The Vilification and Discrimination of Adoption Separated Persons

It makes me crazy the way adoptees and the families they were born into are treated like a cross between people needing special protection - like those we used to call "feeble minded" or "imbeciles" - and pariahs that we need to protected FROM more than convicted criminals.

If some had their way there's be laws for us as there are for convicted sex offenders:

• Register

• Can't go on any social networking sites cause you MAY be stalking another adult

• Can't knock on the door of certain people or even call them on the phone

• And instead of a parole officer, have an intermediary intercede between you and anyone you want to talk to, after you have obtained permission from their Mommy, of course

New York State legislators want to add criminal punishment to a pending bill for equal access!

W-T-F!!!  Is that not clearly discrimination to treat us as suspected criminals?  

And Facebook is the new enemy de jour. People separated by adoption have been searching and finding one another since adoption records were sealed, starting with Jean Paton's Orphan Voyage book an group in the 1940s. I myself was instrumental in HUNDREDS of reunions in the 1980s. It's nothing new. Yet the media are all over Facebook as if it has created a monster that cannot be contained, and OMG what can we do to keep the kids away from it!  

ABC News has joined the bandwagon, latching onto this as if it were a news-story...or more likely something to engender fear.  ("Every day foods that can kill you. Story at eleven.")

Reminds me of this delightful ad for a news broadcast on a "bust" of a colleague, friend and sister co-founder of the original NJ-based Origins. Lucy Pare was set up by a couple posing as birth parents who wanted to find their child and caught in the spotlight of news cameras accepting money in a parking lot like a drug dealer. On the spot and scared stiff, Lucy ran to her car where an eager reporter caught up to her and thrust a microphone into the car window and asked why she did it. And on the spot, Lucy replied: "Civil disobedience. Same reason the underground freed slaves!"

If this print ad (which appears in my first book, The Dark Side of Adoption (1988) p 32, was not bad enough - with parents fighting over a child - the televised commercials for the news broadcast were worse. They showed children on swings in a playground and someone lurking nearby like a sexual predator.

As for Facebook:

1. you can only realistically find someone whose name you already know  

     2. are adopted separated people finding one another online any different than people dating online?

People meet, hook-up, date and marry on a myriad of online dating sites from Match to eHarmony and dozens of others. Some of the relationships work out fine and last, and other fizzle, and some are downright disasters...even dangerous. Yet no one suggests shutting down those sites, even after someone got killed after meeting on Craig's List.

All interpersonal relationships run the gamut from good to bad. Half of all marriages end in divorce,
and as for the other half who knows how many are "happy" or even content not?  But in all other of life's circumstances adults are left to work out thes epersonal relationships for themselves with no government intervention, unless a crime is alleged to have occurred.  Every day millions of people find on another, telephone, contact, knock on doors at will. No restrictions unless they have DONE SOMETHING CRIMINAL!  

Unless you are an adoptee or a member of the family they were born into....freaky, eerie monster approaching music please....then you MAY be dangerous just because you are adopted or are related to an adoptee! Your motives are suspect of being criminal.

I don't see anyone restricting former mistresses of famous people, do you? They get to drag skeletons out of closets and get paid huge sums of money to do it! Many acquire fifteen minutes of fame of more for their ability to ruin lives by blabbing and exposing their slutiness. Doesn't appear that John Edwards or Tiger Woods had the "permission"or approval of anyone t meet and sleep with who they chose to. Doesn't seem to me they had counseling to advise them how to approach their affairs or intermediaries. No, they had free will to screw up their lives!

What about TV shows that expose secrets? People are PUBLICLY mortified to find out their wives slept with their brothers and it's simply one big laugh fest. No one stops it even after one young man committed suicide as a result of a secret being exposed in that manner. 


How can the NCFA and all adoption practitioners and right-to-lifers continue to tell mothers that it putting herself and her child into these suspect categories - for life - is the right, good, loving thing to do?  Give up your kid and don a big fat red letter on your chest forever after!  While those who chose abortion go about their lives with no restrictions!

Give you child the "better" life - with a blazing "B" for BASTARD pinned on him, forever! A better life that is built on lies, fruad  and legal denial of the truth.  And don't dare peek out of the closet you're locked in - or you'll find you are not welcome...anywhere other (normal) people go to meet one another.


We are HUMAN BEINGS. Adult citizens. Our only "crime" was being born or being convinced to do what we were told was "best."