Epigenetics and Abandonment Issues

An adult adopted woman wrote – My biological daughter is 30, married with 1 child and she is struggling so much with similarities to abandonment issues that I had all my life. Her self esteem is very low, she does not feel she’s worthy of her husband, sees him as being the better person as a father and in their relationship a better husband than she is a wife. I see her trying to sabotage her relationship which reminds me of myself doing the same because I always thought people would leave me because I’m not good enough. I had to leave them first (I find this remark interesting because I am the child of 2 adoptees and I have always been the one to leave a romantic relationship) or make them leave me to prove my point to myself. She has no abandonment experiences. She’s always been loved and cherished by her father and I. I am thinking it’s epigenetics like you’ve talked about.

Our children and grandchildren are shaped by the genes they inherit from us, but new research is revealing that experiences of hardship or violence can leave their mark too. Unlike most inherited conditions, this was not caused by mutations to the genetic code itself. Instead, the researchers were investigating a much more obscure type of inheritance: how events in someone’s lifetime can change the way their DNA is expressed, and how that change can be passed on to the next generation.

This is the process of epigenetics, where the readability, or expression, of genes is modified without changing the DNA code itself. Tiny chemical tags are added to or removed from our DNA in response to changes in the environment in which we are living. These tags turn genes on or off, offering a way of adapting to changing conditions without inflicting a more permanent shift in our genomes.

If these epigenetic changes acquired during life can indeed also be passed on to later generations, the implications would be huge. Your experiences during your lifetime – particularly traumatic ones – would have a very real impact on your family for generations to come. There are a growing number of studies that support the idea that the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics.

A lot of epigenetic research requires a proof by elimination and looking at what may be the most consistent explanation. Many of the times when trauma is thought to have echoed down the generations via epigenetics in humans are linked to the darkest moments in the ancestor’s personal history. The idea that the effect of a traumatic experience might be passed from a parent to their offspring is still regarded as controversial by many people.

The consequences of passing down the effects of trauma are huge, even if they are subtly altered between generations. It would change the way we view how our lives in the context of our parents’ experience, influencing our physiology and even our mental health. Knowing that the consequences of our own actions and experiences now could affect the lives of our children – even long before they might be conceived – could put a very different spin on how we choose to live. Despite picking up these echoes of trauma down the generations, there is a big stumbling block with research into epigenetic inheritance: no one is sure how it happens.

A recent paper has revealed strong evidence that RNA (rather than DNA) may play a role in how the effects of trauma can be inherited. Researchers examined how trauma early in life could be passed on by taking mouse pups away from their mothers right after birth. The model is quite unique. It mimics the effects on dislocated families, or the abuse, neglect and emotional damage that you sometimes see in people. Different lengths of RNA molecules were linked to different behavioral patterns: smaller RNA molecules were linked to showing signs of despair.

The science of epigenetic inheritance of the effects of trauma is still in its early stages. It is suggested that if humans inherit trauma in similar ways to the mammal experiments, the effect on our DNA could be undone using techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy. That there is a malleability to the system. Healing the effects of trauma in our lifetimes could put a stop to it echoing further down the generations.

More about the research and results are described in this article – Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations?

Silenced Women

When I saw this graphic, it went straight to my heart like an arrow. My grandmothers, forced by circumstances to give up their first born, and in two cases only child (which includes a grandfather who never was given the benefit to know he had a son), to go on with their lives as though nothing happened.

I don’t think I’ll ever truly 100% get over it and I probably should not because adoption is still a thing that drives mothers and their babies apart. I now have an unflinching awareness of what it means to be adopted.

At almost 70 years old now, having to live through a full 6 decades before I knew the truths of my origins, I do fell as though I was born to re-connect the broken threads of my family’s beginnings, that I have somehow managed to fulfill my destiny in having been born at all.

In learning about my family’s ancestors, I also discovered what a miracle it was that in the mid-1950s, I was not given up for adoption, with my parents forced to suffer the same fate their own parents encountered. My teenage mother and my father only having just started on his university studies – both interrupted when I decided to take up residence in my mother’s womb.

My grandparents could not tell their own stories of loss that hurts for a lifetime because no one would have been sympathetic regarding their plight but for adult adoptees today, there is a growing awareness of the trauma and pain of being cut off from one’s roots and some are even choosing to attempt parenting when they had thought to give up their child and they are finding a lot of support in society all around them.

May the reform of attitudes continue to take over the dominant narrative that adoption saves babies and children from a worse fate.

Assimilation Is The Intention

For many indigenous women, political action regarding children was not about campaigns for
subsidized day cares or cultural arguments about gender, work, and parenting. Child welfare was a literal fight to keep Native children in their homes and in their nations.

During the 1970s, Native American women activists understood the crisis of child adoption
(which had grown rampant in the postwar era) as more than a personal issue affecting individual
families. The removal of Native children from their homes and communities compromised not only parental rights but also tribal sovereignty. Technically, indigenous nations had a legal advantage in the battle for control over Indian child welfare because the right to oversee issues related to children living on reservations existed as an implicit aspect of sovereignty. In practice, however, state courts and welfare agencies largely misunderstood or ignored tribal authority and the interests of indigenous communities and removed Native children from their homes at arresting rates—an average of one quarter of Native American children lived away from their parents during the early 1970s

In response, Native women activists created a child welfare political agenda that not only kept
children in their communities but also addressed the problems that sometimes led to foster and adoptive placements. Although they acknowledged that there were legitimate issues, such as alcoholism, that required some parents to surrender their children, activists did not interpret the current crisis as the result of inadequate parenting. Nor did they place blame exclusively on culturally insensitive child welfare systems. Rather, activists condemned poverty and the vestiges of colonialism for the problems that precipitated child removals. One activist asserted that ‘‘the process of colonization has brought more destruction to these family ties than any internal changes … could have ever created.’’ According to this woman and others, while colonization created the problems indigenous families faced—solutions to them rested with Native nations. Both the programs’ indigenous women activists established and their petitions to the federal government to uphold the right of the tribes to control child welfare focused on increasing tribal agency in addressing the fundamental difficulties that Native families confronted. These activists gained strength from their citizenship in Native nations and framed their work against child removals in the context of tribal sovereignty.

The history of non-Native people intervening in the lives of indigenous families is a long one; arguably as old as the history of colonization itself. The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 is Federal law that governs the removal and out-of-home placement of American Indian children. … ICWA established standards for the placement of Indian children in foster and adoptive homes and enabled Tribes and families to be involved in child welfare cases.

“They closed the boarding schools and opened up CPS (Child Protective Services), but it’s the same thing – they’re still coming in and taking our children,” Cetan Sa Winyan said. The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians of California and the Quinault Indian Nation of Washington are petitioning the Supreme Court to request that the Indian Child Welfare Act remain intact.

The state of Texas is challenging the constitutionality of ICWA, claiming it’s a race-based system that makes it more difficult for Native kids to be adopted or fostered into non-Native homes. Another argument is that the law commandeers states too much, giving federal law imbalanced influence in state affairs.

A Supreme Court response to the tribes’ petition and the petition filed by the plaintiffs is due on October 8th.

Tribes and advocates argue that ICWA is culturally- and politically-based, not race-based, because tribal nations have political status as sovereign governments under federal law. Cherokee Nation Deputy Attorney General Chrissi Nimmo said the tribe will put all the resources it has into making sure ICWA is protected. “ICWA attempts to keep children connected to their tribe … and an attack on that is absolutely an attack on tribal sovereignty,” Nimmo said.

In the case of Brackeen v. Haaland, the Brackeens — the white, adoptive parents of a Diné child in Texas — seek to overturn ICWA by claiming reverse racism. Joined by co-defendants including the states of Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, and Indiana, they’re being represented pro bono by Gibson Dunn, a high-powered law firm which also counts oil companies Energy Transfer and Enbridge, responsible for the Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines, among its clients.

You can sign a petition here – https://action.lakotalaw.org/action/protect-icwa.

False Narratives

Recently the post of a new mother who just gave birth a few days ago and is giving up her child for adoption asked what items from his birth she should keep. She received over 700 comments, mostly from adoptees and birth mothers, urging her frantically to back out and keep and raise her child. The responses spoke eloquently of the reasons why. I thought this one excellent –

Obviously none of us could possibly understand to the full extent your situation or circumstances which led you to this decision, and I don’t doubt for one second that is consumed you entirely the past 9 months. Knowing that you only have just one more day before making probably the most difficult and life changing decision of anyone’s life, I’m sure you’d want to consider absolutely everything, especially if there was anything new which you hadn’t considered before.

Most of the people in this group are either fellow birth mothers or adoptees, so more than anyone else they understand exactly what you and your baby are going through, and will go through.

Knowing the main reasons why women choose adoption being financial and/or relationship instability, we’re all just here to let you know that if those are factors in your decision, there absolutely is support available so that you don’t feel as if you have to make this decision. No one should be coerced or forced into making a decision under the guise of being “best for your baby.”

If finances are an issue, there’s lots of support out there; not only from this group, but government programs, and there are so many church programs and charities. There are so many people here who can help you find whatever services you need because we’ve needed, and used those services ourselves.

We just want to make sure that you know the reality, that it’s actually far more important to have your birth mother in your life rather than having two parents who are non-biological. So if a lack of a father figure is affecting your decision, just please don’t be fooled into believing this false narrative that it’s more important to live in a two parent household, because that’s simply not true.

I’m sorry if you’re feeling guilt tripped, I truly don’t believe that was anyone’s intention.

We all just want to show you that you’re not alone and that you don’t have to make this decision if you don’t want to. We just want you to know that all those typical reasons that society tells us is why women should choose adoption, every single one of those reasons is complete b***sh*t in the real world. But so many people still believe the lies and the false narrative, so that’s exactly why this group is here, to show everyone there’s another way.

One more adds something important – Our mothers’ decisions caused preverbal, pre-personality developmental trauma that we have lived with for decades. It isn’t rainbows and butterflies. Adoption does not guarantee a better life, just a different one. Adoptees are overrepresented in mental health care. We are four times as likely to try to kill ourselves. This is our life, you are about to choose for your son. That is why we are speaking up.

You can find this group – Adoption:Facing Realities – at Facebook. There is a 2 week read only rule because the perspective is rather different from most adoption oriented groups. The comments of adoptees are given priority. Anyone in the triad (birth mother, adoptee or adoptive parent) is welcome but you should be warned that the rainbows and butterflies fantasy narrative of the adoption world is not what you will find there. However, you will find honesty, detailed personal experiences and a belief in family preservation. The group also includes former foster care youths now grown and transitioned to the adult world.

Mommie Dearest

Just the words, “Mommie Dearest” makes me want to cringe. I was aware that Crawford had adopted her children from Georgia Tann. Actually, I had come across the story of the younger siblings, twin girls, while doing my research about Georgia Tann. They have a more positive perception of Crawford. However, I know that one child may be a problem for the parents, while another child won’t be. There are defiant and compliant children and certainly, the complaint ones are easier to parent. Not that I am judging Christina as a problem child but it is clear that she had problems with her mother.

I don’t doubt that she suffered abuse. I’ve read the accounts of too many adoptees in my all things adoption group to doubt anyone’s claim. My first reminder of Christina’s memoir was an article in which the writer describes going to see the film version (about 40 years after its release) and it being found hilarious by many in the audience, that it had become a bit “camp”. Since I really didn’t know the definition, I googled it. Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value. Somehow a movie about child abuse just doesn’t seem like the same kind of cult classic as The Rocky Horror Picture Show from my own perspective.

Christina was 80 years old last year. Her memoir came out in 1978 but she had written a musical based on it around the time of her latest birthday. It had a run at Birdland, the renowned New York jazz venue. She was happy about it. “It sold out, it was fabulous,” she says, looking glamorous and spry, before issuing what has become a standard warning: “The musical had absolutely nothing to do with the movie. I want to put that in big capital letters.”

The movie she is referring to (and the one I mentioned above) is the 1981 adaptation of Christina’s memoir that starred Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford, Christina’s adoptive mother, whose abuses, soberly detailed in the book, were turned by the movie into high camp. As chronicled in Mommie Dearest, Crawford slapped, kicked, punched and tried to strangle her daughter, while subjecting her to a severe schedule of cleaning and other household chores, driven by the movie star’s alcoholism and who knows what else.

The publication of Mommie Dearest, perhaps the first memoir ever to document child abuse from the child’s point of view, changed the landscape of victim representation and was an early precursor to today’s more robust protection of victims’ rights. Generally speaking, we don’t recognize the long-term psychological damage that is inflicted on people who are abused, neglected and trafficked. It is hard for people to understand that what happened 20 years ago is creating behavior patterns today.

Being sent to boarding school at the age of 10 was a turning point for her. She understood that the rules she grew up under weren’t normal. She tried to build a degree of self-esteem after years of being told by her mother that she was useless. Education was the path forward for her.

“Fear is the water that abused children swim in,” Christina says. “Because you don’t know what’s going to happen and your life is so chaotic. But on the other side of the equation, it’s fear from people who are afraid to speak up. Fear that they’re going to lose their job or that people are going to say something bad about them. If you were to ask me about one thing that embraces all of us, it’s the constant fear.” The fear doesn’t go away when the abuser dies. Christina says, “Because it’s internal.”

After a period of estrangement in the latter years of her mother’s life, she attempted a reconciliation. It turned out not to have been possible. Christina says of Crawford that at that point in their lives, “She was an alcoholic. She was ill. She was drug-addicted. And I think she just wasn’t playing with a full deck. I completely lost context – not contact, but context with her, because I wasn’t physically present. Then she died.”

Christina and her younger brother Christopher were cut out of Crawford’s will, for what was cited as “reasons which are well known to them.” Christina was so furious she went straight to her desk and started writing down everything that had happened in her childhood. Her two younger siblings disputed the book. Different people in the family experience the parenting situation in different ways. Because the parenting situation is different towards them, they may have trouble believing how awful it was for a sibling.

Credit for much of this blog goes to Emma Brockes for her June 25 2019 article about Christina in The Guardian. Though I hesitate to add this movie trailer, I will for full diligence to this blog.

So Many Questions

Today’s blog is thanks to Elle Cuardaigh – If Adoption Is Beautiful.

*Adoption, meaning the current concept of it in the Western world. The complete legal severing of the natural relationship between child and parent(s), replacing the original family and (sometimes) culture with another, including changing the child’s identity and sealing the original records, keeping information from everyone involved.

If adoption is beautiful…

Why do people lie about it?
Why isn’t it the first choice for couples who want children?
Why has it been this way for less than one hundred years?
Why doesn’t everyone give up a baby to someone who can’t have one?
Why does rehoming not only happen but is completely legal?
Why does Biblical scripture have to be twisted in order to justify it?
Why does the Quran condemn it?
Why isn’t it done this way all over the world?
Why are people in other countries horrified when they learn what adoption means here?
Why have several “sending” countries banned international adoption?
Why are adoption agencies being sued or forcibly shut down?
Why do adoptees turn to DNA testing to avoid dating a sibling?
Why is family medical history still the first question asked at doctor appointments?
Why are records kept from the very people they pertain to?
Why is a court order needed to see the records?
Why are adoptees terrified to ask their adopted parents questions about it?
Why do adopted parents swear their families to secrecy?
Why did the Catholic church get rich off its corruption?
Why is coercion routinely employed to get “birth mothers” to relinquish?
Why are there consistently over 100,000 eligible children waiting years for “their forever families”?
Why do white children cost more than black children?
Why is it okay to think of children as commodities as in the above question?
Why do the American Adoption Congress, Adoptee’s Liberty Movement Association, Bastard Nation, Concerned United Birthparents, and numerous other organizations like them exist?
Why do so many adoptees search?
Why did the Australian government officially apologize for its role in it?
Why are adoptees who are murdered by their adopted parents still considered “lucky”?
Why were adoptees used for medical and psychological experiments?
Why are adoptees the punchline of jokes?
Why is it recognized as a childhood trauma?
Why are adoptees considered “as if born to” their adoptive family, yet are subject to conditional terms for incest?
Why in cases where the baby goes back to the natural mother is it called “failure”?
Why are teen adoptees overrepresented in mental health services?
Why do so many rely on it as an industry for their paycheck?
Why is it patterned after the system Georgia Tann – a known kidnapper, trafficker, child killer, and pedophile – developed?
Why is it used as a tool of war and cultural genocide?
Why can’t all adoptees get a passport? Why are others deported?
Why are adoptees four times more likely than the non-adopted to attempt suicide?
Why can’t we have this conversation?

And again, Why is it that we can’t have this conversation?

Elle Cuardaigh is author of The Tangled Red Thread.

Identity

From an article in Severance magazine.

Growing up as an adoptee, I frequently fielded questions from friends and strangers alike. “Do you know who your real mother is?” “Do you think you look like your parents?” “What [ethnicity] are you?” The first two questions were easy to answer: My mother is my real mother. No, I don’t look like either of them. But the third question hounded me my whole life. It speaks to a universal quest to identify with a group. And it speaks to the need of others to figure out who we are. For an adoptee, another question swirls around in the mix: Are we valid?

On one hand, our identity is who we believe we are, and on the other it’s who others believe us to be. In essence, the identity question is two-part: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who do you think I am?’ Adopted or not, we work to reconcile our personal vision of who we are versus who others believe we are. Yet when you’re adopted, there’s an added layer. For me, and I imagine for many adoptees, there’s a struggle to answer the question ‘Who are you?’ When others challenge our identity because of our adoption status, it’s difficult enough; but it’s further complicated by the fact that we have incomplete information about our genetic roots and, therefore, we can’t answer. And even when we get that information, we’re still left wondering how others view us.

Now my story –

I’ve been going through 30-40 years of saved clutter, old letters to and from family members, etc. Yesterday I found my OMNI Berkeley Personality Test results. One does this for their own self and asks some people close to them to do it regarding that person’s perspectives on one’s personality. I had my husband, my daughter, my two sisters, my parents and my in-laws all do this for me back in the early 1990s. Then one compares how one sees one’s self with how other see them. It does give great insights.

I knew that both of my parents were adopted. Since finally learning who all 4 of my grandparents were so late in life (after the age of 60), I’ve also been reading and learning as much as I can about the effects of adoption on adoptees as well as on their descendants. Much of that learning I’ve been sharing in this blog.

No doubt, adoptees have all sorts of reasons for discovering their birth or genetic backgrounds. My mom felt compelled to try to connect with her birth mother but by the time she made the effort, it was too late. Her mother had already been dead for several years leaving my mom devastated. The state of Tennessee wouldn’t release her adoption file to her at that time because they could not determine the status of her birth father who had actually been dead for 30 years (they really didn’t try very hard). It’s a pity because in her adoption file that I now possess was a picture of her mother holding her for the last time before she was taken to be adopted.

In the Severance article, she writes – “I projected her need to know about the baby she’d given up, basing that assumption only on my own feelings toward my children—trying to imagine how a woman could part with her child. I thought perhaps she might want to know that I’d had a good life.” This is so much like my mom’s own explanation of her need to know. My own reason to do the search was to learn the truth about my own ethnic identity. Simply being “American” as my mom once told me because due to adoption they didn’t know, didn’t cut it for me. It is surprising how important in our melting pot of a country, there is still so much emphasis on our ethnic heritage. It was my public school girl days friends making a big deal about theirs that made me feel like something important was missing in my own life. Even the Census forces you to record some ethnicity other than American.

I am so glad to know today about my Danish paternal grandfather, my Scottish maternal grandmother and all of the English and Irish parts of me. I’m less fond of the strong streak of Confederates in my maternal line but grateful my Yankee paternal grandmother and that Danish paternal grandfather balance my karma out in that respect. I’ve certainly had fun exploring the traditions and places where my DNA originated. It is amazing how often Denmark turns up in my life before I even knew I had that culture in my background.

The Rights of a Non-Surrendering Father

This is such a complicated case. It really took reading through the lengthy legal opinions regarding this case (Kruithoff v. Catholic Charities of W. Mich. – In re Doe) to try and make some sense out of the situation. I leave it to my readers if they have that much interest to wade through the complexities. Below I will include a couple of reasonable arguments made in descent.

What is involved is the Michigan Safe Delivery of Newborns Law (SDNL) which is intended to prevent the abandonment of unwanted infants. The mother gave birth under her maiden name. There is also an indication that she was taking Methadone during pregnancy, so that the infant was born addicted to that substance. She also made allegations of domestic violence against the father, while acknowledging that she was still legally married at the time of the infants birth. She did not provide the father’s name.

Known or unknown to her was that the father had filed a petition for divorce and request for the custody of his unborn child the day before the mother gave birth. That is a part of the complication in the determination of this case.

It was never determined whether the paternal custody of the child was in the best interests of the child or whether the accusations of domestic violence were warranted.

Upon voluntary surrender by the mother at the hospital where she gave birth, custody of the infant was given to Catholic Charities. It appears they did not knock themselves out to identity, locate or notify the father. The father is trying to regain custody of his now 3 yr old son. The story has been published by a Grand Rapids Michigan newspaper with the title – Biological father sues Catholic Charities over newborn’s adoption.

Even as difficult as it has been for the courts to sort this one out, it is difficult to know what the best interests of the child are at this point. Both the surrendering and the non-surrendering parents had their rights terminated prior to the finalization of adoption proceedings.

At the end of the legal record were these statements of dissent.

To presume that it would somehow be in Doe’s best interest-the standard under the SDNL-to rip him from the arms of the only family he has known and place him with a stranger, as if Doe was somehow a mere piece of property instead of a living person.

The Legislature therefore enacted a policy that prefers to err on the side of protecting the safety of the child and of the surrendering parent, even at the possible detriment to the nonsurrendering parent.

Kept – An Adoption Journal

This is causing some noise. They say of this journaling tool that it “has all the same heart and soul and the only change we made to this adoption version was to the pregnancy page. We now call that ‘The Beginning’ and have the prompts ‘how we found out about you,’ ‘how we told our loved ones about you,’ and ‘how we met’.”

On their Facebook page, one man writes – you obviously haven’t talked to any adult adoptees about this book. So many of us would have told you that your company name has a very obvious meaning to us. Also treating us as if our story began with adoption is effectively an erasure of our origins.

The company owner of Kept replied – Thank you for your phone call today. I really appreciate your willingness to engage and help us learn about the adoptee experience. As we talked about, we had only consulted with adoptive parents on what they would love to record from their child’s life. And we had a huge misstep with not consulting with adult adoptees on this product. A lot would have been caught. The heart was to record memories from when the adoptee was adopted into their adoptive family, but we didn’t realize how starting here would be harmful and insensitive. Thanks for your willingness to keep the conversation going with us. We really appreciate it.

Another one wrote – I’m speechless. Did you talk to a single adopted person? I’m an adoptee, a Licensed Professional Counselor who counsels adoptees, an author of adoption resources, and an adoptee civil rights advocate who led the multiyear effort to pass a 2021 landmark adoptee rights bill in Connecticut. I understand Kept is your company name, but it is beyond tone deaf, insulting and egregiously ignorant to publish a journal to document an adoptee’s life under such a name. You have seriously mis-stepped here, not only regarding adoptees but adoptive parents. I’d withdraw this product until you have consulted with adoptees (and at least some birth/first mothers) and LISTENED TO THEM.

And again, the company owner had to humbly reply – We didn’t. We should have consulted with people with exactly your experience. We should have listened to learned so much more before we launched this product. I’m dumbfounded about my own tone-deafness with the language of our brand name and how it would cause hurt related to this product. It was just a huge, unintentional, albeit hurtful misstep. We do have the product on hold until we’ve consulted with enough adoptees and can see a way forward. We are listening. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

The response from the adoptee above was this – Thank you for listening and responding. As you have abruptly discovered, there is a great deal of pain and anger in the adoptee community about how our experience has been unseen or actively silenced. I believe you are actually in a position to help adoptees, as well as adoptive and birth/first parents, given your desire to find a way to help parents hold the life stories of their children.

Yet another adoptee bluntly wrote – It’s obvious you didn’t talk to a single adult Adoptee. “Kept” is an awful name for an adoption journal. If I had been kept, I would have grown up with my biological family. Perhaps “Bought” would be a more appropriate title. After-all most of these adoptive parents dropped thousands purchasing their newborn babies.

Repeatedly, the company owner has to apologize with basically the same message over and over again.

Here is another adoptee’s response – As an adoptee this is highly insensitive. Adopted children have a very traumatic start to life, this leads to developmental trauma which affects them through to adulthood. Their life doesn’t begin when they are adopted. So much happens prior. Adoption should be for a child to keep them safe. Their journey should be honoured. The name kept is disgusting. Adoption happens because we were given away, point blank period. Please do some research and educate yourself because you are doing a disservice to every single adopted child.

Not crystal clear about the problem yet ? Here’s another – Calling a book “kept” that’s meant for an adoptee is really tone deaf. An adoptee is given away, relinquished, sold. That’s nice that you talked to some of your friends who have adopted, and some adoptive parents but did you ever talk to an adult adoptee about this? Did you ever consult what kind of information the person who the book is ultimately for might want to know when they’re older? Their journey, our journey, my journey, stared with my natural family. I have a history with them too. Every adoptee has a first family. Do better. Talk to adult adoptees when making a book for them.

And another – Just here to echo the comments of others. As an adoptee, I find using your brand/company name for this type of product incredibly tone deaf and insensitive. We are not kept. We are people who have endured trauma after trauma. Please pull this from your line and research deeper. Consult with those this actually affects.

And another – It’s obvious this journal was made for kept people — that is, people who were *not* adopted. Adopted people are quite literally *not* kept. We are given away. “Kept” is a term which refers to those who were *not* given away. The only person who could possibly think this is tasteful is one who *was* kept. Please listen to the voices of adult adoptees. We know adoption better than the people you know who have adopted.

And this – I am glad that you are now intending to speak with adopted people, but I am really disappointed that you had to be told/asked to do that. If someone wrote a book about Black people, or people who had Jewish heritage, or people who were refugees from a war, without speaking to these people or at least researching their experiences, it would be incredibly offensive and wrong. As is this. To which she added later as a reply – I am impressed, though, that you are now considering it; and have acknowledged your action’s impacts; often adopted people are dismissed or bullied when they speak of their experiences and viewpoints, or show society how damaging its actions are, so thank you for that.

Then this one made me smile – It works for me. Adoptees are “kept” in return for their services: replacement placeholder for the real child adopters can’t have/to fuel a savior syndrome/virtue signaling tool/to carry on the line of genetic strangers/to look after adopters in their old age/to provide a generic childhood so someone can acquire the title of ‘mother’ or ‘father’…Kept: having the expression of principles, ideas, etc., controlled, dominated, or determined by one whose money provides support.

Someone is working on something called “Kept” about women who were kept by their teen moms and comparing them side by side with stories of women who were relinquished for domestic infant adoption. In adoptionland, “kept” people are those who are NOT adopted.

The company prides itself on using the colors of nature for its baby memory books. One commenter wrote – This is APPALLING.I was not kept. I was TAKEN. Who the hell thought this was a good idea??? And ‘fog’ as one of the colors? You have got to be kidding.

2nd Chance Adoption

Dax is a 16-year-old who has experienced the heartbreak faced by far too many youth in the foster care system. Seven years after being adopted, this teen was told it wasn’t going to work out when Dax came out as LGBTQ. He says, the adoptive parents stopped loving him anymore because of who he is.

He thinks that maybe he needs a same-sex couple or at least someone who is understanding about his sexual identification.

He has been featured on a News segment in Oklahoma.

In a Patheos piece, I read –

A family adopts a 9 yr old child, cares for them 7 years and then kicks them out because they are LGBTQ. They ask “Who does that ? What is wrong with people ?

And I get it. My sons live a rather isolated life at the moment due to where we live in sparsely populated rural forested land and because they have received all of their education at home. One of my sons may eventually “come out”. There is more than one person in my husband’s family who has such a sexual identification.

The news segment doesn’t tell us anything about Dax’s former family or whether religion came into their decision.

However, a couple of nights after the segment aired, a woman wrote the station via Facebook.

“We are a LGBTQ+ supportive DHS approved foster/adoptive home. We are open for teen placement. WE HAVE CHICKENS !! (Dax has raised and loves chickens).

The News channel has put her in contact with the child’s case worker, so there may be a happy ending to this story.

I got some of this information from The Friendly Atheist at Patheos, Hemant Mehta author.