Ownership

“Naming is claiming – go for it!!!”

There’s power in a name, naming and claiming a child for yourself. So many adoptive parents, re-name the child they adopt, and thereby seek to make it something the child was not born as – their own.

Tied like charms to a ribbon are thorny bits of memory…perhaps pre-verbal. A sense that one had been someone else “before” adoption.

There’s far too much power given to adoptive parents over a child. When they endow you with a name of their own choosing, you become their property.

An adoptee was always who they were born as. No one thought to ask their permission before they changed the child’s birth certificate to create a false identity for them because they were simply too young to ask.

Of all the reforms I have been learning about from the adoptees themselves, not changing the names they were born with or re-doing their birth certificates to take ownership of them, like one would with the title to a car, would be a respectful and considerate decision.

If they want to change what the world calls them when they are old enough to understand the power that is their own name, then that is their choice, not someone else’s.

Equal Citizenship ?

Adoptees are less free than other citizens of the United States. Most citizens take for granted the right to know who they were born as. Adoptees have their birth names taken from them to be replaced by the name their adoptive parents want them to have.

Most citizens have their original birth certificates. Adoptees are given a falsified birth certificate making it appear that their adoptive parents actually gave birth to them. With some, even the location of their birth is changed to make it more difficult for them to learn about their true origins.

All adoptees endure a form of culture clash – for some more extreme than for others. Some adoptees are affected by ethnic, socioeconomic or regional differences than what they would have experienced if they had remained in the families they were born into.

Our society is adoption-focused. It is NOT adoptee focused. In other words – the focus is on the people who want children instead of on the children themselves.

Always A Child

My Mom After Adoption

Children grow up into adults. That is their only real occupation through almost 20 years of life. Some children have to grow up early. My mom gave birth to me at the age of 16. I married at the age of 18 and had my first child at 19.

When I look at my 18 year old son, I can’t imagine him married with a child. He is intelligent and has an abundance of common sense but as his mother, he is still a bit of a child to me, though the maturing is obviously taking hold and he spends much of his daily waking life doing men’s work with his dad on our farm.

There is a subset of humanity that is never allowed to grow up – adoptees. Certainly, they pile on the years and mature, just like any other human being but society and governmental agencies treat them as though they were still a child.

Why do I say this ? Because they are denied rights that any other citizen takes for granted. When their adoption is decreed by a court of law, their identity is stolen away from them. Often, their name is changed and their original birth certificate is amended to make it appear that their adoptive parents actually gave birth to them. Sometimes, even the place where they were born is changed.

Then, when they become an adult at 18 or 21 years of age and because they know they were adopted (or for some who were never told the truth and take a DNA test and receive the unpleasant and sudden surprise that they do not derive their origins from the people they believed were the source), when they attempt to learn the truth of their identity, origins and heritage – they are denied the very normal and simple human right of knowing who they really are.

It is time for the LIES to end and for ALL states in this country (United States of America) to open their files to the adults who were once a child that was adopted by strangers to raise as their own.

Legitimacy

“In the soul of every adoptee is an eternal flame of hope
for reunion and reconciliation with those he has lost
through private or public disaster.”
~ Jean Paton, Orphan Voyage

The blankness of our past is like a constant gnawing at our heart. It creates a hole that can’t be filled, a vacuum for which there is no substitute, it is a piece of our soul that was taken from us. It is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, the center of a wheel missing two spokes. My mom was not unique in her yearning to know who her original mother was.

The withholding of birth information from adoptees is an affront to human dignity. Most Americans assume that the falsification of adoptees’ birth certificates arose from well-meaning social workers anxious to relieve adoptees of the stigma of illegitimacy.

However, my mom’s parents were married at the time of her conception and her birth and at the time she was taken for adoption by my adoptive grandparents.

Of greater concern was the possibility of the original family tracing such a child and disrupting a well established adoptive relationship. Especially if the surrender had been forced, as was the case with my maternal grandmother.

The rationale was that in order to be secure in the position of adopting children, anonymity was essential.

“We never tell the natural mother or reveal to others where the child is and where it is being placed for adoption,” Georgia Tann told a reporter for the Commercial Appeal in 1948. Her letter to my original maternal grandmother certainly revealed nothing about my mom having been taken from Memphis to Arizona.