First go to Bastard Nation’s statement-

BASTARD NATION STATEMENT ON HAITIAN ADOPTIONS AND “BABYLIFTS”

It says much of what I need to, although far more eloquently and concisely than I ever could.

It’s a stunning statement, that speaks to the core of how we’re dealing with a corrupted and broken system long before the quake ever hit. In the aftermath, some of those on the ground have massive economic conflicts of interest. What’s happening now is attempting to put a polite face on little more than scavenging.

Since my last post four days ago, Haiti’s children and the American adoption market, obviously, the situation has unfolded very much the way some of us were deeply concerned it would.

I’ve spent the past four days looking at a virtual mountain of news pieces, blog posts, tweets, and emails so much of which can be summarized as little more than the constant drumbeat of the demand for children.

While the newspapers tend to focus upon the demand to ram through the adoptions already in some cases barely begun, much of the broader online culture openly calls for an all out child round-up, and redistribution.

There’s simply too much to write and as many of you have by now realized, the situation is simply changing too rapidly.

Child export flights have already taken place.

Clean water, medical care, food, shelter, and for Haiti’s massive population under 18, basic security from those who would utilize the  instability towards satisfying their own demands are very basic needs.

But what does it mean when the very nations “coming to Haiti’s aid” are themselves, those who would utilize the  instability towards satisfying their own demands? (See my comment here.)

How can you work against “child trafficking” in the wake of natural disaster when entire countries (that Haiti will be reliant upon to survive and rebuild) are part of the child export problem?

Let’s be perfectly clear here, Inter-country Adoption is not humanitarian assistance.

Taking children from Haiti is not altruism, it is child export, and utilizing the collapse in infrastructure to personal advantage .

Here in the US adoption has become THE story.

Certain Americans, completely unable to get their heads around scale and scope of human suffering, (recent estimates put the population of the region around Port-au-Prince at between 2.5 and 3 million people) have instead decided to focus on institutional interests or all the way down to a vested self interest, their personal demand for what they disingenuously deem “their” child.

Speaking as an adult adoptee myself, I find it absolutely disgusting that there are those who feel “adoption” is somehow vital to focus upon, as opposed to the massive scale of human suffering and needs in Haiti right this very moment.

But as so much of the current American government and media, is likewise disproportionately representative of those who have adopted, particularly internationally, prospective adopters find in judges and elected officials a welcome mat to their demands.

Denis McDonough, the National Security Advisor had this to say yesterday about how high a priority the demands of the American-would-be-adopters have been given on the federal level:

In fact, we’ve been working very closely throughout the course of the last couple of days with our counselor affairs office on ongoing adoptions. We are obviously also trying to make sure that orphanages have the resources that they need.

…

There has been an intense amount of interest done here — intense amount of work done here in the embassy today on this issue, because I think there are a lot of people focused on exactly this. And counselor affairs has dedicated personnel to addressing it in particular.

All this over what is very loosely being defined as roughly 300 American  “pending” cases (what’s a “pending” case? Here at the latest guidelines for kids being brought in,), more than 150 of which have ALREADY been brought to America over just the last several days in a mad rush to get them into the States.

See this story as but one example thereof.

Hospital officials also set up a makeshift courtroom, and a judge is expected to address any legal and adoption issues, Gessner said.

Many families from across the country have arrived or are expected to arrive today in Pittsburgh to finalize adoptions for most of the children, said Marc Cherna, director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. U.S families, including one from Pennsylvania, are in line to adopt 47 of the children. Three are going to families in Canada and four to families in Spain.

“Most of them were just about there in the adoption process, so this was just the last step,” Cherna said. “If they have their paperwork and everything in order, hopefully they can take them home.”

Mind you, those pesky little “last steps” under normal pre-quake conditions may well have been Haitian approval, something that has for intents and purposes become moot in practice at this point.

In pre-quake Haiti, “orphanages” bemoaned the length of the approval process (roughly 2 years) and were deeply concerned about how the process was slowing and they were having difficulty exporting kids, putting up prayer requests that processes be expedited.

“Orphanages” are by and large dependent upon the fees (over $10,000  US per child in at least once instance) for the adoptions to pay their basic expenses. As international adoptions worldwide slowed and the economy contracted in the U.S. adoptions from Haiti likewise began to slack off. The process drew out and some  “orphanages” raised their fees in that the monies collected from each adoption had to be stretched further until the next one could be realized.

The quake changed everything. Haitian “orphanage” directors are dancing for glee at so many dossiers moving in a single day, and elated at the prospect of suddenly having bed availability for so many more kids (which they hope to pass along as well.)

Instead of the long drawn out dossier approval process, we’re seeing adoptions rammed through in a “makeshift courtroom,” in Pennsylvania, presided over by a Judge with little to go on other than the agency and would-be-adopters end of the paper trail. The conflicts of interest are obvious.

All notions of child welfare, let alone children’s rights (rights which the U.S. still fails to recognize) are out the window.

Here is a small chunk of what I wrote previously in a piece about Vietnam, pertaining to UNICEF and it’s stated opposition to child extraction in the wake of natural disasters (the link in the below is no longer valid, though the position can be found here now):

UNICEF’s position on International Adoption, which begins, naturally with the assumptions contained within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guides UNICEF’s work, clearly states that every child has the right to know and be cared for by his or her own parents, whenever possible.

It elaborates that intercountry adoption should be considered when a permanent family setting in their country of origin cannot be found. UNICEF also lays out guidelines for when international adoption should NOT be utilized.

The case of children separated from their parents and communities during war or natural disasters merits special mention. It cannot be assumed that such children have neither living parents nor relatives. Even if both their parents are dead, the chances of finding living relatives, and a community or home to return to after the conflict subsides, continues to exist. Thus, such children should not be considered for inter-country adoption, and family tracing should be the priority. This position is shared by UNICEF, UNHCR, the International Confederation of the Red Cross, and international NGOs such as the Save the Children Alliance.

I strongly urge readers to carefully read the entire position statement and carefully consider what it means to say that all possibilities for a child to find permanence in a family in their country of origin have been exhausted.

Then there’s the underlying terminology problems and how utilization of certain terminology holds one meaning in the pop perception and quite another in international adoption law. Much of what’s happening right now is running down the greased rails of linguistic assumptions that have little to nothing to do with how such terms are actually applied in international adoption law.

Americans hear about the plight of Haitian “orphans,” never stopping to think that the child labeled “orphan” may be in an “orphanage” for any number of reasons, including coercion and false representation of such places as nothing more than mere “temporary child care until the family gets back on its feet.” Those of us familiar with how some of these orphanages tend to work have seen it time and time again in country after country, kids taken in ‘just for now’ only to be shipped out without consent, as the mere act of leaving a child in said places is being legally construed as consent.

Now in the aftermath of disaster, all of those assumptions are making the removal of children easier, at precisely the moment when parents and other relatives have the least voice with which to push back, if they are even aware their child has been taken.

When is an “orphan” not an orphan? Far more often than most people would care to contemplate in inter-country adoption.

As I’ve begun to touch on in some of my comments on this incredibly useful comment thread over on the Daily Bastardette, People hear terminology bandied about like “pipeline adoptions” or being “at the last step” and assume those adoptions should be expedited.

“Pipeline” at this point can mean pretty much anything from submitting an initial application towards potentially becoming an adoptive couple (and oftentimes not having gone through background checks, much less been matched to an individual child,) on through to all the paperwork having been set in place, but final approval had not come from the Haitian end.

Now with Judge Cadet having died in the quake, the disposition of a number of those cases is left to speculation, or whatever the international community or a judge in Pennsylvania can ram through.

As I’ve covered here so often on my blog, the basic definitions of terms such as “orphan” and “abandoned” are often slippery at best. Returning again to that earlier post on Vietnam for example:

All of which comes back to how terminology such as “orphan” in international adoptionland does not necessarily refer to ‘a child whose parents are dead’ or ‘a child bereft of parents.’ “Orphan” in relation to international adoption law has a very specific meaning.

Children adopted internationally after being designated “orphans” often have one or both parents still alive (and yes, in some cases even still seeking them, as often parents are lured into signing paperwork and leaving their children at ‘orphanages’ with promises of it ‘just being for a short duration’, perhaps until the parent has more money to care for the child.)

While the idea of a child whose parents are now dead tends to be the non-technical/non-legal definition in lay or common use, “orphan” as relates to international adoption has a very specific technical meaning embedded in international law in relation to the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and a set of criteria laid out in its definition of an “orphan.”(WAY too huge to lay out here, instead use this search tool of the document, searching on the term “orphan.” “Sec. 1101. Definitions” contains the technical definition of “orphan” for purposes of international adoption.)

“Orphan” is not the only linguistic stumbling block, Look here for a definition of how “Abandonment” is defined in relation to theUSCIS Guidebook for international adoption and how that begins to pose a new set of issues in relation to Vietnamese adoptions. (The entire guidebook is well worth glancing through.)

Likewise terminology such as “orphanage” also begins to shatter when held up to pop perceptions. Some so called “orphanages” in Haiti, far from the

Madeline‘s boarding school

Madeline-like institution notions some carry from childhood children’s books, are more accurately described as simply the Haitian end of international adoption markets. They are places where children are collected, cleaned and fed, stored, dressed to be attractive to the western eye, and then relentlessly marketed via websites and lookbooks, and newsletters. The primary function of some of them have nothing to do with long term child welfare. They are instead essentially holding pens where kids are kept until adoption paperwork can go through.

Some are simply about the money. Others add in an ideological component, raising the kids to be Christian and eventually set into Christian adoptive families by way of agencies that only take on those deemed adequately “faithful” as clients. (“Missionary tourism” and the Haitian orphanage trade deserves a post all its own.)

We’ve seen it time and time again in the wake of natural disasters. Some of the few things that prohibited child harvesting in the wake of the Tsunami were stricken countries laws banning Christians from adopting Muslim children and countries closing their doors in the wake of Christian childhood evangelism efforts. But pick an earthquake, a flood, a war-torn devastated somewhere, even New Orleans here in the States, post Katrina, and the child demand drumbeat can be heard all too clearly.

In the immediate aftermath of de-stablizing mass events, there are those with the infrastructure and “justifications” already in place to utilize such to their own ends. Haiti is sadly becoming just the latest example of child scavenging in the wake of natural disaster.

***

Is there more to write? Of course. Are there details and links and the continual unfolding of the whole sorry mess? Of course.

But adoption is not what matters here.

It shouldn’t be the story. It shouldn’t be where resources and personnel are focused, and it’s damn shameful that that’s what’s happening.

Chock it up to a lack of empathy, or a complete inability to get their heads around scale, but what genuinely matters here is getting lost, buried under the rubble, and lack of attention span.

There are people, right now, in desperate need of help.

Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

People still trapped in the rubble, hunger, death, and complete social collapse.

What’s the story here in America?

Adoption.

Natural disaster, for some, spells an opportunity to extract Haiti’s children.

Haitian adoption used to take roughly two to two and a half years. Some will use this as an excuse to call for efforts to fast track resettling these kids into new families internationally.

If you ever needed a reason not to give money to those who conflate disaster relief with extraction of children Marley’s vital and timely post lays out the lay of the land. It’s a long, but very important post,

HAITI CHILD EVACUATION: A NEW OPERATION PEDRO PAN?

Where should donations and resources be going instead?

Donations should be aimed towards those who explicitly reject the re-branding of kids as “orphans” at every opportunity (particularly when the kids still have living relatives) and who explicitly reject strip mining disaster striken countries for child export.

Look towards organizations with a track record of rejecting child export as anything other than relocation to other family members.

Stealing a country’s children means stealing a country’s future.

Haiti, pre-quake was already a nation of dire poverty, a culture in turmoil and a country of children.

See this from the Unicef Executive Director’s Jan. 13th statement:

“Expert estimates suggest that 46 per cent of Haiti’s nearly 10 million people are under 18 years of age.”

Sadly when it comes to the redistribution of children in the wake of natural disasters (as well as  wars and other such) the industry has learned that getting in quick, getting the kids out, and then forcing their country of origin, or individual family members to mount legal battles to reclaim children can be an effective strategy.

In adoption, as in many other such extra-legal grabs in the wake of catastrophes, disgustingly, the mere act of possession (and relocation) can end up being 9/10ths of the ‘law’.

Just ask the mothers of children stolen from Guatemala and relocated to America who have yet to have their children restored to them.

Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

Ron brought this Guardian article about Late Discovery Adoptees to my attention. Interviews with LDAs and this secretive side of adoption rarely gets the attention such deserve.

Adopted – but we didn’t know

Here’s a brief  segment:

“I was at my uncle’s funeral when my cousin’s husband wandered up to me and said, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you, because we’re both adopted.’ It was a huge shock – how could it not be? On the other hand, I had an instant explanation as to why I’d always felt like a square peg in a round hole when it came to my family.

“I once said to my mother, ‘I’ve always felt like I was found on a doorstep.’ She got terribly upset, and I later learned that was the point at which she confided in my cousin’s husband. She chose him because he’s a vicar. She assumed he’d keep it to himself.

“My mother had died by the time I found out the truth, but my father hadn’t, so I asked him about it. He was an unpleasant man and simply said, ‘Well, nobody else would have you.’ I threw a cup of tea at him, said that at least it meant I wasn’t related to him and we never spoke again.

“Was I angry? Of course I was. I had been advised not to have children because my mother and brother had both had severe diabetes and had gone blind and died early. To learn I wasn’t blood-related to them means I made an enormous decision based on fiction.

While some Bastards are aware of their adopted status and often have lies told to them about their early days, others, untold of the basic historical realities of their own lives, are forced by default to base their decisions and lives over the course of decades around fictions, lies, and secrets. Others never learn the truth.  All of which can have devastating and far reaching implications and consequences.

Oftentimes the anger in the aftermath of such revelations of those decades worth of lies is overlooked, re-framed as if such were merely a purely “personal problem” (as opposed to a natural consequence of the broader system that often encouraged keeping the truth from the people most directly affected) or simply outright glossed over. I thought the article did a good job of acknowledging the (fully justified) anger that can accompany such revelations.

Adoption has often meant relationships rooted in lies. The hidden nature of such keeps vital information from the very people it pertains to themselves.

This is why Bastard Nation uses the simple chant:

Are you adopted? Are you sure?

Adoption is a hidden legacy (often associated with shame) within many families, sometimes without ever being acknowledged or brought to the light of day.

For further LDA resources, see Ron’s http://www.latediscovery.org/ page and mailing list. (Always linked in my sidebar.)

Ron and other LDAs are doing important work. They have a very great deal to say about adoption and the long term genuine needs of adopted people.

The guilty plea to three counts of child rape by Eddy Tony Whisenhunt back in mid-December has led to an announcement from the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA.)

Pound Pup Legacy has a profile page on the Chinese girl adopted by Eddy and Donna Whisenhunt that links across to a number of pertinent articles.

This KIRO tv piece (also see attached video) from last May lays out the basics of the case as it was reported at the time-

A girl adopted from China has allegedly been sexually assaulted for years by both her adoptive mother and father, said Lt. Jim Mack of the Lacey Police Department.

A 51-year-old man and his 47-year-old wife face multiple charges of rape as they are accused of sexually assaulting their adoptive daughter for at least the past four years, Mack said.

Police said the alleged crimes may never have stopped if they didn’t have a chance encounter with the victim on Tuesday.

Police were called to the girl’s Lacey school after a little boy exposed himself. While asking the 8-year-old girl about what she’d seen, she ended up revealing details about her parents, Mack said.

“The 8-year-old female disclosed to the detective there was some secret time with her mother and her father,” Mack said.

Prosecutors allege both the mother and the father independently and secretly sexually assaulted the girl inside their Lacey home.

“Adopted from China, brought here and appears to become the personal sex toy of these two defendants,” said senior deputy prosecutor Joe Wheeler.

After the December 11th guilty plea, the CCAA issued an anouncement on December 22nd responding to the case. It contained among other details a suspension and assessment for the agency involved.

1. CCAA will suspend the cooperation with relevant American agency and decide whether to continue cooperation with this agency depending on its treatment of this incident.

The agency that handled the Whisenhunt adoption was  Faith International Adoptions (see the Pound Pup Legacy profile page on FIA as well).

5. Depending on individual cases, CCAA will suspend or terminate cooperation with agencies that are involved in cases where adopted children’s interests and rights are harmed. Home study reports prepared by social workers who are involved in such cases as well as the social workers themselves will not be recognized by CCAA.

Both points 1 and 5 leave plenty of wiggle room. The announcement is not an absolutist statement that when such circumstances are uncovered agencies will be barred, rather it offers potential suspensions, assessments, and squirm-phrases like “depending on individual cases.”

Social workers responsible for the home studies will become the fall guys. As many agencies subcontract out home studies, this creates a useful compartmentalization, the agency that placed the child can continue their relationship, while the contracted social worker gets the blame.

This allows agencies to continue on, business as usual, and any time one of these ‘unpleasantnesses’ crops up, the social worker involved can be moved from doing that agency’s China placements across to another country’s placements. (Opps, had a bad Chinese placement, time to move her over to Indian placements.) The idea that such would somehow protect kids adopted via any given agency is laughable.

There is no notion inherent to the announcement that agencies are ultimately responsible for the placements they do.

Portions of point 3 of the announcement is highly problematic as well (emphasis added):

3. To learn a lesson from this incident, it is suggested that social workers of government departments and adoption agencies evaluate the eligibility of applicants factually and in details. Social workers shall not only evaluate quantifiable factors such as age, profession, education background, income etc., but also evaluate whether the applicants are loving parents and with good personalities, as reflected in feedbacks from schools, communities, churches, social groups, etc. so that the reports provided can serve as dependable reference for CCAA during the reviewing process.

When you have church-based structures (see this Show HOPE backgrounder) built upon the notion of Christian movement growth via adoption, (also see this Show HOPE backgrounder) one really has to ask what the worth of any potential adoptive couple’s reference coming from churches could possibly hold at this point?

OF COURSE those associated with a church would give a regular churchgoing couple a positive recommendation if the institution itself is attempting to grow its flock via adoption. All the more so when the very churches offering said reference are associated with networks offering grants to Christian couples specifically for adoptions in hopes the child would likewise be raised within the belief system, or as such is more commonly phrased internally to the movement, “set orphans into loving, Christian families“.

Churches have realized a potential use for adoption and have mobilized towards utilizing it purely for their own reasons.

Under such a system the church criteria for a reference is not based on whether or not the couple would be an optimal home for a child, but whether or not the couple themselves are believers and would raise said potential adoptee within the faith.

The idea of adoption as a form of social movement growth undermines any notion of the needs of any single individual child. Results are not measured via the actual needs to the child, but the projected so called “spiritual needs” of the child (to become a christian themselves), and the demands  of churches as institutions, intent upon ‘self’ preservation, even if it means importing children from China (as but one example) to do so.

The final point from the announcement that I’ll address is point 2:

2. It is suggested that all the government departments and adoption agencies conduct a following-up research of all the children adopted from China. If problems turn up, relevant parties shall assist in the re-placement of the child affected and notify CCAA accordingly. It is also advised that government departments and adoption agencies do a good job in the post-placement following-up of adopted children in the future.

Follow up is “suggested.”

If an ongoing pattern of child rape happens to turn up in the course of such “suggested” or “advised” follow up, the answer is apparently a replacement, oh and don’t forget to notify CCAA. No demand law enforcement be notified immediately. No counseling or other such forms of support for the kid, just hand ’em a new “forever family” and get on with it.

Follow up in the wake of adoption, international or otherwise is all too often non-existent unless and until headlines hit the papers.

Heck, we’ve got domestic adoptees who move from DC to Maryland, disappear, are killed and left frozen in a block of ice no less,  all while adoption subsidy checks continue to flow to the adopter who apparently killed the kids.

If Renee Bowman was able to do this to her domestically adopted daughters who came out of DC foster care, who were not in school as she claimed to “home school” them, and all while she was receiving adoption subsidies for them, as absolutely no one was checking up on the girls or doing any form of follow-up, just whose job does the CCAA think it’s going to be to do their “suggested” follow up?

No one is doing any follow through checking up on the wellbeing of these kids.

We only learn of their deaths when such hits the papers.

Without “follow-up” becoming someone’s actual job, with a budget and reporting requirements, “suggestions” remain just that, nothing more.

Moreover, the Whisenhunts are not an “isloated incident.” Just as we’ve seen with the murdered and abused Russian adoptees, there are also a growing number of cases relating to kids adopted from China as well.

Niels (of Pound Pup Legacy)  has compiled a list of fourteen other cases involving murder or abuse of Chinese adoptees by their American adopters.

So long as everyone continues to take their suffering and deaths so lightly, there is no doubt in my mind that the number of these cases will continue to grow.

Yeah, not so swell.

Yesterday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran an article focusing on the adoptive family’s end of an adoption of two girls from India, an adoption rooted firmly in lies. The girls were the second and third adoptions Maria Melichar and her husband Carl had done through the agency.

Minnesota couple caught up in apparent adoption fraud

(By way of context, Minnesota has the highest international adoption rate in the country with 17 agencies doing intercountry adoptions. 14 investigations against 8 firms have been brought by state regulators in the past three years.)

Yeah,  adopting a twenty-one year old (presented as a “12 year old”) isn’t exactly what most people have in mind when they start plunking down the big bucks for “kids” from across the globe.

Melichar family photograph Komal and Shallu

Crossroads Adoption Services (a Hague Accredited member agency of the JCICS, the  Joint Council on International Children’s Services) handled the adoption.

Note Crossroad’s previous ugliness related to trafficked children in El Salvador. In light of such, you’ve simply gotta love their tagline:

Building families through adoption. The first thing we build is trust.

Their homepage brags of the supposed age range for the kids they place:

Each year, approximately 150 children join Crossroads’ adoptive families. The children come from across the United States and from other countries. They range in age from days old through teenage. Most of the children Crossroads places are under 2 years of age and are healthy. Crossroads continues to place children who have special physical, mental and/or emotional needs or are part of a sibling group.

The Star-Tribune article points out, the fabrication of ages for children adopted from India has been an ongoing concern:

While India has been criticized for changing children’s ages to make them seem younger to adoptive parents, experts said a nine-year discrepancy is unusual.

This October article, also from the Star-Tribune, Burned by a baby broker, contains a bit more detail:

The family has sued, and state regulators are investigating the conduct of Edina-based Crossroads Adoption Services, which handled the adoption.

Thing is, the real story at the heart of this particular case is the foot dragging on the investigatation on the part of U.S. officials at the State Department. The Star-Tribune has previously delved into some of the investigative problems inherent to the current system, see Adoption treaty sets up double standard in U.S.:

The job of investigating complaints was given to the Council on Accreditation, a nonprofit organization in New York that also handles accreditation duties. Only the state of Colorado will investigate its own cases. If an investigation confirms that an agency violated standards, it can lose its accreditation, shutting it out of the 77 treaty countries.

But in an interview, Richard Klarberg, the council’s chief executive, conceded that the council isn’t prepared to conduct international inquiries into complaints of corrupt adoption practices. Baby stealing or other fraudulent adoption practices have been alleged in Vietnam, China, Liberia, Guatemala and India. Some countries halted adoptions after such revelations.

“The reality is that the Council on Accreditation lacks the resources, either in staff or financial resources, to send someone to China to review a complaint. … We lack that capacity,” Klarberg said.

and

Klarberg said the council has just three staff members to investigate complaints against U.S. adoption agencies. They can question U.S. agencies and gather documents related to their foreign activities. So far, the agency has opened at least 17 investigations, but no agencies have been sanctioned. The council will leave the more complicated job of investigating foreign conduct to foreign governments or the State Department.

That’s not good enough, said Gina Pollock, an adoptive mother and board member of Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, a group that lobbies for changes in federal laws. She said the job of investigating international wrongdoing should be the government’s, not a nonprofit organization’s.

That outsourcing is precisely part of the problem. The very same non-profit agency that provides accreditation to agencies is also responsible for investigating their crimes. On the very face of it, that’s laughable at best.

Add in the complete lack of capacity and apparent lack of will to impose actual consequences both on the part of the COA and the State Department lies at the core of the girl’s case (the following is from yesterday’s article).

A U.S. immigration judge ordered the sisters sent back to India in July 2008 for visa fraud, after medical tests confirmed the age discrepancies. It appears to be the first time the U.S. government has expelled orphans under such circumstances, experts said.

The Melichars complained about the misrepresentations in 2007, but the organization that probes questionable adoptions for the State Department said it didn’t hear about the case until this year. Even then, officials postponed the investigation for months.

The United States implemented the Hague Adoption Convention last year. The State Department handed the job of policing international adoption agencies to the nonprofit Council on Accreditation, which enforces the treaty’s ethical standards. The reforms directly affect Crossroads and 13 other agencies in Minnesota, which has the highest rate of international adoptions in the United States.

Critics of the United States’ commitment to the treaty say the Melichars’ case shows the government is not aggressively investigating adoptions that go wrong. “I can’t understand why the U.S. government is moving so slow on these cases,” said Arun Dohle, founder of the Belgium-based advocacy group Against Child Trafficking and author of a 2008 law review article on Indian adoption fraud.

The answer of course, is that adoption lies at the core of American foreign and domestic policy.

Adoption is inherently viewed as ‘always a positive thing’. Any counterexamples to that mythology are to be ignored, swept under the rug, or quietly dealt with in ways such that the institution itself is not questioned, instead such circumstances are re-framed as mere ‘personal problems’ or ‘exceptional circumstances.’

For the U.S. to get serious about fraud in adoption would mean tarnishing the image of international adoption, and thus risking turning off potential adoptive couples (and the loss of cash that that would entail), something neither the architects of the policies nor the industry are willing to risk.

If intercountry adoption contains a certain percentage (as to what percentage, that remains quite unknowable) of reliance on child trafficking, that’s simply a ‘cost of business’ certain interests have been more than willing to embrace, as evidenced by the industry’s track record to date.

Over the past two days Marley‘s already laid out the basics of the situation, so I won’t attempt to rehash her fine work, first go see her posts about the NJ mess:

NEW JERSEY: ANYTHING TO GET A BILL PASSED. WE LEAVE EVERYBODY BEHIND!

BASTARD NATION’S LETTER TO NJ HOUSE SPEAKER JOSEPH ROBERTS, JR–PLEASE OPPOSE A 752. ADOPTEE DESERVE RIGHTS NOT FAVORS!

NEW JERSEY: MY CAUSE IS BETTER THAN YOURS. ADOPTEES V GAYS

The core of it all is of course, yet another broken bill, designed to leave some behind, constructed upon the false notion of parental vetoes that does real damage to existing adoptee rights.

One either excepts the basic premise that adopted people should receive equal treatment under law to non-adopted people, or they don’t. Sadly, the proposed legislation in New Jersey is predicated upon the notion that we are somehow ‘different’ and thus deserving of ‘different’ treatment.

The New Jersey bill, A752, has opened the door to complete non-sequiturs like “parental medical information” which simply have nothing to do with a genuine effort to restore Bastard access to our Original Birth Certificates (OBCs). Bastards regaining access to our OBCs doesn’t grant us access to parental medical histories, it merely restores to us access to our own documentation that the State had allowed access to originally, only to later confiscate and refuse us access to.

Just as non-adopted people get no family medical history when they request a copy of their Original Birth Certificates, neither should such be falsely folded in to concepts of adopted people’s restored access to ours. Doing so only attempts to conflate search and reunion issues into the genuine civil rights issue of records access.

Restored records access is what Bastards demand of the State. We demand such based on the premise that adopted people should be treated equally under law to non-adopted people.

Family medical histories are what some of us MAY ask of our relatives. Such requests may be granted or denied. Under law we have no “right” to be granted a medical history. Sharing such is at the discretion of our relations. Just as non-adopted people likewise have no inherent legal “right” to be granted such by their families.

Ethically, of course, sharing what information is available is likely morally preferable, but such interpersonal relationships and what information is or is not passed between individuals should not be state mandated.

As I’ve written here time and again, individual medical histories and family medical histories are up to individuals to decide whether they chose to share or not.

At the core of the Bastard rights position is the demand that we be free to live our lives without undue governmental intrusion into our interpersonal and family affairs, asking only we receive the same treatment as non-adopted people.

When states then insist upon entangling medical histories into state mandated requirements, they do little more than CONTINUE the ongoing pattern of state interference and control over ourselves and our families’ lives. Simply put, it’s none of the State’s damn business. It’s an interpersonal matter between us and our families- just as such is under law for non-adopted people.

Again, all we seek is equality. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Deformers in New Jersey are creating what would be a catastrophe instead, attempting to put our families into the position of being essentially state blackmailed by the State itself into handing over personal and family medical histories, should they desire a lack of contact.

A752 is not an adoptee rights bill, it’s a false conflation of a bill that attempts to push medical histories and reunion issues into the discourse about our authentic need for restored access to our own records, our demand to be treated just like other non-adopted citizens.

It sets up precisely the systems that are the hallmarks of deform bills: false and interpersonal issues conflated in, and separate class of Bastards left behind in the wake of the bill.

Speaking as one of those left behind by Ohio’s contortionist deforms, I know firsthand what it means to have some people get theirs at the direct personal cost to people like myself. It’s why I will never support anything other than a pure restored access bill that leaves no one behind.

Anything this “compromised” bill would manage to pass in the short term will have lasting detrimental repercussions for those left behind for decades to come.

Horrible excuses for legislation such as New Jersey’s A752 say a very great deal about those supporting them. As I pointed out in my WTF page one of the clear indicators of a Bastard is that they are not in it merely for what they perceive as something that might get records for themselves, nor for some short sighted ‘quick fix’ that leaves other Bastards standing beside them screwed and left behind at the end of the day:

An adoptee who is cognizant of and cares about ‘class Bastard.’ I.E. an adoptee who either inherently understands, or has moved beyond caring about issues of equality and access from a purely personal position of merely wanting equality for themselves, to understanding “personal solutions” are not the solution. A Bastard understands that ‘compromising away’ the person standing next to you in an effort to get something for oneself is simply unthinkable. We don’t jump in to get ours now by putting the Bastard standing next to us off with promises of “we’ll come back for you later.” A Bastard understands to the core of their being politically and interpersonally, “we leave no one behind/no one gets left behind or forgotten.” All of which is to say, Bastards have learned a number of lessons from history and incorporated such thinking into their everyday, perhaps now second nature, actions.

If the so called “activists” in NJ claiming to represent NJ adoptees haven’t figured that out yet, they’ve forfeited any genuine claim to representing any adoptees other than themselves and their own personal interests: they’ve presented a selfish half-assed piece of crap legislation that not merely leaves other adoptees behind, but also once again, sets a model that will could (and likely would) be used by other states to screw yet more adopted people.

When you’re willing to settle for what amounts to table scraps instead of human rights, you should not be the least bit surprised when what you get table are scraps instead of human rights.

I, as an adopted person, oppose New Jersey A752.

Sadly if that’s all it did, it could be dismissed as yet another lousy compromised from the get go bill. Merely the latest in a very long string of such. Sadly, that’s not all it would do. Instead it goes further, going so far as to actually erase existing OBC information for kids who go through the state’s babydump (or so called “safe haven”) process, for example.

Marley has laid out the core of some of the mess it would create (emphasis added by me),

Sponsored by NJCare, (aka The Krampi) A752 (aka The Krampus Bill) is one of the worst throw-our-rights away bills on record. The bill, of course, contains the compromiser’s favorite compromise, the “birthparent” disclosure veto.

But wait, there’s more!

In order to make this veto work, the state extorts a family/medical history from closeted parents. Kind of a pay to play scam. If parents don’t submit the government mandated snoop form in 60 days, then The Bastard gets the obc. Sounds like a violation of HIPAA to me.

But wait, there’s more!

A752 also contains the whiteout “alternative” that will give adoptees, slapped with a veto, an “original birth certificate” that’s been mutilated by a government censor with a glob of white-out smeared over identifying information including their own names, and the parental addresses at the time of birth.

But wait, there’s more!

The Krampus Bill automatically seals the obc of all persons anonymously dumped under the state’s “safe haven” law, even if one or both parents are identified on the obc (one of baby dumping’s dirty little secrets). See, a safe haven dump, coerced out of a confused parent ” is a legal assumption of an on file and notarzied “disclosure veto.” Tough, but at least you weren’t thrown in a dumpster. That receptacle is reserved for your rights.

Finally, Krampus includes a fiscal note of $90,000 from the General Fund to finance the cost of a national advertising campaign to warn biological parents that their bastard may be hunting them down with the adoptee-requisite drywall hatchet in hand. Be sure to get that veto on file while you still have your hands to write with.

It would create a whole new ‘right’ of sorts for parents (“of origin”) that sets them apart from all other people. The ability to have our paperwork modified and to demand adopted people go through an intermediary whether we want to or not.

NJCare board member Carol Barbieri, writing of A752 in the Asbury Park Press goes so far as to claim those not wanting contact “will be left alone” as a result of their bill, relabeling such a sick form of “protection”:

For starters, it gives birthparents who wish to remain anonymous a year to file a notarized “request for nondisclosure” letter with the state. Their name and address will be omitted from the adoptee’s original birth certificate. If a birthparent doesn’t want contact from an adoptee, they will be left alone.

Currently no such protection for birthparents exists in New Jersey. Furthermore, if a birthparent wants to reunite with an adoptee, he or she gets to choose how they would like the initial contact to take place — directly or through an intermediary.

All of which firmly inserts state interference into the ways in which adults conduct their interpersonal affairs.

Adopted people’s constitutional and human right to free association, would now be explicitly circumvented. We would be forced down chutes of predetermined contact or lack thereof with government serving the role of enforcer over our interpersonal relationships.

This holds no resemblance to any known concept of adoptee equality, instead, adopted people would form yet another new class, a set of people with what amounts to a pre-emptive restraining order set against us and interpersonal contact not based on any standard of prior actual behavior but merely on our EXISTENCE as members of a a class of people, those adopted and ‘nondisclosured’.

This is precisely the sort of pre-emptive restraining orders on interpersonal contact we’ve seen over and over down through the years out of the usual opponents of Bastard rights. To see such instituted on the back of any notion of an “adoptee rights bill” would be a damn sad day indeed.

Anyone who thinks this New Jersey bill does no harm has missed the horrific details contained therein.

Furthermore, if Bastards settle for utter garbage such as this, the odds of New Jersey ever being adding the roll of honour of states that treat adopted persons equitably under law are slim to none. No state that has settled for “compromised” legislation has ever come back and become a state authentically supportive of our full equality.

The United States according to Bastard Nation–

(Alaska and Kansas never sealed their records away from their adopted citizens. Oregon, Alabama, New Hampshire and Maine have each entered the roll of honour over the course of the last nine years.)

If New Jersey passes this bill it will instead join the list of states that rather than moving towards equality for adopted people, have chosen to protect the interests and secrets and lies of those with much to hide and much to answer for.

For adopted people themselves to side with such interests, putting forward bills that maim our demand for full equality under law is nothing short of an embarrassment. They side with those whose hands are dirty over those of their own class and long term interests. Such shortsightedness belies any claim to speak for adopted people as a class.

They have been “bastardized” by the State and wish to continue precisely such patterns of discrimination.

There is no shame is asking for what you really want, restoration of rights for all adopted people and genuine equality under law.

Conflating in search and reunion interpersonal issues, state enforced pre-emptive restraining orders, record nullification for those entering the system via the babydump mechanisms (a nice little X-mas bonus, cleaning up an oversight on the part of the dump pushers by piggybacking on a supposed ‘adoptee rights bill,’ nice that. so yup, an ‘adoptee rights’ bill that will actually take an eraser to a class of Bastard’s OBCs) , and granting new powers to parents (that will utimately come down to the State’s whims in interpretation) all at the direct expense of adoptee human and constitutional rights is unacceptable.

Such junk legislation should go only one place, the nearest shredder.

This bears no resemblance to adoptee rights instead, in a truly Orwellian fashion, it guts our existing rights and takes white out to “Dumpee’s” (or “Dumplings”) OBCs.

It’s yet another ‘I hope for mine, screw the costs to others’ bill.

If New Jersey activists came back with a real access restoration bill next time out, I’d gladly blog, write, and work in support of such, but when the best NJCare appears to have to offer at the moment is white out for a new set of OBCs, it’s past time to let this bill die.

I leave readers with the contact information for the Speaker,

Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts, Jr,.
Brooklawn Shopping Plaza
Rt. 130 South & Browning Rd
Brooklawn, NJ 08030
Phone: 856-742-7600
(No fax number listed)

email him via his web page: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/members/bio.asp?Leg=16 (cut and paste) (hit the email link.)

Ask that he allow A752 to die.

After all these years of work, it’s long past time, New Jersey needs a genuine bill that restores adopted people’s equality, not a piece of legislation that will ultimately gut what few existing rights we have left.

This is one of those posts that’s been on the back burner brewing here for a bit.

I’ve known Marley/Bastardette for a number of years now and I find I always come away from time spent with her having learned something. It may be  something deeply nuanced in relation to the intricacies of adoption policy and politic, or it may be something as marvelously “mundane” as her turning me on to a classic film. Other times we talk about music or history or she recommends another book to add to my seemingly endless reading pile.

Always, she leaves me with new ideas to chew on. Her humour, wit, and willingness to dare the outrageous have inspired me time and again.

Spending time with her down through the years has always been time I’ve treasured.

So when I heard she had taken on the task of tackling NaBloPoMo, I knew we were all in for a treat.

Get her talking, and sooner or later listeners (or readers in this case) are going to stumble headlong across new ideas or even old concepts that leave them thinking.

The promise of a truly *DAILY* Daily Bastardette has always been inherent, but trust me, as a fellow blogger, I understand how maintaining such, even over the course of a month is no small feat. (Closest I’ve ever come is 20 some odd days in a single month around the Nebraska big kid dumps.)

So this past November, The Daily Bastardette pulling 30 blogs in 30 days was just a bit like sitting down with a cup of coffee and opening the paper each morning used to be (back in the age when ‘Dinosaurs roamed the earth’ and ‘news was actually printed on a thing called “paper” and was delivered daily to one’s abode.)

The Daily Bastardette this past November served as the perfect anecdote to the nonstop cotton candy sticky sweetness of the all-marketing-all-the-time National Adoption Month.

For those of you who may have missed it, you missed the development of a body of work over the course of a single month the likes of which you wouldn’t find in the course of a year on many an adoption related blog: humour, history, media criticism,  original research/investigative journalism, community connections, theory and international content. Or put more simply perhaps, everything that the Daily Bastardette is, condensed down into a nutshell, a single month long extravaganza.

Marley is a true Bastard treasure, a genuine preserver of the rich Bastard-centric history that surrounds us all, even as it continues to unfold day in and day out all around us.

This post then is both a small personal ‘thank you’ and a celebratory ‘well done old girl!’

***

Browse at will, the November ’09 body of Bastardette’s posts-

HAPPY NATIONAL ADOPTION AWARENESS MONTH: JOIN ALT.ADOPTION ON FACEBOOK! Nov 1

UPDATE: JEAN PATON BIO Nov 2

3RD ANNUAL DEMONS IN ADOPTION AWARD WINNER: BETHANY CHRISTIAN SERVICES Nov 3

NATIONAL ADOPTION AWARENESS MONTH RESOLUTION: SURPRISE! WE’RE NOT IN IT Nov 5

GALLERY OF HEROIC ADOPTEE & BASTARD LEGENDS Nov 6

BASTARD NATION BEST PRACTICE 12 YEARS LATER: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-DEFEATISM IN ADOPTION REFORM BY DAMSEL PLUM Nov 7

MY LAME MAD MEN BLOG Nov 8

OHIO ABANDONED BABY CASE SOLVED: WE KNEW IT! HOAX! Nov 9

HOAXES CANNOT PIMP BABY DUMPING Nov 10

11-11-11: PVT . FRANK LAWRENCE RIP Nov 11

HAWAI’I: THEY’RE BACK–MORE MORONISY Nov 12

MY FIRST ADOPTEE: RONNIE BURNS Nov 13

CONGRATULATIONS DON CHAON! Nov 14

THE GREAT LIE. THE GREAT CAT FIGHT. ONE OF MY FAVORITE ADOPTION FILMS Nov 15

MORE FILM–THAT HAGAN GIRL: YOU THINK YOU’VE GOT PROBLEMS. BE GLAD YOU’RE NOT MARY! Nov 16

UK FLIM-FLAM: THE FERTILITY SHOW Nov 17

ADOPTION IS A FEMINIST ISSUE: DAWN FRIEDMAN TAKES ON THE NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR ADOPTION Nov 18

ABC NEWS LOOKING FOR ADOPTEES: DISCRIMINATION Nov 19

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION Nov 20

THE AAC AND ADOPTEE RIGHTS: A REPLY TO THE EXAMINER Nov 21

MARLEY MISSING FROM SHELTER Nov 22

JOAN WHEELER IS A BAAAAD GIRL! Nov 23

FIND MY FAMILY: WHERE’S THE RECORDS? Nov 24

“SAFE HAVEN” SURVIVOR Nov 25

THANKSGIVING: I’M GRATEFUL FOR CELEBRITY ADOPTERS! Nov 26

KITTIES SPEAK OUT ABOUT ADOPTION Nov 27

“FIND MY FAMILY” REDUX Nov 28

TROY DUNN TALKS ABOUT GLADNEY AND RECORDS Nov 29

BABYKLAPPE NEIN DANKE! GERMAN ETHICS COUNCIL SAYS NO TO BABY DUMPING Nov 30

I wanted to draw additional attention to two comments that came through yesterday on one of my recent posts about the ongoing failure that states’ “baby safe haven”/babydump programs have been.

I’m not going to attempt to write around them as the comments speak for themselves, other than to confirm that the author was posting from Michigan.

comment 1:

Melissa Says:

I live in michigan and in 2001 I gave my son up under the save delivery law. I was 16 and had delivered him at home. I was terrified and called an adoption agency out fear she directed me to the hospital and told me to tell the emergency room staff safe delivery I had no idea what that meant or what was about to happen the social worker said she would meet me there ha of course she would. This law is full of holes. I have custody of my son now and hes 8 years old healthy smart and perfect but the battle of getting my newborn back was horrible the state had no provisions for what would happen if I changed my mind the adoption agency fought me so hard they even lied in court they tried everything to keep my baby they took advantage of me and the law it makes me sick to know that the same people who abused the law to begin with are now the ones running the training program. What an industry. I’ve read the statistics for michigan and your article right on I’m one of the the very few on there that wasnt a 40 yearold women who gave birth in a hospital. I never had any intentions on throwing my baby in a trash can nor did I want to abandon my baby under such a law but was in shock from delivering a butt breach baby and was terriffied because I hid my pregnancy. The adoption agency I dealt with was evil and self serving and repeatedly tried to talk me out of filing for custody telling how I would regret my child and it would ruin my life which none of that is true my son is the best part of my life hes an amazing little boy. Something needs to be done about these laws its being a abused by all people involved and it disgusts me this law was put into effect to keep young women from throwing newborns in trash cans not to circumvent adoption laws among other things its been used for . how can this law even be used for what its intended for when the young women it was created for arent even aware or educated on it. Which is probably why a young women was just on the news a couple days ago here in michigan because she threw her newborn in a dumpster. These laws need to be fixed .

and comment 2:

Melissa Says:

I also forgot to mention that i changed my mind the next day and made the adoption agency and the hospital aware of my decision right away but it took 5 weeks and cost my parents about 20,000 dollars to regain custody of my baby

Thank you Melissa, for taking the time to comment and drawing attention to the problems inherent to these legalized child abandonment schemes.

Lots of people assume that even in cases where the child is eventually reunited that there’s no real downside or cost to having these laws in place. Your story draws attention to the sheer effort, the time lost, and the financial demands to families such programs can create even in cases where the kids do eventually go home with their mothers.

Again, thanks for speaking out.

Joy Madsen apparently had a complete melt-down on the Facebook “alt adoption” group’s discussion boards last night.

Some of us have seen this behavior from her time and again over the last three years, particularly in relation to the Adoptee Rights Demonstration/Day for Adoptee Rights though usually it’s been in spaces such as the AAAFC/”Adult” adoptees board, behind logins.

What happened on the FB alt adoption board last night is a rare publicly available example.

For those of you who might have been trying to understand some of the many reasons some of us refuse to work with people like Joy and those who tag along with her seeing nothing wrong with what she does, this ‘discussion’ may provide some illumination.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging and ‘National Adoption Month’.

*UPDATE*

Not surprisingly, a number of Joy’s posts from last night have gone ‘missing.’

Fortunately, it’s never so easy to make information disappear as some might wish.

Well here’s something you don’t see everyday.

Bitch Magazine* saw fit to include a commentary criticizing the industry from a Feminist perspective, written by adoptive mother Dawn Friedman. See “Adopt-ation: A feminist take on the state of the adoption industry.”

Marley/Bastardette has written her own blog post, ADOPTION IS A FEMINIST ISSUE: DAWN FRIEDMAN TAKES ON THE NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR ADOPTION, about the commentary, pointing out one of the core weaknesses of the Friedman piece, that of attempting to place adoption into a “reproductive rights” context/i.e. attempting to frame adoption as a reproductive issue. (A false meme I have addressed here on my blog repeatedly.)

Dawn replied in the Bastardette blog entry comments:

You’re right about adoption not really being a reproductive rights issue and I winced when I typed that but I want women to realize that if they care about abortion, they need to care about adoption because too many feminists aren’t thinking about adoption.

Unfortunately, here the ends simply cannot justify the means. Attempts to cloak adoption in the language of womyn’s “reproductive rights” or “reproductive choices” only serves to further muddy the waters. It continues to render Bastards, our human, identity, and civil rights as invisible to the equation. We as separate people (post birth, birth is the line of demarcation) have our own rights and interests and are not part of any mythical spectrum of “reproductive alternatives.”

Decisions about who will raise the expected child may be made during pregnancy, but none of those decisions mean a damn thing until after there is an actual born child to determine placement of.

Compulsory Pregnancy Advocates (i.e. those opposing womyn’s access to abortion) routinely conflate the issue by falsely inserting “adoption” into notions of womyn’s “reproductive options.” Sadly over the past 36 years since Roe and Doe, many Feminists themselves have been snookered into embracing this false meme.

Rather than repeating it in some sad attempt to gain sympathy for the cause of ‘openness’ (however nebulous that appears at times) in one of the rare mentions of adoption, the industry, and Feminism internal to Feminist media, the more Radical (“to the root”) approach would have been to take that rare opportunity to tell the truth, that adoption is never a reproductive rights “issue”, it is instead a chronologically secondary point in the process that takes place AFTER the reproductive phase is over and done with.

One the one hand, many Feminist Bastards are happy to see any scant critique of the industry from a Feminist perspective appear in print.

But on the other, it is precisely because these critiques are so rare that it becomes all the more important to get the analysis correct; avoiding false memes (that originate within the very industry and broader movement one is attempting to critique) and unflinchingly speaking to womyn’s authentic roles in adoption.

For Feminism to genuinely begin to grapple with its legacy of and current entwinement with adoption as an institution and the corrupt industry itself, Feminists would need to move beyond listening to adoptive mothers and begin to genuinely listen to Mothers and Bastards ourselves, all while coming to terms with the many ways by which Feminist individuals and institutions, as well as institutions supported by Feminists (NARAL, as but one of many such examples) have enabled the industry and participated personally, a tall order indeed when for decades now adoption has been sold to womyn as another “reproductive choice.”

The fact that those critical of adoption tactics and the industry remain ghettoized, never added to the pantheon of “Feminist Issues” says a very great deal about the internal blind spot modern many Feminists have perpetuated. Turning a blind eye to the conditions under which children are procured undermines the authenticity of other aspects of the modern Feminist critique.

How can one speak to the conditions of working womyn in India, for example, without ALSO acknowledging that one aspect of the work some number of Indian womyn are forced into is that of bearing children for American would-be adopters?

Adoption politics speak directly to the broader experiences of womyn as a class. That some womyn, self professed feminists no less, willingly (hell, at times gleefully) provide the capital and raison d’être for an industry that clearly benefits from the deprivation of another set of womyn fundamentally calls into question not merely their “feminism” but their very humanity and ability to empathize with other families. Families, at times across the globe, that oftentimes do not speak the same language, nor have the resources available to them regain what are clearly at times children stolen, sold, or explained away as “having died.”

The sad fact remains, this is one of the great human rights “issues” of our times, for many feminists to not merely be missing in action, but personal participants in this human trade undermines credibility on any number of fronts wherein those approaching the hard issues do so from a Feminist perspective.

Do those of us who consider ourselves Feminists (or in my case a Radical- or “to the root”- Feminist) ensnared by aspects of adoption as currently practiced find our “sisters'” participation in and advocacy on behalf of the industry somewhere on a spectrum between “disheartening” and “outright betrayal”? Well. ultimately, yes.

• When one learns that womyn’s health clinics, so entangled in their opponents rhetoric and false memes that they turn to forms of “adoption counseling” making referrals and become an intake path into the Gladney Center for Adoption (Gladney has long been opposed to Bastard rights. It was one of the founding agencies that created the National Council for Adoption as an industry lobby against open records. Every child they place adds money to their coffers. In a day and age when finding womyn willing to relinquish is a daily struggle for industry, the idea of womyn’s clinics providing them raw fodder is nothing short of doing their dirty work for them.)
• When we watch as year in and year out, feminist organizations willing to take on Coercive Pregnancy Indoctrination Centers (CPICs, “crisis pregnancy centers” or fake clinics) yet are unwilling to address the one of the two ultimate goals of such centers, (one being religious conversion, the other being) procurement of eventual children for faith based adoptions through the use of fear tactics, outright lies, and propaganda.
• When evidence of coercion, intimidation, kidnapping, smuggling, bribes, etc etc etc are brought forward as case studies of the tactics utilized particularly in the international adoption trade to mainstream feminist organizations and publications, yet the concerns of Mothers and Bastards are brushed aside again and again.
• Or worse than mere neglect, when organizations do come out to lobby on for example, legalized baby dumping/”safe haven” bills, only to support them! Thereby making it appear legalized baby dumping is something “both sides” (“feminists” and those vehemently opposed to abortion) can “agree” upon. (Meanwhile others of us Feminists actively fight against such measures, understanding how they genuinely subvert womyn’s rights and forever destroy the child’s human, civil, and identity rights.)

It’s a long sad litany of failure. Failure to understand that the gain of one womyn CAN come at the direct and permanent cost to another. That calling oneself a feminist while fucking over another womyn rings hollow.

Sadly the above are only but a few of many such examples. Yet by and large those of us with direct personal experience have been shut out.

So should we be surprised when the only voices that make their way up through the cracks into certain forms of feminist media are those of adoptive mothers, unintentionally(?) couching their critique in the false memes of their opponents so as to ‘gain a hearing’?

Not in the least.

My Radical Feminist Bastard perspective was forged in the realm of street activism. Of taking direct personal experiences and listening to the directly affected, then acting upon such, demanding authentic change.

So long as today’s feminist institutions are unwilling to take a long hard look at their own participation in causing the suffering and political disenfranchisement of other womyn, I find it damn difficult at times to call them allies. When they abandon the genuine needs of classes of womyn, I personally have difficulty conveying the mantle of ‘a voice for womyn’ or notions of ‘leadership’ upon them.

Are there Feminists on the ‘right side’ of the adoption mess? Yes, there are a few, but as Marley pointed out:

There is little feminist critique of adoption outside of academia, and even there it is top-heavy with adopter discourse–some of it spot-on., and I don’t want to dimiss it. But, Feminist Bastard and Feminist First Mother voices are generally limited to blogs, forums, and obscure conference workshops.

One of the many things I aim to accomplish with my own blogging is to point out, those claiming the title “feminist” and attempting to “speak on behalf of womyn” in adoption anyway, oftentimes cannot speak for me, nor for many other Feminist womyn. At this point, there is no singular “feminist stance” in relation to adoption.

The pop perception is that the “feminist position on adoption” is to have a power career long enough to have put off childbearing long enough so as to adopt an “orphan,” preferably from some “third world” country in an “act of altruism” now dubbed “feminist.”

Said charactature, ignores Feminist Mothers who have lost children to adoption. It ignores Feminist Bastards fighting against the corrupt sealed records system used to hide industry wrongdoings. And it ignores what is often the reality of womyn who adopt as well, some of whom self identify as Feminist.

Modern feminist institutions have a lot of listening to do. Not surprisingly, some of the first voices they may be willing to hear will likely come from womyn who have adopted. Such are voices easier to make room for and to hear, often viewed as a version of peers.

We’ll know we’re finally beginning to make progress, however, when Mothers speaking from their own experiences and Bastards speaking from their legalized second class citizenship begin to populate the discourse and are granted more than mere voice, genuine representation and structural power.

***

* note, I have been a financial supporter of Bitch magazine. While I have both good and bad things to say about the magazine, my beef in this piece is less about one of the few remaining pieces of Feminist media and more about where Feminism as a whole stands in relation to adoption. If anything, yes, however flawed, I am glad to see Bitch tackle the issue and crack the door just a bit wider, for that alone, they deserve support.