man THEY hate because, according to THEM, he gave me away so he does not qualify to be honored by me as my father. BUT HE IS MY FATHER. Without him, I would not be alive.

So much for family values – so much for adoptive family values. The adoptee only has value if she honors and obeys the adoptive family’s rules and ignores from whence she came.

My MOTHER gave birth to me today 54 years ago in Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York. Her name, and that of my FATHER, is on my hospital records, my hospital birth certificate, and my true birth certificate. But the State of New York seized that birth certificate in January of 1957 and by March of 1957, the State of New York BASTARDIZED my legitimate birth by issuing a falsified, certified as true, Certificate of Live Birth with a raised State seal and a stamped signature of a City of Buffalo Registrar of Vital Statistics. This fraudulent piece of paper is my legal birth certificate. It desecrates the honor of the woman who gave her life so that I may live.

Thank you, New York State, for dis-honoring my birthday.

I will fight till my dying breathe to avenge the violation of my MOTHER’s honor as the woman who nurtured me in her body and then died so that I may live. I will fight to my dying breath to win back my birthright and re-build after the destruction by State-sanctioned vandalism of my true birth certificate — the official documentation of my actual birth.

HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER, so says a Catholic Commandment.

Where is the honor befitting my father and mother of conception and birth?

A Catholic nun in my Junior High School used to say, “Look ashamed!” when she caught some unruly student misbehaving.

I say to all who violate adoptees’ sacred bonds of birth: Shame on all of you who mock adoptees and our natural parents!

Thanks for a wonderful life, you lousy relatives. I am ashamed to have been adopted into YOUR clan. Family values, indeed. The values you proliferate certainly are not Christian values of love. Only a few of you are worthy of my love.

I take away valuable lessons from President Millard Fillmore. He had the tenacity, strength and the personal integrity to stand for honor and justice, to stave off the American Civil War for a few more years, and to stand up to end slavery.

There is a quiet civil war going on right now: the US and State governments are imprisoning all adoptees by seizing our birthrights and birth certificates by forcing us to live lies every time we are forced to present fraudulent birth certificates as the real documentation of our births. Stop the vandalsim of adoptees’ true birth certifcates.

Poll Started by Mara – Should Kids Given Up for Adoption Have Their Rights Defended in Court?

On January 7, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Baptismal Certificate, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptee's Conflicting Emotions, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Family Systems, Reunions are not bad, True Birth Certificate for Donor-Conceived1 Comment

WOW! Best Birthday Present EVER! Thanks, Mara!

First, take the poll:

Should Kids Given Up For Adoption Have Their Rights Defended in Court? (CASA)

Then, leave a comment.

I was the first to do so on my BIRTHDAY, thanks to Mara!

Here’s my answer: YES!!!

And my Comments, spelling mistakes and all:

If my rights had been defended in court by an independant attorney who was looking out for my true “best interest of the child”, my adoption might have been handled diffeerently. One solution to my pre-adoptive parents’ petition to adopt me could have been to totally negate their petition on the grounds that it would be illegal and immoral to remove an infant from an existing sibling group and change her name and her identity to conform to what the adoptive parents want for “their” adopted child. Another solution could have been was to modify the petition to adopt by restricting the pre-adoptive parents to Legal Guardians. That would have kept my legal and my birth name one and the same (thereby preserving my Birth Certificate), and at the same time, given my Guardians the joy of raising a child with the knowledge of and visitation with that child’s one remaining parent (mother died) and visitation with her older siblings. The third option — which is what actually happened — to sever the ties completely with the father and siblings of the adoptee and raise the child 100% as the “only child” of the adopting parents which completely cut off my ties to my natural father, wiped out my chance for a timely and appropriate grieving of my MOTHER’s death, and wiped out any relationship that could have developed with my full blood siblings. It is a crime what happened to me! NO CHILD SHOULD BE PERMENTENTLY SEPARATED BY ADOPTION. This is cruel and is child abuse!!!! I blame the adoptive parents and the adotpive family for lying, manipulating the system and lying to the relinquishing natural father who was vulnerable at age 31 because he was grieiving the loss of his 30 year old wife who was the mother of five children.

Oh, yes, another solution would have been to compelety restore my father AS my father, restore my siblings AS my siblings, negate 100% the Petition to Adopt by my pre-adotpive parents and provide emotional and financial support for this FAMILY to stay together.

Still another solution would have been to give me back to my father, but, since my pre-adoptive parents had taken care of me for 10 months prior to the Final Court Date securing my closed and sealed adoption, that would have been cruel to them. This last option would have validated those legal guardians’ rights to have contact with the child they had grown to love.

These situations happen all the time. Played out quite well in extended family within my adoptive family: my adoptive parents took care of a number of sinling groups who did not have a father (he ran off). But, my adoptive parents (years before I was born and adopted) had respect for the remaining parent, knew their own boundaries and limitations as Parent Figures, and loved the children anyway.

Love is best when it is honest and respectful. Closed and sealed adoption destroys family relationships for generations.

Children who are Relinquised for adoption and who are being Petioned to be be Adopted, SHOULD have legal cousel to prertect their best interests.

Had my legal rights been protected from the very beginning, I would have had a happier life.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

Joan M Wheeler of http://forbiddenfamily.com .

………

Now, all you good little adoptees, go raise some hell on this fabulous poll started by MARA!!!!

Dear Mr. President at Congress dot org

On January 3, 2010 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptees' Civil Rights

My letter to President Barak Obama on the website Congress.org:

Letters To Leaders

All messages are published with permission of the sender. The general topic of this message is Children/Families:

Subject: Adoptees’ Civil Rights to their true birth certificates

To:
President Barack Obama

December 5, 2009

Mr. President,

It is of vital importance that you pass Federal Legislation restoring the legal right for adoptees to not only have access to their true birth certificates, but it is also imperative that you immediately halt the state-by-state assault on illegitimate bastards, half and full orphans, and step children adopted by their step-parents and children born within a marriage to be “legitimized” by adoption. The process of adoption strips a child of her/his name at birth, parents of conception and birth, strips them of their relationships with these parents, and forbids any contact with siblings left behind.

I urge you to immediately pass Federal Legislation that would erase the automatic issuance of “new” and “amended” and false and fraudulent Certificates of Live Birth to adoptees at the finalization of their adoptions.

Adoptees do not have the full civil right to access and obtain a certified copy of their true birth certificates. Meanwhile, the Certificate of Live Birth that is issued upon adoption falsely states that the parents named on the document are the parents by birth, which is a blatant lie. Such a document is a fraudulent birth certificate, yet this is what adoptees have to pass off as their birth certificates.

Much better is the way it is done in The Netherlands:
1 birth certificate + 1 adoption certificate = adoption truth

I am 53 years old and cannot obtain my true birth certificate, even though I already have it (because my natural father gave it to my adoptive parents at my relinquishment.

Visit my website: http://forbiddenfamily.com.

Sincerely,

Joan M Wheeler,
born as,
Doris M Sippel

author of: Forbidden Family:
A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion

Guest Post – ONE LIE = MANY GENERATIONS LOST

On December 21, 2009 By legitimatebastardIn Adoptee Birth Certificates, Adoptee False Baptismal Certificate, Adoptee False Legal Birth Certificate, Adoptee True Sealed Birth Certificate, Adoptees' Civil Rights, Adoption Loss, Adoption Psychology, Adoption Trauma, Family Preservation, Family Systems, True Birth Certificate for Donor-Conceived

This post is written by Lori Carangelo founder of Americans For Open Records, and submitted by me, legitimatebastard, via email:

Another thing the general public as well as pro-adoption folks don’t consider is that neither relinquishing Parents nor Adopters have a say wih regard to falsifying and sealing the Adoptee'[s birth recoird — It’s the law, even in stepparent adoptions. And it’s not only the immediate “Triad” of Adoptee-Parent-Adopter who are adversely affected by the Adoptee’s falsified records. It’s also the Triad’s future children and their children who inherit the burden as well.

I found my son two decades ago, after an 18-year search hindered by falsified sealed “adoption-birth” records. Two decades later, now that they are of legal age and can make their own decisions, I found his two daughters, my granddaughters, who were also lost to adoption (stepparent adoptions with falsified, sealed records). One of them who I had helped raise in her first year, could not possibly have remembered me nor know that I loved her. I had no say in her parents’ decisions and only my son’s Adopter was permitted to be part of her life as “her grandmother,” just as only his Adopter was allowed to be his “Mother.” This granddaughter was evidently conditioned from an early age to be angry and distrustful of not only her father (my son) but also his “birth” family, and so she rejected my attenpt to know and befriend her.

My other granddaughter, however, who has the same father (my son), different mother, and who I had never seen, has told me she was searching for her father before I found her and that she is interested to know about the family and “what she missed”…an expression of a natural need to know. Is it that my two granddaughters have different genes and personalities? Or that they have different resiliences to adoption’s lies, half-truths and false assumptions? Or that they were raised in different environments with different histories? I’ve had only a first contact with her at this writing, so cannot yet answer these questions, but anticipate we’ll both have lots of questons…and answers that adoption would otherwise withhold, distort, or fabricate.

Books such as Joan Wheeler’s “Forbidden Family” are written to help break the cycle of adoption’s mistakes not only for themselves but also for future generations.

Lori Carangelo, Founder ( http://LoriCarangelo.com)

Americans For Open Records ( http://AmFOR.net )