It’s The Industry That Brainwashes

From an adoptee – Let me be clear about my position on adoption. As someone who was taken from his homeland, I have accepted a truth that what happened to me was not adoption. I now work to recover from the brainwashing and propaganda of an industry that originated from human trafficking and child slavery. Such crimes that have found a way to hide behind a more comfortable euphemism: adoption.

At this point, do I get upset when I come across someone who is still brainwashed? Absolutely! It takes me a few minutes to remember I was there once not too long ago. It’s the industry and those who have perverted the term Adoption, and have made the billions off human lives, our lives.

Those who have been brainwashed by the propaganda can not be blamed. I was caught up in the cover-up scheme as well. (blogger’s note – as I was myself, the child of two adoptees.) It is a process of deprogramming ourselves, not from the fantasies or illusions, but from outright coercion and deception. What we refer to as the narratives are in fact the messages produced by the industry’s propaganda machine.

I am fighting in this war against the adoption industry, not against adoption itself. I am saddened that so many continue to be brainwashed, ignorant and stuck in their fantasies, or willfully holding onto their denial. At times it’s overwhelming and hopeless, triggering and depressing, but truth will prevail and I am inspired by the growing number of others who are also fighting against this criminal scheme.

We were once held prisoner by our own fear, but now we are finding strength and courage in community resilience. We are learning how to unite and fight together. Where we are hundreds today, there will be millions in the future.

Baby Box Push Back

I’ve written here before about Baby Boxes. The anonymous way to leave your baby that is popping up – not only all over the United States but all over the world. However, it appears that all is not well and good in Baby Box land and some activists are speaking out by making some realistic arguments.

Here is one example from Colorado (which seems to be out front of a lot of shifting perspectives these days). Lori Holden who writes as Lavender Luz recently testified at a hearing for Baby Boxes in Colorado. She has a lot to say – you can read it at this LINK>Colorado’s Baby Box Bill: My Testimony At The State Capitol.

It has occurred to me that Baby Boxes are a commercial business interest – the cost is $16,000 per box (plus maintenance) – while continuing an enduring failure to support mothers in crisis. And regardless of safety features, something could still go wrong related to the box itself. She notes “If we truly understood baby’s brains and what makes for secure attachment we would not encourage anonymous and impersonal Baby Boxes. We would encourage MORE connection for a vulnerable mother and her infant, not less. Baby boxes make this lifelong process of forming connection to self and others even more difficult by the disconnections inherent in such an impersonal dropoff.”

Lori shares another voice against Baby Boxes – LINK>Stop Baby Boxes Now which is “An adoptee-centered non-partisan website that serves as an educational source and tool to de-propagandize and deconstruct the Safe Haven Baby Box myth and movement.” Doubt the commercial interest ? – I found this LINK>A Scorched Earth Lawsuit – revealing. “The baby box company filed suit in Federal Court against the Miami-based traditional safe haven advocacy organization A Safe Haven for Newborns/Gloria Silverio Foundation, its founder and director Nick Silverio, the South Trail Fire Rescue District, and Amy Bollen, its public relations director, accursing them of slander, defamation, and “tortuous interference with contract or business.”

When I was trying to get original birth information for my mom, I did have brief contact with Gregory Luce – LINK>Boxes at Any Cost. He is a Minnesota-based lawyer and an adoptee rights activist. He is the founder of Adoptee Rights Law Center PLLC and the executive director of Adoptees United Inc.

It Was Not What You Think

A Facebook acquaintance of mine, who is also an adoptee, delivered a made for Sunday sermon –

Here’s a serious question. Why is it so many couples who have experienced issues with infertility or unable to keep a fetus viable in utero, believe God is or has called them to adopt, only after they’ve spent thousands of dollars, spent years of time trying to have their own baby.

Seriously, if God was really calling you to adopt why didn’t he/she/they call you before wasting the time and money?

Also why do you think telling an adopted child about how much time and money you spent trying to get and maintain a pregnancy will translate to them how God chose you to be their parents when clearly if you had been successful you never would have adopted?

And how do you justify telling an adopted child it was God’s will for you to be their parents? Like isn’t this God powerful enough to put a baby in your barren womb?

Why is it not gods will for you to accept your struggle to conceive as god telling you you shouldn’t have children? But it’s the adopted child’s responsibility to believe it was gods will for them to leave their family of origin and become the child you couldn’t create or deliver?

100 years of propaganda, and Indoctrination.

Has convinced you that adoption is a way to build a family.

This is commodifying children.

Adoption was never suppose to be about finding infants for infertile couples. Adoption prior to Georgia Tann was about finding homes for orphaned children. (Blogger’s note – my own mother was a victim of Georgia Tann’s practices.)

Inquiring minds want to know.

Blogger’s note – searching for an image for today’s blog led me to this LINK>How Do I Know If I’m Called to Adopt? by Lauren Elizabeth Miller. Which led me to look at her “About” page. She says “My next greatest calling is writing and speaking about faith, motherhood, and adoption.” She is an adoptive mother of children from China. In her blog, I appreciate this line – “While all of us can do something, not everyone is called to adopt.”

Yet she also writes – Our family has always landed in churches full of adoptive families that have affirmed our family’s call to adopt. We temporarily moved to Franklin, TN right before we were old enough to start the adoption process for China. (China requires both parents to be 30 years old.) The first church we visited was filled with adoptive families and stories that re-affirmed our calling. However – You will have family members or friends who will question your call to adopt.

Blogger’s note – partly in answer to my FB acquaintance – Evangelical Christian churches play an outsized role in promoting adoption.

Treatment Resistant – Really ?

An adoptee writes – It amazes me how ignorant most people are about how to speak kindly to an adopted person who is advocating for adoptee rights and adoption reform activists.

That’s because everyone doesn’t see the gaping wound inside us. If they could see it, they’d fall to their knees telling us how sorry they are for our loss and apologize for insisting we feel, think, and talk only the way the adoption industry’s propaganda would like us to. Along with having numerous mental health diagnosis and labels (and they were all a lie because ”they” made the wound about behavior) and then made an incorrect diagnosis and even that incorrectly and so, treated us for the wrong thing. Yeah, that is what happens.

We got labeled “treatment resistant”, like somehow this twisted up lie we had to buy into, with everything bottled up within us, was more important than our own feelings and thoughts about our very own life experiences. Like having very normal feelings related to a very abnormal situation made us bad, or sick, or troubled children and

Why?

Because, up until adult adopted people found their voice and started using it, to educate, and get laws changed, even the mental health professionals didn’t recognize the trauma of relinquishment. The focus was always on how the child was not adjusting and the treatment consisted mostly of behavior modification. In other words, we were being groomed to be compliant adoptees.

Some of us were just too stubborn. There was no way my adoptive mom was getting the space in my heart I’d given to my first mother or the smaller space reserved for my foster parents and brother. I loved her and all but I was determined to hold onto my lived experience.

In fairy tales and children’s stories – there was a pea, and the flying monkeys were never bad, just exploited by power, and the truth really is – movies about orphans are propaganda for the adoption industry. It’s time we stop expecting children to play house. We need to start caring for and loving them through the losses they have experienced, before they landed with you, their adoptive parents. It’s time we allow a child in need of care by strangers, to continue to keep their own factual birth certificate and for courts to issue permanent guardianship papers, instead of a fictitious birth certificate. Every attempt must be made to keep the child with the family they were born into, until that effort has been completely and truthfully exhausted. Expediency is not an excuse for running roughshod over families.

So much of an adoptee’s time is spent going round and round, trying to make sense of this huge lie they are being forced to live. Many simply have not yet recognized how to blame anyone else, which is ok to do during the sorting out phase, just don’t forget to go back and clean up your campsite, once you’ve gained some clarity.

It Will Take A Lot

I often wonder if I will ever run out of things related to adoption to write about here but everyday I seem to find something and so, until I can’t seem to do that anymore, I suppose I’ll persist. Today’s inspiration comes from this admission from an adoptive mother –

After adopting our daughter and experiencing some pretty clear effects of her being separated from her mom, I have changed my mindset on adoption. While I know realistically that there will always be a need of some sort for a program to care for relinquished children, I don’t believe in the current system and think it needs a complete overhaul.

She admits – I did not do enough research before we went through the process and relied too heavily on the agency to provide me information. Now I realize their bias, pursuit of financial gain, etc. I did everything wrong – did a gender reveal, had a baby shower, did a GoFundMe, ick ick ick. After placement, I could just FEEL that my baby needed more than I was giving.

I also know that a woman who is struggling with fertility issues that desperately wants to start a family is going to be mighty difficult to dissuade – the flood of savior stories and toxic positivity that is shoved in hopeful adoptive parents’ faces is overwhelming. And despite all of the very valid points that have been made by those who know repeatedly, it will take a lot of education and dedication to overcome the propaganda and the emotional response a woman experiences in order to make a decision that is best for the child and not for her own desires.

So what to share with a woman who is struggling with fertility issues, who desperately wants to start a family ? I often see the very first suggestion is therapy to reconcile her infertility issues and realize that adoption is never a replacement for a natural born child.

Read The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier. I have read it myself and I still see it turn up recommended as the very best possible perspective into adoption trauma from a woman who is both an adoptive and a biological mother as well as a therapist to adoptees and their families. She has tons of insight about all of it.

It is very important to listen to adoptee voices. Here is an analogy – We would never do open heart surgery without an expert surgeon who performs that surgery every day. While a patient (adoptive parent) is part of that process, they are not the ones (adoptees) who know what it feels like to walk in those shoes. A hopeful adoptive parent is inherently biased against hearing any truth about the pitfalls of adoption. They often only listen to the voices of other adoptive parents who have benefitted from adopting. You will rarely hear these discussing the risks, only the positive aspects of adopting a child into their life.

It is important to explain what a for profit enterprise adoption is. The coercion of birth mothers, our society’s lack of focus on family preservation, the option of being a foster parent who strives for family reunification over fostering simply to adopt, explain the guardianship option, share the loss of identity and anything else that a mature adoptee knows about it all.

Remaining connected to those genetic mirrors that the child’s original family is of vital importance. There is occasionally a need for long term care, when the parents could not or would not parent their child(ren), and the extended family members were unwilling or unable to be a placement resource for those children. Adoption is much more nuanced than most people realize and many adoptees feel negatively about their adoptions. Many who choose to be foster parents are actually trying to help and actively trying to support families in crisis to reunify. That said, the training and support is abysmal.

It Isn’t Fair

It could happen to anyone . . . today’s tragic story.

I am being forced to sign an adoption agreement tomorrow. With it comes a gag order. I won’t be able to speak to my experiences as much after that. My kids were in foster care because of my ex. I’ve been ruled fit however the children have been bad mouthed so much by the fosters that they are unwilling to return home. It’s this or I have to go to trial and lose any hope of contact with them. I am only doing this at their request and at the last possible minute. I always wanted my children. I always loved and supported and kept them safe. It’s not my fault I’m poor and the system is abusive. I fought hard for almost 10 years and it was never going to be good enough for the department. I’m beyond destroyed.

I submitted yesterday. I had to go in open court today and sign and consent. The judge was patronizing. The kids refusing to come home would mean I would just by default lose in court. I asked for therapy and assessments but because the kids’ therapists said that it wouldn’t be in the kids best interest, the social worker refused and the judge refused to allow it. Anyway, an assessment would have come out against reunification. They argued that however it happened, they were damaged now so we just have to make the best of it.

As the blog author, I relate to this comment – I cannot imagine the anguish you are experiencing. I am so sorry that this is happening, has happened and unfortunately, will happen again- to someone else.

In fact, I believe that my mom ended up adopted because Georgia Tann threatened to have her declared unfit because she wasn’t able to find a way to provide financially for her self and her baby quickly enough. Tann’s good friend, Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley, was certain to have done it if she was requested to.

Oversharing In The Classroom

I am frequently surprised how common some connection to adoption is. If you were an adoptee, how would YOU have felt if your teacher in school openly shared with the classroom information about her “adoption journey” as it is ongoing? How would hearing details about “matching” and “failed adoptions have affected you!? How would a “slideshow” announcing the birth of teacher’s adopted child affect you?

These questions were put to my all things adoption group – and adoptees and former foster youth were asked to be the only responders (and not parents who had given a child up for adoption, adoptive parents or foster caregivers).

Some replies –

I would have been so uncomfortable but wouldn’t have known how to voice that as a student. Even now as an adult who is coming into my power, I still shake like a leaf when I speak my truth about the trauma of adoption.

My 5th grade teacher adopted a boy they were fostering. It wasn’t infant adoption with that whole journey, but we all certainly knew this boy. He was always in her classroom during lunch or after school. As I was only 10, I guess it solidified a lot of the propaganda I was fed my whole life. I liked it because I felt like I related to it? I didn’t know any other adoptees at the time. But I was a child! As an adult out of the fog, looking back, I feel very uncomfortable about it. I’m not sure how else to say it.

I would have felt very awkward. It seems so very personal to share with people at school. Especially children. They aren’t in a position to understand or put into context what any of that means. I would also feel that it was attention seeking behavior. It’s just someone playing at being a hero. No thanks.

Would have made me f**king uncomfortable as a kid, and it makes me furious as an adult. Don’t freaking normalize the act of switching babies from one family to another. We need kids growing up with a better understanding of how damaging our current way of dealing with family disfunction is. If this was one of my kids teachers I would demand it stop.

I would still keep my own adoption a secret. And I would feel terrorized.

I was very much “in the fog” for my entire childhood and most of adulthood so I wouldn’t have noticed anything problematic about it. I wanted to be like other kids so much that I probably would have been kind of glad to see someone else in my daily life was affected by adoption too, as it would mean I would be less singled out as having an alternative family structure.

I have to say I find the failed adoption thing the weirdest part, then and now. I was always assured that adoption was permanent and they wouldn’t have it any other way so I’m sure that probably would have made me feel …uncomfortable? Normalizing the process of ….deciding you don’t want that child after all. That is what they mean by failed adoption, right?

Someone else thought that last one wasn’t what was meant in this particular situation (though sadly such a think as second chance adoptions actually do happen in reality). So the counter response was – I have to imagine by failed adoption they mean the baby’s natural parents decided not to go through with the adoption. Which is always disturbing. Hopeful adoptive parents act like that was something bad that someone did to them, or they were “tricked” or that someone took their baby away.

I would have been so upset and not even known why because that’s pretty much how triggering worked when I was a kid. I can look back and connect all the dots now, but not then. I would have been a mess. It would have manifested into days and maybe weeks of negative behavior to myself and to others.

This makes my stomach churn now. I can imagine it would have affected me similarly at the time but I wouldn’t have known exactly why.

I remember being 11 or 12 years old, when the a teacher started talking to me about Child Protective Services and my potential removal. I know it’s not the same but I heavily didn’t want to associate home life and school life. Because it’s their personal thing, OK mention it once I hear you, but it would have me outright avoiding their class, probably with some defiance, if it were repetitive. I don’t know if I would have even had the language then to express my feelings.

If you doubt adoptees suffer trauma, consider what the above adoptees have said consistently.

The Wrong Use Of Religion

I’ve never heard a religious person say that God decided they wouldn’t have children.

God is supposed to be without flaws or mistakes in all ways right? But not being able to have children is God’s way of saying adoption, when you’ve exhausted all the other angles?

Religious people never accept that infertility was God’s way of saying – you won’t have children.

It was just Jesus saying – take someone else’s child, believe that child is the child I took and returned for you. Take that child because I gave you money instead.

God forbid any of these families might chose to help mom enough to keep her child. No God’s calling wasn’t – help this woman with a job, so she can keep her baby. God’s calling wasn’t – teach her something, so that she has a skill. God’s calling wasn’t to be the neighbors that help a person grow and do better like she wants.

God’s only calling was take her child. Help her with food, clothing and bills till baby is here. God’s calling was support her emotions in your favor during pregnancy and make her feel like she will be part of your family. God’s calling was to take a child from a mom at her worst, when she’s trying to do what’s best.

F**k that God, he’s a f**king monster. All this is just propaganda to continue the practice of adoption oppression.