By Mirah Riben A mother’s love, loss and determination has greatly impacted social awareness and created organizations such as MADD, founded by Cindy Lightner, and the well-known Amber Alert system, which Donna Norris created. The power of another mother’s love also created the Make a Wish Foundation. All of these women, and others such as the parents in Sandy Hook, turned the loss of their children into a passion-driven effort…
By Mirah Riben Most of us have heard, seen or read about a six-year-old girl named Lexi who was ordered to be taken from those who fostered her for the past four years in Santa Clarita, California. The court of public opinion and social media are sympathetic and supportive of Lexi’s foster parents, Rusty and Summer Page. This is very understandable since the Pages have seemingly done nothing but provide…
There are various national adoption conferences that are yearly and bi-annually in different parts of the country. Also, there are many local adoption connections to be made and events organized by various adoption groups or even events that are adoption focused, or projects by those in the adoption community. ( please note: things such as adoption fund raisers to help make an adoption happen will NEVER EVER be unacceptable here)
There is a great need to provide adoption connections as a means of supporting the adoption community. You can list your adoption event, class, meeting, event, conference, call for papers, for FREE. Each event is given its own URL on the site as it becomes a post such as the ones listed below and will be listed on the Adoption Event Calendar as well. In addition to the 20K readers a month here, every post goes over to Facebook and also gets shared on Twitter too… so that’s about 30 thousand people that can see your adoption event.
Adoption can be a very isolating experience. The rise of the internet has been an incredible tool which allows people to find those on a similar journey and can offer all sorts of support and validation. Because of this the adoption community has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. No longer are we all alone in our feelings and confusion, there is always someone out there who cares.
Get involved with the Adoption Army, or keep track of pending adoption legislation. Read up on other adoption blogs by adoptees and birth mothers or write a guest post. See what adoption events are happening by you or worth you time and effort to travel to. And keep up on the latest in adoption news hitting the media and making waves. There is no need to be bystander anymore. You voice matters, use it and be heard!
Consider this your engraved invitation!
In the United States, there is not a central body that is collecting accurate adoption statistics. There is no one single oversight organization that actual collects data from all the different adoption agencies around the country. Often all the “big” number on adoption are estimated at best. Various facts and numbers float around and if they get repeated often enough, they are “facts about adoption”. Sometimes the source is lost and cannot be verified.
Actual scientific research on adoption and adoption related issues is frequently hard to find. For one, there just isn’t enough of it. Almost every study that I have ever read included in their conclusion “further studies are needed”.
The other issue is that many of the adoption studies are not made public. They are easy enough to find, but not read online. Many of the studies require access to an educational database or a purchase of the papers. In the last 12 years I have acquired quite a collection from various sources and am working to add them all here.
When I can transfer them over to copy, I have included the entire papers. When I cannot move the copy off PDF, I have a link to the actual PDF of the adoption research study.
I am not sure if this is even considered acceptable, but I have done it anyway. I am trying to get permission from the authors when I can. If you happen to have authored a paper here and would like to officially “allow” it, then please let me know. If you need it taken down, I will also comply. Maybe I am rationalizing, but all this work done helps no one if it cannot be accessed.
Good info graphics are a wonderful way to share information across many social media networks clearly and concisely. An informational graphic creates a clear visual medium to share much needed information on adoption. We are so lucky in AdoptionLand that we are blessed with the wonderful info graphic designer, Kate Dahlquist.
Kate has made them all and keeps on creating new adoption infographics all the time! She has covered many important facts and figures regarding the truth in adoption, father’s rights, adoption coercion, adoptee rights, forced adoption, and what the adoption agencies don’t want you to know.
According to Google, about 3600 people a month want to know “how much does adoption cost?” Of course the word “cost” here is assumed to mean the monetary expenses incurred when a child or baby is adopted. Those facts and figures, the actual answer to “how much does it cost to adopt a baby” are rather simple to answer.
No matter where you do adopt a baby or child from, if you do it legally (ethically is another matter entirely) then you must have a home study and someone to handle the legal transaction of transferring the parental rights of said child.
However, please remember that adoption is at least a 13 billion dollar annual industry,
And then all the other “costs” and “fees’ that make adoption such a wonderful social construct, but that is just the money.
Let’s look at the true costs of adoption.
How Much Does Adoption Cost to the Child Adopted? How Much Adoption Costs a Birth Mother and Family?
They don’t teach the facts about adoption in school. There are no courses in college unless you go into a master level in Social work and even then it is limited. Most people go thought life thinking what they hear about adoption form the media, or even worse, from the adoption industry that supplies the message to the media is true. They would be wrong.
Then, when people find themselves about to enter the word of adoption, they go to the “trusted professionals” . Again, most of these sources have their own agenda for keep “on message” as the professionals make their living form the continuation of the adoption status quo. This goes for both prospective adoptive parents and expectant mothers considering adoption. Neither have any reason to believe that they are being given a sales pitch.
My agenda is to be able to give you information that you won’t find in other places. Why? So that you can have true information based on facts in order to really understand what adoption is, what it means, how the adoption industry works and what people really think about adoption
Willful ignorance is the state and practice of ignoring any sensory input that appears to contradict one’s inner model of reality. At heart, it is almost certainly driven by confirmation bias.
Willfully ignorant people are fully aware of facts, resources and sources, but refuse to acknowledge them. It is sometimes referred to as tactical stupidity.
Depending on the nature and strength of an individual’s pre-existing beliefs, willful ignorance can manifest itself in different ways. The practice can entail completely disregarding established facts, evidence and/or reasonable opinions if they fail to meet one’s expectations. Often excuses will be made, stating that the source is unreliable, that the experiment was flawed or the opinion is too biased. More often than not this is simple circular reasoning: “I cannot agree with that source because it is untrustworthy because it disagrees with me”.
In other slightly more extreme cases, willful ignorance can involve outright refusal to read, hear or study, in any way, anything that does not conform to the person’s worldview. To counteract any true ignorance, may we present you with some real facts about adoption.
If you watched Dr. Phil and think you know what happened in this case, then please just leave. Dr. Phil is a lying sack of rotten potatoes. Unless you are willing to understand that he gives the readers digest condensed version of stupidity and you can see that this case was completely unethical and decided based on money and power, then you’ll get a good dose of the truth.
The simple fact is that Adoption is supposed to be about finding a home for a child that needs a home.
Veronica had a home and a family that loved her. She was adopted because wealthy strangers wanted her and basically bought her. They bought the courts. They bought influence.
We should all be disgusted. And while that little girl is forced to live with strangers; the only thing we have left to do is pay homage to her and fight to see that her suffering is not in vein. Please help us battle unethical adoptions in the USA. This has got to change!
Most people view adoption as a wonderful altruistic act that is a win win for all parties involved. The birth parents cannot raise a child for whatever reason and other, more establish couples are waiting to have children or add to their families and they cannot. The general consensus is “Finding homes for all those unwanted children.” It sounds like a adoption is meeting the needs of society.
The problem is that adoption is a business, a big business. There is lots of money to be had by those who make their living from the transferring of parental rights from one party to another. If adoption was truly a societal need, then there wouldn’t be such profits to be had.
Adoption is over a 14 billion dollar a year industry by anyone’s best approximation.
In the adoption community there are tons of conversations about “educating” the general public about adoption. Depending on how you are adoption affected, what you think needs to happen will be very different.
Adoptive Parents want people to accept their families built by adoption and complain about the stupid questions people ask like “Where is her real mother?” Adoptees are suppose to be happy and grateful that they were somehow saved from either “ending up in an dumpster” or “from being aborted”. Adoptees are “lucky”.The general public likes to blame the birth mother’s pain on her own irresponsible choices. She is punished for her fertility and the sexual drive that got her pregnant in the first place.
Basically, unless you are actually adoption affected, and even then, only if you have done your own research and homework, most people have no clue about adoption.
While everyone seems to love an adoption story; whether it be adoption horror stories or adoption reunion stories, adoption success stories or adoption stories gone wrong – these seem to capture the interest of the general public who want to peek into our lives like adoption voyeurs. However, not all books about adoption are stories about adoption. Though the adoption memoir has a place, there are many more informational books about adoption that should also be well known and on everyone’s books shelves.
There are many MORE books about “how to adopt a child” or even “adoption books for kids”; those will NOT be my primary focus, but some will be included here even if only to even out the lists and also for SEO purposes. I’m going to do my best here to break adoption books down via categories. Obviously some books will be relevant across the board and serve to meet more than one need. The books that I HAVE read myself will be so noted, but obviously I have not read them all.
Hi, I’m Kat.
>p>Many times I feel that others think open adoption is the ideal solution to an unplanned or crisis pregnancy. It is said that, compared to a closed adoption, the open door in adoption allows the adoptee to go into a better situation where there is family and financial stability while maintaining contact with his or her biological family to obtain answers about heritage and genetics.
If you are an expectant mom, perhaps for different reasons, you may be contemplating open adoption for this very reason. Maybe someone has told you that it is a great solution, or maybe you have seen open adoption portrayed positively in movies or on TV. Possibly you are on the fence about placing your baby for adoption, but a professional in the adoption industry has said that you will still be able to have contact with your baby through open adoption.
Typically when people debate something, there are those who may say that it is wonderful or beautiful. Still others say it is horrendous. Usually in the middle, there is the truth of complexities.
While many people say open adoption is a ‘one big happy family’ solution, I wonder about the child. Is it possible that a child could go through open adoption and feel: isolation, confusion, jealousy, rage, sadness and loss just like those in closed adoption?
,p>If you are an adoptee or a birthparent planning on an adoption search and hopeful to have a family reunion, there is no such thing as too much planning. The time to start preparing for an adoption reunion is actually way before you start your actual adoption search. You will want to be reading all the adoption reunion stories that you can so you can gain insight and knowledge from other people’s experiences. Start gathering together the people who “understand” and will support you . It’s a good time now to find and adoption group for support.
I have tried over the years to share both stories from my own reunion experience and also to talk about other issues that adoptees and birthmothers face. I am as flawed as the next person and I don’t think any of us are experts, but I try to share what I have learned and my thoughts.
Make sure you read adoption stories from the adoptee point of view and read adoption reunion stories told from the birthmother or birthfather’s point of view. Read the good happy family reunion stories and read the tales of adoption reunions gone bad.I cannot stress this enough; READ