Reproductive Discrimination

Struck v Sec of Defense

This case straddles both the issues of abortion and adoption. Story courtesy of LINK>Teri Kanefield. You can read the entire essay at that link.

Susan Struck joined the Air Force at the age of 23 in 1967. The recruiter warned her that she would be discharged if she got pregnant. She was sent to Vietnam. When Struck learned she was pregnant, her commanding officer gave her a choice: Get an abortion or leave the Air Force. At that time, abortion was legal in the armed services. Struck refused an abortion on the grounds that she was Catholic — although a lapsed Catholic. She wanted to give her child up for adoption and remain in the Air Force.

According to Air Force regulations, when an officer became pregnant, a board of officers was convened to hear the case. On October 6, 1970, Struck appeared before the board and asked if she could use her accumulated leave to have the baby, arrange for the adoption, and then return. The board refused her request. A few weeks later, on October 26, the secretary of the Air Force reviewed the findings of the board and ordered Struck to be discharged effective October 28, 1970.

With the help of the ACLU in Washington state, Struck took her case to court. Colonel Max B. Bralliar, commanding officer of the Minot Air Force Base, testified that Struck “demonstrated excellent ability in the performance of the managerial aspects of the work units and an excellent knowledge and application of nursing care principles,” and that she was highly dedicated with a “professionally correct and mature attitude.”

Meanwhile, Struck returned home to have her baby and arrange for the adoption. She gave birth to a girl, who she called L.B., which stood for “Little Baby-san” or, if she was in a different sort of mood, “Little Bastard.” She selected the adoptive parents, Julie and Art, who agreed to Struck’s terms: the baby would be raised Catholic, and Struck would be allowed to visit. On December 10, 1970, the adoption was finalized. Julie and Art named the baby Tanya Marie.

On June 4, 1971, the district court ruled against her, so she appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Five months later, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s order. She filed a petition for rehearing, but was again denied. One of the judges dissented for two reasons: first, men with temporary periods of disability were not discharged, and second, he found it irrational that only the natural mother, not the natural father, was declared unfit for service after the birth of a child. With the dissent, the ruling was 2-1 against Struck.

Susan Struck wanted to take her case to the Supreme Court. Because Ginsburg was then the director of the ACLU’s newly-formed Women’s Rights Project, Struck’s case found its way to Ginsburg’s desk. Ginsburg thought Struck’s case was the perfect case to challenge abortion laws as unequal under the Fourteenth Amendment. The gender distinction in the Air Force policy made absolutely no sense. Once the baby was adopted and Struck was legally no longer a mother, there was no reason to deem her unfit for service.

Moreover, Struck’s case made two vital points: A woman should decide whether or not she would have an abortion, and abortion laws naturally discriminate on the basis of sex or gender. As Ginsburg said, nobody is for abortion. What people are for or against is a woman’s right to choose. For Ginsburg, the issue wasn’t about privacy. It was about autonomy. It was about a woman’s right to control her own life and her own body. Moreover, the facts would make the case unlikely to trigger a backlash.

Ginsburg planned to ask for a narrow ruling that would make the public aware of the issue without turning the abortion question into a hot political mess. To Ginsburg’s regret, as she was working on Struck’s case, another case–the case of Jane Roe–made it to the Supreme Court first. The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade extended the right to privacy to the right to have access to an abortion.

Ginsburg believed the Court’s ruling was too broad. The sweeping decision caused the abortion laws of forty-six states that restricted abortions to be instantly rendered unconstitutional, even the most liberal of them. Ginsburg feared the decision would turn the issue into a political one, mobilizing the pro-life movement.

Remembering Tam

Today’s story by a grieving friend (not the blogger) but such an important acknowledgement – remembering Tam on the anniversary of her birth.

She cried for weeks after she arrived. Tam spent years in the orphanage back in Vietnam, it became her home and the other children her family. She played a cassette tape of all the songs they sang together. Each time it ended, the crying would die down as she flipped it to the other side. The crying would resume after she hit the play button. Profound pain and sadness. Grief.

Tam was blind, yet moved with ease, feeling with her hands, smelling with her nose. She took care of herself meticulously, especially her hair. She refused to use a service dog and reluctant to use her cane, never wanting to draw that kind of attention to herself. She had a good amount of self-pride.

I graduated from college in 2000 with a degree in psychology. I had also wanted to minor in social work which seemed to come to me more easily. Second semester senior year was just a bit too late to choose a new major, or even a minor. Since then, I’ve surrounded myself with social workers for most of my career.

Midterms are one of the last ways to boost your GPA, and I could have used a boost! I also received my acceptance letter from UConn to their master’s program at their school of family studies. I make the call back home from my dorm room to share the news. “Tam is in the hospital, call everyone to come home.”

The story of how she died has been told a number of different ways in the media over the years. What hasn’t been included in Tam’s story though is that as adopted people, we live with layers of pain, trauma and in a constant state of grief. Too often it is disenfranchised grief, to the point we aren’t aware our bodies still feel the losses we’ve endured. Too often an act of suicide is confused with wanting to stop the pain. To stop feeling. Sometimes, we act impulsively after a fight or argument as we register it as a threat. This threat triggers our fear response. Fear of rejection. Anger at ourselves.

Whatever it is, we just want the pain to go away. We are tired of feeling. We want it to stop. Suicide continues to be stigmatized, and those, like me, live with shame and guilt. It’s why there is a movement to normalize these thoughts and feelings, so people can share them to be seen, heard and validated. It’s powerful when someone connects with you and says “I see you, thank you for helping me understand your pain.” With that kind of connection, a life can be saved.

The truth is that Tam died in 2000. Both her life and death have profoundly changed me. I continue to turn my pain into purpose. To keep telling her story. Many people don’t realize how important it is when you’ve been adopted. Your story is told by others, often to shape a narrative. I strive to tell Tam’s truth. Even through her death, she deserves to be seen. Her pain and how she lived makes her human.

It was her birthday last week. I now call it the anniversary of her birth. Often it is a traumaversary for those who are adopted. I will never know what she would have been like at this stage of adulthood. I do remember her laugh. What a laugh!

A Very Mixed Bag

Angelina Jolie with all 6 of her children

I recently saw LINK>Angelina Jolie in the movie The Bone Collector. I was fascinated by what has been defined as her “bee-stung lips.” I remembered she had adopted children from several countries. So I thought, as I had never written in this blog with her circumstances in mind, I would give it a go. I wondered about her ethnicity and did a deep dive down the rabbit hole of her parentage. It is no wonder she is a humanitarian because her mother, LINK>Marcheline Bertrand was. Her mother was involved with the activist John Trudell at the end of her life. It is worth spending some time looking into the Wikipedias for both Jolie and Bertrand for more insight. I was never a huge fan, though I have seen more than one movie that she acted in.

Today, I will focus on her children and an intersection with her humanitarian work – Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt who was born in Cambodia, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt who was born in Vietnam, and Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt who was born in Ethiopia, are all adopted. Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt was born in Namibia. Her twins – Knox Léon Jolie-Pitt and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt were born in France. Her twins were conceived via in-vitro fertilization and she gave birth to them via caesarean section at the age of 33.

In an article at LINK>Harper’s Bazaar, Angelina Jolie discusses her adopted children. There is more at the link but here are a few quotes attributed to her – “All adopted children come with a beautiful mystery of a world that is meeting yours. When they are from another race and foreign land, that mystery, that gift, is so full.” She has also been quoted as saying – “They are not entering your world, you are entering each other’s worlds.”

Regarding Maddox, she has said “Cambodia was the country that made me aware of refugees. It made me engage in foreign affairs in a way I never had, and join UNHCR. Above all, it made me a mom.” Jolie has said that “Each (adoption) is a beautiful way of becoming family. What is important is to speak with openness about all of it and to share. ‘Adoption’ and ‘orphanage’ are positive words in our home. With my adopted children, I can’t speak of pregnancy, but I speak with much detail and love about the journey to find them and what it was like to look in their eyes for the first time.”

She has been heavily involved in humanitarian work, something her mother was known for. She has created with her wealth various foundations – the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation which created Millennium Villages in Cambodia and Kenya as well as funding schools, roads, and a soy milk factory in Kenya. Some of the employees in Kenya were former poachers who are now employed as rangers. She is also a patron of the Harnas Wildlife Foundation, a wildlife orphanage and medical center in the Kalahari desert. She established the Shiloh Jolie-Pitt Foundation to support conservation work by the Naankuse Wildlife Sanctuary, a nature reserve also located in the Kalahari. She has also funded large-animal conservation projects as well as a free health clinic, housing, and a school for the San Bushmen community at Naankuse.

I have read more than one op-ed by Jolie in Time magazine related to her United Nations work for refugees and the welfare of people living in conflict zones. I don’t intend to judge her for anything related to her very public life, including her marriage to and divorce from Brad Pitt. Whatever one thinks of her and her life, they also cannot deny she has made a difference in the world.

Not A “New” Life

This comment came up in a discussion about how adoptive parents change the name of their adoptee when the adoption is finalized. One woman commented – “Nothing wrong with that, we started using his new name too to get him used to it. New life, new name.” She was quickly corrected – “I need you to fucking not. Adoption isn’t a “new life”, it’s a continuation of the life they are already living. This comment is insensitive at best.” This one had started new childcare job. She is a domestic infant adoptee. One child in her class is in the process of being adopted and that X is their legal name and Y is the name the adoptive parents have chosen to change it to. This child isn’t an infant, so the childcare workers are basically having to train the child to respond to a new name.

I will admit, I did a little sleuthing into the one who made the insensitive comment but could find nothing definite except that she is relatively new in the all things adoption group. There are some interesting photos but nothing certain as to her status in adoptionland but her comment seems to indicate an adoption there.

Lacking that, I looked for some context and found this recent (Oct 2022) article in The Atlantic LINK>Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending, with the subtitle – It’s a complicated beginning. While maybe not perfectly what I was looking for, I did see how it begins – In America, popular narratives about adoption tend to focus on happy endings. Poor mothers who were predestined to give their children away for a “better life”; unwanted kids turned into chosen ones; made-for-television reunions years later. Since childhood, these story lines about the industry of infant adoptions had gradually seeped into my subconscious from movies, books, and the news.

The author, Erika Hayasaki, notes – researching a book on identical twins raised in radically different circumstances, the reality of adoption is far more complicated than some might think—and, as many adoptees and scholars have argued, deserving of a more clear-eyed appraisal across American culture. Her book, Somewhere Sisters, chronicles identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam in 1998, and their mother struggled to care for them. Isabella (born Loan) was adopted by a wealthy, white American family that gave her a new name and raised her in the suburbs of Chicago. Hà was adopted by a biological aunt and her partner, and grew up in a rural village in Vietnam with sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons.

Twins have always fascinated me. I was born a Gemini and have always wondered what happened to my twin. When I was a child, my 13 month younger sister and I were often dressed alike and sometimes people thought we were twins. When my daughter was preschool age, she used to claim we were twins. I suppose I’ve had at least two surrogate twins in my life. I digress.

The author discovered that when reunions with birth families do happen, they aren’t always happy; they can be painful, confusing, or traumatic. Adoptees who are parents, lawyers, educators, or activists are challenging the rosy image of adoption that stubbornly persists in our culture. Children are not offered up for adoption in a vacuum. Many of them “are available because of certain, very strategic political policies.” Often the reasons for removing children from their parents comes under the heading of “neglect.” Throughout adoption history, this broad category has encompassed homelessness, poor hygiene, absent parents, and drug abuse in some instances, or simply leaving a child with caregivers outside the nuclear family.

A happily ever story after adoption often comes at the cost of forsaking everything that came before. The process, known in the adoptee community as coming out of the fog, refers to when an adoptee starts to see beyond the narrative about fate and question their true feelings about the adoption system, and how it has impacted their relationships, personalities, and identity formation. As the child of two adoptees, I also had my moment of coming out of the fog because adoption had seemed like the most natural thing to me until I was over 50, both of my parents had died and I began to discover my families true origins.

For me, coming out of the fog was, and continues to be, a process that involves simultaneously holding my adoptive grandparent’s love and good intentions in my heart’s memories alongside all the ways that adoption robbed me of what, for most people, is almost an unconsidered common reality. There are all of these contradictory realities within one’s experience of belonging to a family created by adoptions. The duality of that space can be hard for those without such a background to reasonably understand.

All You Can Ever Know

With Asians on my mind this morning, I stumbled on this book when an essay in Time magazine titled “My adoption didn’t make me less Korean” got my attention. I can not locate a digital link for this (I will share some excerpts – her own words about being Asian at this fraught time – later in this blog). In my all things adoption group, there have been a number of Korean adoptees. The international adoption of Korean children by Americans was the result of a large number of orphaned mixed children from the Korean War after 1953. That is not Nicole’s story.

In looking for her book, I found a New Yorker review by Katy Waldman – Nicole Chung’s Adoption Memoir, “All You Can Ever Know,” Is an Ode to Sisterly Love. Like many adoptees, her parents believed she was a gift from God. Like many transracial adoptees, growing up among white, Catholic Oregonians in the eighties and nineties, students teased her for being adopted and for looking “different.”

Her adoptive mother couldn’t tell her much about her original parents. They “had just moved here from Korea” and “thought they wouldn’t be able to give you the life you deserved.” This brief story, one of love and sadness and altruism, “may be all you can ever know,” her mother told her.

After a protracted and unglamorous process of filing paperwork and wrangling lawyers, she finally uncovered the reality of her original genetic family, the Chungs. She discovered an older sister, Cindy. Sadly, her sister had been physically abused by their natural mother. She learned that her parents are divorced and not speaking to one another. Her birth father had told Cindy that Nicole had died.

Nicole explains why having a baby mattered to her so much, “I wouldn’t be alone anymore. There would be someone who was connected to me in a way no one else had ever been.” For her memoir, Chung wanted to explore “the quiet drama of the everyday adopted experience.”

Remembering the fiction she scribbled down as a kid, Chung writes that she “found a measure of previously unknown power” in envisioning “places where someone like me could be happy, accepted, normal.”

From Chung’s Time essay – What her adoptive parents struggled with was to fully and consistently see and understand her as a Korean American woman. She doesn’t blame them for this, she notes – “Acknowledging it flew in the face of everything ‘experts’ had told them when they adopted me in the early 1980s – the adoption agency, the social worker, the judge had all maintained that it wouldn’t, shouldn’t matter.” She shares the things they would say to be color-blind with her.

She also notes – “Often, people who’ve read my memoir will note my white family’s ‘color-blind’ approach and ask whether this led to me thinking of myself as white. My answer is always swift, unequivocal: no, I never thought I was white.” However, she goes on to say her adoptive parents did “assume that I’d be protected from racism because the world would see me as they did – their child, no more, no less – and as my race was irrelevant to them, they could not imagine anyone else caring about it either.”

She says, “While my adoptive family saw me as almost raceless and therefore safe from racists, I lived every day from the age of 7, when I heard my first slur from a classmate, understanding that my Korean face made me hypervisible where we lived – and that it could also make me a target.”

This startled me. I cannot imagine children that age knowing racial slurs. Then, I remember reading once that children learn racism in the family. I thought about WWII, the Korean War and more recently the Vietnam War. I could believe that some returning veterans, having done battle with Asians, might have brought bias home with them.

Chung describes how from the start of the pandemic and racial scapegoating, she has thought of other Asian American kids growing up in white families and white spaces, even as she knows their experiences are not interchangeable. She says, “I know it can feel like a unique burden when you witness or experience racism in a kind of isolation, unable to retreat and process your rage or sorrow with people who also know what it’s like to live in an Asian body.”

She speaks of the experiences of transracial adoptees – “asking, sometimes begging our adoptive relatives to acknowledge our experiences; to stand with us; to challenge the racism endemic in our society as well as our own families and communities.”

Her adoptive parents have died. She says, “I’ve had to accept that there are questions I’ll never get answers to, things we’ll never be able to settle. That my parents didn’t entirely understand or accept my racial reality will always be with me, part of my adoption story.”

In her final thoughts she says, “I know the last thing either of my parents would have wanted was for me to despair, or live my life in fear. And so, for their sake and my own, I won’t.”

The Story of Haitian Adoptions

God’s Littlest Angels, an orphanage in Pétionville, Haiti

Since the subject has come up, I thought I would look into this. The January 12 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capitol set off an international adoption bonanza in which some safeguards meant to protect children were ignored.

The current Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett adopted John Peter, now age 13, was adopted by her in 2010 when he was 3 years old, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Ibram X. Kendi tweeted, “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.”

John Lee Brougher from the NextGen America PAC tweeted, “As an adoptee, I need to know more about the circumstances of how Amy Coney Barrett came to adopt her children, and the treatment of them since. Transracial adoption is fraught with trauma and potential for harm.” And I really hoped that Trump would have picked the judge from Florida that was on the short list for diversity reasons but I knew he didn’t care one whit about diversity. He does care about the Evangelicals (many of whom promote international adoptions) and their desire for ultra-conservative judges. From that perspective, of course Coney Barrett was a given and that has proven out. A group of Evangelicals were reported in the Oval office the morning before the official announcement.

The Obama administration responded to BOTH the crisis and to the pleas of prospective adoptive parents and the lawmakers assisting them, by lifting visa requirements for children in the process of being adopted by Americans.

Although initially planned as a short-term, small-scale evacuation, the rescue effort quickly evolved into a baby lift unlike anything since the Vietnam War. It went on for months; fell briefly under the cloud of scandal involving 10 Baptist missionaries who improperly took custody of 33 children; ignited tensions between the United States and child protection organizations; and swept up about 1,150 Haitian children, more than were adopted by American families in the previous three years, according to interviews with government officials, adoption agencies and child advocacy groups.

Under humanitarian parole, adoptions were expedited regardless of whether children were in peril, and without the screening required to make sure they had not been improperly separated from their relatives or placed in homes that could not adequately care for them.

Some Haitian orphanages were nearly emptied, even though they had not been affected by the quake or licensed to handle adoptions. Children were released without legal documents showing they were orphans and without regard for evidence suggesting fraud. In at least one case, two siblings were evacuated even though American authorities had determined through DNA tests that the man who had given them to an orphanage was not a relative.

I’m sure there will be more about these circumstances in the coming days. To inform yourself about the matter, you can read about the free for all Haitian adoptions after the 2010 earthquake in the New York Times – “After Haiti Quake, the Chaos of U.S. Adoptions“.

Adoptee Citizenship Act

I didn’t realize this was a problem until tonight. The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 awarded citizenship retroactively to what advocates estimated were more than 100,000 international adoptees under 18 who were already in the country when it went into effect in February 2001. Today, children who are adopted from abroad by US citizens generally receive automatic citizenship, and adoption agencies and embassies are better at informing parents about any follow-up they need to do.

There are estimated to still be tens of thousands of people who were adopted internationally by American parents between the 1950s and 1980s but never naturalized. They are in effect stateless. They are also potentially deportable to countries they don’t even remember.

The Adoptee Citizenship Act is proposed federal legislation that would grant citizenship to anyone who was adopted by a U.S. citizen regardless of when they turned 18. It would also allow those who have been deported to return to the United States. U.S. Senators Roy Blunt (MO), Mazie Hirono (HI), Susan Collins (ME), and Amy Klobuchar (MN) introduced the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2019. A Virtual Rally will take place on Twitter on Wednesday, September 23rd at 2pm EST because HR2731 has still not passed the House. #Citizenship4Adoptees

Widespread adoption of children abroad by US citizens began in South Korea in the 1950s after the Korean War and then spread to other countries. It was initially less regulated than it is now. Advocates estimate there could be up to 18,000 from South Korea alone in this situation, along with an undetermined number from countries such as Venezuela, Germany, India, Guatemala, Vietnam and Iran.

Growing up, they were able to obtain Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses. Before the 1990s and early 2000s ushered in a stricter era of screening, many even received US passports, served in the US military and voted — unaware that they were not citizens.