July 12, 2019
TRIGGER WARNING: DV simulation, not a simulation but a four minute peek into my marriage. Yikes!
Articles by admin
Birth Mothers; Have you Lived a Horror Story?
Birth Mother Experiences in Adoption Relinquishment; Journalist Inquiry I have been speaking at length this past week with a very well established journalist how is looking into the experiences of mothers relinquishing their newborns to adoption through voluntary domestic placement. Based on the conversations, I am confident that this request for specific stories and experiences is not only very legitimate, but will result in a very informative piece on ethics….
Reunion Flashback
I wrote this some time ago as a submission to some contest some place. I have been holding on to it until today. It was ten years ago today that this happened. Last Hours of Cold She couldn’t find a freaking parking space to save her life. After all the meticulous planning and her careful timeline, she was going to be late because she couldn’t find any visitor or public…
Promote Your Adoption Event
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)
List Your Adoption Event
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.
AdoptionLand- the Community
Activism and Support; The Adoption Community Call to Arms
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!
Statistics, Studies and Research on Adoption and Adoption Related Issues
Statistics, Studies and Research on Adoption and Adoption Related Issues
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”.
Making Adoption Research Studies Public to All
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.
Adoption Infographics
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.
The Coolest Adoption Infographic Design
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.
The Average Cost of Adoption; for the Adoptee, for the Natural Family
How much does adoption cost?
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?
Frequently Asked Questions About Adoption
Real Adoption Information and Facts on Adoption
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
Research, Statistics, Studies, Information & Facts About Adoption
No Excuse to be Ignorant 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.
The Unethical Adoption of Veronica Brown
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!
What the Adoption Agencies & Professionals Don’t Want You to Know About Adoption in the USA
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.
Money and Profit in US Adoptions
Adoption is over a 14 billion dollar a year industry by anyone’s best approximation.
How the Real World Sees Adoptees, Adoptive Parents and Birthmothers
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.
The Adoption Stereotypes; Limiting and Hurtful, also Untrue
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.
Adoption Stories and Books- Birthmother Memoirs to Adoptee Information
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.
A Relevant Adoption Book List
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.
Welcome to the Open Adoption Experience
I’m an Adult Adoptee Raised in Open Adoption
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.
Considering Open Adoption as an Unplanned Pregnancy Option?
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?