Monday, June 17, 2013

Baby Steps in Adoption Education!

The other day, I fell into a slump...feeling what's the sense of it all?

After nearly forty years of working to end the corruption, exploitation, coercion and profiting in adoption and seemed to just keeping worse instead of better. And there were such a precious few of us cared about anything beyond access for adult adoptees!

I’m a HUGE advocate for equal access, but there is so much MORE that needs to be done. And I was feeling hopeless, helpless, useless…

Then, today, in my doc’s waiting room I picked up a copy of a mag you only see in doctor’s waiting rooms. It’s called WebMD and has articles about the latest treatments advertised therein!

I never expected to turn a page and see an article on adoption and still have no idea what it was doing in a medical magazine…but there it was…I looked at the title with dread “What to expectwhen you’re thinking about adoption”

I could not believe my eyes when I read the opening paragraph:
"Adoption is created through loss," says Linda Hageman, executive director of adoption services at The Cradle, an Illinois adoption agency.
That's a statement you don't often see among the pretty pictures of giggling babies and happy families in adoption brochures. But it's true. The child loses his or her first parents. The birth parents face the loss of their child. And the adoptive parents often lose long-cherished dreams and expectations about having biological children.
An amazingly good start!   Unfortunately it went on to ONLY discuss the losses experienced by guess who? You got it…the only paying customer in the transaction!
Good advice is offered on dealing with feelings of loss of fertility, BUT…the idea that the child has also suffered a loss (never mind the original family) is never mentioned again in the short, one page article.
So it is far less than ideal… and it comes from The Cradle so is probably intended to give expectant moms warm fuzzy feelings about them as an agency that "gets it." (I have not gone mad and totally lost my objecgtivity, sense of reality, and even a bit of healthy cynicism)....but, just for today, I choose to take as a BABY STEP in the right direction! 
After all, ten years ago, even five…you would never see an opening line like that in print – or anywhere other than on FB or a blog!
So for today, I choose to see this as a positive step in the right direction and pat us all collectively on the back and say:  We Are Being Heard!!! We are being heard! We are being heard!
“Adoption is created through loss”
Nearly 40 years of saying this and it IS beginning to be heard and spreading to main stream media.

for tgoday I choose to be HOPEFUL.

2 comments:

Margie Perscheid said...

For the work you have done and are doing in adoption reform, you SHOULD be hopeful, Mirah. People are listening, perhaps not with ears as wide open as one would hope, but nonetheless, they're listening. And things are starting to change for the better.

Mirah Riben said...

Thanks, Margie.

RussiaToday Apr 29, 2010 on Russian Adoption Freeze

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RT: Russia-America TV Interview 3/10

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