In response to a post at Feministe, Adoption as a Feminist Issue, I threw in my .02 worth:

(As there was a request to limit the number of links in replies, the version of the below on Feministe contains only 3 links, this represents a vastly expanded version with citations for my readership.)

I’ve actually been blogging about adoption from a feminist/humanrights/pro-reproductive autonomy perspective for a number of years now. There’s no question in my mind how it must be considered intrinsic to the broader feminist framework.

Additionally, it must be understood from a “class” perspective both in terms of the classes of women children are (often non-consentually) taken from and those they are granted to. Bastards likewise face legal discrimination as a class, not merely as individuals.

“Class” must also be understood in relation to adoption in terms of economic class. As I said on my about page, my blog

“…has roots in exploring adoption and how it is deeply entwined with many social factors, particularly poverty. Many real life “love children” who are later adopted, are not ‘given up’ for lack of love, but for lack of resources. Many of those mislabeled “orphans” are in fact made available to the adoption process as a byproduct of grinding poverty, both domestic and global.”

Post after post I’ve written chronicle the global adoption marketplace and the human rights abuses and crimes that are an inherent aspect of such. I invite readers to explore some of my posts tags such as “Ethiopia.”

I write as a Bastard and a feminist who has longtime involvement in the struggle for reproductive autonomy.

I’ve spent years documenting those who advocate the compulsory pregnancy stance and the ways in which anti-abortion movement and the religiously based (and at times forcible) adoption movement are more often than not often one and the same. Certainly the major adoption industry umbrella lobbying organizations in the DC area are rooted in such, just as most of their individual member agencies are.

• Here’s a post I wrote back in 2009 about how the adoption industry’s co-optation of genuine reproductive privacy in relation to sealed records and the myth of adoption as a “reproductive right” were being used by the industry to falsely pit feminists against Bastards (adoptee rights advocates) and Mothers (“of origin”) as a means of protecting its own interests- Adoption as a modern Feminist institutional blindspot.
• Here is another post from just over a year ago about the adoption industry’s intentional infiltration into women’s health clinics that provide abortion services (Made all the more relevant now in relation to Dr. Carhart’s desire to position adoption counseling front and center in his Maryland clinic in the course of providing late term procedures)- Adoption in relation to Abortion provision, notes on clinics that embrace adoption marketing.

For those who care about women and our lives, adoption ultimately must be viewed as a feminist issue, as it is so deeply entwined with questions of agency and autonomy both economic and biological.

Those distinctions become all the more clear when a careful study of adoption practices by American entities abroad is undertaken: from Australia to Ireland, Russia to Vietnam, Guatemala to Ethiopia pregnant women globally have been systematically strip mined for their offspring.

(Furthermore, with the rise of repro-tech, the virtually unregulated American marketplace offers the hope of offspring to anyone with enough cash in hand. )

In addition to well, my entire blog, as my Radical (“to the Root”) Feminism is the perspective every word written here comes from, readers may also want to shortcut directly to my “Feminism” tag for some of my most explicitly Feminist posts.

In all likelihood I’ll probably not write a more detailed response to Brigid’s questions in the original post, particularly due to the fact that I’ve already done a number of posts pertaining to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and Hague Convention (both of which were subverted intentionally by the American adoption industry) and the U.N. Declaration of Indigenous Rights, here is but one of several examples.

These provide the existing legal framework for what children’s rights are already internationally recognized and what such could begin to mean, although both the Rights of the Child and the Hague Convention documents provide key loopholes that exempt and divest adoptees from rights otherwise explicitly recognized for all other classes of (at the time) children.

A Bastard-centric and Feminist demand for all our human rights, must of necessity be broader.