I'm 67 years old and have been living with adoption loss for 44 years.
My first initiation into the insults I was to experience after doing what I was told was the "loving" "good" and "right" thing to do came shortly after I relinquished.
Baby Lenore, the first major contested adoption case made headlines in 1971. Every day I heard at work, on the subways, elevators and in the streets, and coffee shops people saying "The NERVE of that mother to want her baby back!" And: "Any dog can give birth."
I knew then that what people thought of me and wanted to crawl into a hole...
Lately, I am called an anti-adoptionist but that's not an insult. I'm proud to stand up and speak out against the atrocities that separate families needlessly. I am proud to denounce baby brokering, child trafficking, exploitation, coercion, corruption, and falsified birth certificates.
It has all strengthened me.
But now the ultimate insult has been spewed on the Facebook page "Adoption News and Events."
An adoptive parent put forth the proposition that children who are relinquished - and taken from their families - are "orphans"!!! This includes those who are kidnapped, stolen, and coerced from loving - LIVING - mothers and families. And what of the children in open adoptions who visit their moms - are they also orphans?
She wishes! Many wish we were dead, but we are NOT, and no piece of paper can kill us. Our children are our children and always will be and we are their mothers and always will be for all eternity.
The adoption industry creates the language for what they WISH is so and then those who want to adopt use it - and even the press and public begin using it and worst of all, believing it.
But it doesn't make it SO! No piece of paper kills me off as my daughter's mother. No falsified documents. No relinquishment. We all know the second part of "sticks and stones": Names will never harm me! I know who I am and I know I am my daughter's mothers.
Adopters can imagine, pretend and convince themselves that all the children being adopting are orphans, but when they find their mothers, or their mothers find them - those won't be ghosts coming to haunt you!
Maybe they are simply listening to too much Black Crowes:
She never mentions the word addiction
In certain company.
Yes, she'll tell you she's an orphan
After you meet her family.
Says she talks to angels.
They call her out by her name.
Oh yeah, she talks to angels.
Says they call her out by her name.
She keeps a lock of hair in her pocket.
She wears a cross around her neck.
The hair is from a little boy,
And the cross from someone she has not met, well, not yet
Labeling children who have been stolen, kidnapped and coerced from their mothers - as well as those given with the hopes that it is right and best choice - as "orphans" is comforting, convenient, white-washing language for those on the receiving end. It allows people like the Monahans to sleep at night pretending their kidnapped daughter's mother is dead and not longing for the return of her child.
Calling our sons and daughters orphans insults and offends every mother who lovingly sacrificed or was coerced out of her child, and it insults and offends our children.
I am horrified and one angry, pissed off MUTHA!
"....replace the voice that only whispers about your pain and loss with a strong and unwavering one, and be prepared to tell your story with courage and conviction, to add your voice to all the others, never to be silenced again." Pemina Yellow Bird (2000)
16 comments:
I agree with your position. It would be so much easier for the adoption community if we pesky natural parents just vanished in to thin air. But then again we do serve a purpose. We relinquish our children to them, and we are there to blame later when adoption pain is voiced.
Yes, but how much better to blame us posthumously.
Hmmm...now that I think of it it's a case of everything old is new again. they were "killing of" fist parents back in the 60's. fathers were all killed in Vietnam and mothers all died in childbirth. Odd, though that back then when adoptive parents and adoptees were routinely told these convenient lies, adoptees were not called orphans! That's a new twist. It makes for so much more gratitude, don't you think?
Mirah--I am in total agreement with your outrage. Only one of my adopted daughters came to me as an orphan. Her mother was dead and so was her father (or the person most likely to have been her father). But even as an orphan, she had plenty of biological family who remain part of her life.
But I wish you wouldn't make the similar outrageous mistake of equating an idiot adoptor with Nazis. Nazi and holocaust are terms that should not be used as all-purpose cliches--they are specific to a horrific part of our history and should remain solely that.
Mirah,
You know that I do not always agree with you, but this time I'm in 100% agreement. You nailed it!
David K
www.pear-reform.org
www.adoptionagencychecklist.com
Yes, Mirah, I agree wholeheartedly with you. To disgrace mothers in this way is a slur against all women, but women do not see this.
Also, that adoptive parent who referred to children who are relinquished as “orphans” has set a new precedence to disregard real orphans. I myself, am a real half-orphan, an adoptee whose mother died, leaving behind her five children and their father. I did not need a home because I already had one. But adoption was pushed as the only solution.
And then, there are those foreign-born “orphans” who may have one or both parents still living, but adoption is seen as a means to save these babies from poverty, etc.
Mirah, you are your daughter’s mother. And I will fight along with you to free her birth certificate so that your name is certified as her official mother.
My child is no orphan. His adopters wish they could claim that to be true but never will. As a survior of open adoption fraud, to think that my child is labeled as some orphan who's mother did not want him makes my blood boil.
My child lost to adoption "friended" someone on his Facebook page who runs a blog called "An Orphans Wish" and it sickened me. He believes his adoption was ordained by his god, so I highly suspect he calls himself and "orphan" as well to further dehumanize me.
I can't think about it it makes me so ill...
WOW! So many comments in one night!
Thank you David.
Stephanie - I am soo very sorry for you. That would be excrutiatingly painful.
Julie - You are right. I do not disagree. I was outraged and was looking for a term to express my outrage and borrowed from the shock jocks like Limbaugh who use the term Feminazis which has no connection whatsoever to Hitler or the Holocaust.
I wanted to express that there are those who adopt with such a strong sense of entitlement they totally disregard their child's heritage. I have the same red hot rage for adopters who hand over bribes and turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to obvious corruption and are thus very much part of the problem...and fear exposing the truth will prevent them form obtaining the brass ring they covet. There has to be a name for such col-hearted, selfish people, that despite all of their self-centeredness get accolades from friends, family and the public for doing a "noble" things and "rescuing" a child.
Part of my state of outrage is that i am near completing the book "Finding Fernanda" which describes people such as stated above....I will be writing a review shortly. people like the mother in the film "I Love You Mommy" who hands over a bribe and comments that some think this is bad, "but it's just the way things are done." All those in that book and in life who put their fingers in their ears and loudly sing "Lalalalala" and ignore BLATANT red lights and say it can't be so...and then claim that mothers in Guatemala SELL their children and claim they are kidnapped. Those who claim their child was sent to them by God, as if God wants to take babies away form other mothers!
Any my hottest rage is for those who terinate adoptions - and go online seeking SYMPATHY on top of it! And get it!
And the Monahans who KNOW full well they are raising a KIDNAP VICTIM - not an orphan - and do noting. An the US gvt for allowing them to do nothing and not pursuing it as they did when it was reversed and a UD child was being held overseas.
The studies that say that relinquishing mothers' anger increases over time are sure proven right by me personally! the more I learn, the ore I see, the angrier I get.
I will NOT be eradicated with words.
As an adoptee I am not an Orphan. I have 2 families because of adoption and will always have two families because of adoption. This goes for all adoptees regardless if biological parents are deceased.
Yes,Jodi. this is why i said it is an insult to mothers AND adoptees! It is language that has one and only purpose; to further commodify human beings and make them more "sale-able." You should indeed be insulted!
Only a totally brainwashed, manipulated adoptee like Stephanie's son would accept such language and use it define himself. But then again, he may simply have been told the convenient story that his parents are deceased as adoptive parents have done for decades to prevent any and all questions and the nasty and scary possibility of "searching."
The only worse lie adoptive parents can perpetrate is not revealing that their child is adopted at all. But since so many adoptions today are transnational and transracial, that's a bit difficult to pull off, so we just tell them they're orphans instead - RESCUED from their orphanages by their brave, noble adopters who should be lavished with praise and eternal GRATITUDE!
Thank you, Mirah, for speaking the truth.
Mirah, using the term Orphan is as offensive as telling a child they are "Chosen". These words are used in marketing and selling children. A coverup for abandonment. We who know the adoption industry know not all children are abandoned and are stolen in the name of the mighty dollar.
Yes I know several selfish AP's who have told their adoptive children lies about their birth parents. Sad that these AP's will go to such lengths to get their adoptive children to hate their birth parents and make the adoptive children think their AP's are their "Savior". Sadly some people can be brainwashed and not free think for themselves. I asked questions all the time after I was told I was adopted. I never backed off on my search for the truth regardless of what I was told by my AP's or the info given by attorneys. No one was going to stop me from finding my identity.
Yes there is nothing worse than a child not being told at all they were adopted. Being that I am so different from my AP's I would have figured it out if they did not tell me. Most do figure it out and know they are "Different" even when they are not told they are adopted.There are a few who dont and find out later due to someone spilling the secret or they go and DNA test and find out the truth that way. It will be a lot harder for AP's to hid the truth now that there is DNA testing out their for personal genealogy use. These selfish AP's need to wake up!
"But then again, he may simply have been told the convenient story that his parents are deceased as adoptive parents have done for decades to prevent any and all questions and the nasty and scary possibility of "searching."
In my case, they never told him I was deceased, they just pretended I didn't exist. (same difference I suppose). I tracked him down when he was 18 and told him the TRUTH, but he chose not to believe me. I did discover that his adopters did not even bother to show him a picture of me until he was 12(so much for that Open adoption) and told him they knew very little about me.
Funny, I spent time with these people before he was born, talked to them, went shopping, out to dinners, lunches and they even accompanied me to doctors appointments; yet they claimed to not "know" me. When I found my son they said not one word to me nor did they acknowledge me in any way. Their perfect little bubble was burst. I was happy to oblige. It was the least I could do, really. They could not live in fantasy land forever, but are still manipulating and controlling my child. I have to block it out it is so disturbing. I don't know what to do...
Stephanie - taking a child under the pretense of offering an open adoption and not is cruel and shameful fraud! Do you know of carla and the survey she is putting together? Are you a member of the FB group called Mothers of Open Adoption Fraud?
I am very sorry to bother you all with this,but I work with a young man, and I am very worried about his situation. I was trying to find him a place to look for a way to post a letter to his unborn child that will help he/she find him when they want to connect with him. He is not in a relationship with the mother and the mother is married. She is wanting to raise the child as their child and not involve my co worker. He is worried that they will lose all contact and possibly never connect with the child when the time comes.
Is there a place that he could post a letter or info about him and his history...possibly hints to where they may find him in years to come.
Please have him contact me directly at: MRiben@AdvocatePublications.com
From Facebook:
""the children relinquished are not orphans. they are collateral damage in the industry's war on women."
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