I’m in the middle of family building lifetime memory making week. The “kids” and I are down in Orlando, Florida for the rest of the week. I am over the moon with silly gidiness as I have been wanting to get these two down to Disney before they get too old.
I did not know Alyssa Toner. What I do know, though, is that Alyssa was searching and cannot finish her search. She made the video, but it does not show up in searches for her birth date. The article about her adoption birthmother search does not seem have been published. The news stories about her death, do, right now, but as time passes, news articles like these get achieved and fall way down on the search rankings. Maybe her search will be forgotten completely. Maybe her account will be taken down, the video eventually deleted and, if her birthmother ever does decide to search, she will never find anything at all.
The message will be lost.
So while dealing with mothering obligations and major house construction ( did I mention we built WALLS where there were none?), I got word that the piece I had written moths ago, was scheduled for publication in the SUNDAY New York Times!
These stories are not isolated. Various members of the adoption community have created vast clearing houses of these images on the many social media sites form Facebook, to Pinterest, to Tumbler where they are tweeted, shared, and hopefully, maybe, find their way to the one person who could provide clues about their origins. We tirelessly share and promote our fellow Adoptionland members and pray that they find those whom they seek. There are over a hundred images like this with the numbers growing daily.
Adoption Ark and Christian World Adoption have both announced they are closing their doors and filing for bankruptcy in the span of one last week. Even Chuck Johnson, CEO of the National Council for Adoption, said he expected that many more agencies would be closing. Burn, baby, burn!
I was alerted the other day that Missouri has new adoption legislation in the House of Representatives. While we like to see adoption laws updated, there are a few issues with HB 252. While the contact preferences for OBC access are often included in any Adoptee Rights legislation in order to make the legislators feel warm and cozy, allowing one party to deny another their legal documentation is not treating ALL adoptees equally.There is also a portion of the bill having to do with Open Adoption Agreements. In essence, the issue is not that they are saying that there can be enforceable open adoption agreements, it is in the enforcement aspect that the language gets a bit too vague.
This is one of those times when I am asking for your help on a project. It was barely two weeks ago when Facebook started exploding with the Adoptee Searching Picture memes. Though I know we all tried to keep up and share like crazy cakes, it’s proving to be a difficult task! I was trying to share all the images of Adoptees begging for help finding their families, but I quickly had the longest blog post on the east coast. And then, I remembered Listly!
For an adoptee searching to find their family, DNA testing can be really helpful. We talk to Adoptee Richard Hill, author of Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA and an DNA testing expert about the the best to use this new technology to help answer the age old question ” Who am I and where did I come from?”
The justification of adoption relinquishment was out in full force. You would think with all these people caring about her making the “right” choice, there would be more cries of concern questioning these adoption practices that pushed the known boundaries of even the most common adoption industry tactics used to separate mothers and children. How can she be “brave” if we don’t really even know the first thing about this girl? If her earlier, now removed tweets, were any indication upon the thought patterns of her choice, she was obviously immature and acting like this whole pregnancy was about as exciting as a trip to Disneyworld.
Follow your state group on Facebook and Twitter or sign up for their mailing lists and when they ask you to do something, just do it! Send your letter, make a comment saying you did, and share the post to your own networks, The only way we will ever restore the civil rights of our friends and children is if we work on their doggedly and with purpose together.
The latest batch of pro-adoption propaganda, “What’s Mine is Yours”, by Katherine Nelson and Deanna Harper, has set a “beautiful” song that highlights the pain and suffering of infertility while promoting adoption and glorifying relinquishment. But with this song and the simplification and romanticism made of the relinquishing mother, Katherine Nelson leaves out millions of real mothers who have suffered a real loss of living, breathing children, many now gown adults. And often this trauma was inflicted by the hands who those claim to want others to understand; women who should be able to appreciate the true longing to be mothers. She promotes a false cure, a band aide, in adoption, by glorifying the very need that claimed so many of our children.
When we are pregnant, we don’t pump our own gas or dye our hair. We stop smoking and drinking and eat right. We watch our medications, don’t eat sushi, go in hot tubs or ride roller coasters. There is a mass of other “don’ts’ that I forget since it’s been a while, but I think even goat cheese is “bad” when you are pregnant now. Bottom line, we do not do all these that MIGHT somehow endanger our babies. Even if it’s like .00096% of all pregnant women who eat unprocessed cheese get the weird amoeba that could cause blindness in the fetus, we don’t take that chance. So why are we encouraging mothers, who really do NOT have to relinquish to endanger their babies with maternal separation?
I do not believe that we will see the end of adoption completely, but these solutions could very well produce a country like Australia where the relinquishment rates dropped about 95%. That is not unrealistic to me. Ideal, yes, but… People will want children that they cannot bare, and here will be people who have children who do not have any desire to ever be a parent. Yes, adoption will still be there, but let it be a safe guard that provides families for children who need homes rather than finding children for families that want them. Adoption relinquishment should be seen as the last possible choice.
Based on a 100% population, then, the USA IF it had similar adoption practices and supported mothers would have 539 Voluntary Domestic Infant relinquishments annually give or takeWant to do it again? Based on the 2006 numbers, we are looking at only 826 infants relinquished in the USA rather than the 14,000.
I don’t even need my calculator to know that it means we are looking at aproximately 13,500 babies relinquished by mothers who, IF given accurate information regarding parenting and had options and support, would most likely NOT have placed their babies for adoption. Now multiply that by the last ten years: that’s over 135,000 families separated for no other reason than the fact that adoption is a huge profit driven business in the USA.
Imagine a world where we let adult make decisions that affect their lives. We let them fill out their medical forms with more than an unknown. We let them know the branches of their family tree. We let them know whose nose it is perched upon their face.