Today’s a good day for me to shut up and let First Nations people speak for themselves.

I will merely point out where I’ve written about these annual memorial marches before to provide some background and links to additional resources, let readers explore the news links for themselves, and then close with a few brief sentences.

• First Nations peoples continue to decry the ongoing stealing of their children for adoption (A post about last year’s march)

• First Nations peoples’ fight for their kids brought to the Iowa Commission on Native American Affairs (A post about some of the ongoing work between last year and this year)

Here are some articles about this year’s march.

• March to memorialize Native children lost in foster care.

Between 100 and 200 people will gather at the Marina Inn this morning for the eighth annual Memorial March to Honor Lost Children. The march remembers those children who have died or who have been lost in foster care in Siouxland.

“I don’t think it’s a leap to say that we’ve lost hundreds, even thousands of our children through the intervention of the child welfare system in the state of Iowa,” LaMere said. “We memorialize that loss and we remember those children.”

• Siouxland Natives March to Honor Lost Children
• 8th Annual Memorial March to Honor Lost Children (w/video)
• PHOTOS: Memorial March to Honor Lost Children
• Native Americans march to honor “lost children”

and the accompanying video segment:

The wildly disproportionate state confiscation of Native children must end.

The child placement provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) must not be ignored.

The cultural genocide continues. The “residential schools” may be closed now, but in far too many states, that ideology remains  just as close as the foster system.

That must change.

Blogs don’t have acknowledgement pages or other such,  but I wanted to simply say thank you tonight to those who have supported me both as a Bastard and specifically in this writing.

Some readers stop by from time to time, or are very specific about what they seek and take from my blog. If they’re finding what they’re after I’m happy and grateful for their readership.

Others read along and sometimes some actually incorporate aspects of what I’ve written into their own thinking and actions (and that has been a really amazing process to watch unfold.)

Seeing individual and even small scale social change come of something that I was never altogether certain I was willing to do in the first place, write, has shown me the value in giving voice to things even when it seems completely overwhelming and the words don’t come.

It’s too large to write.

And I’m small.

But encouragement comes when you least expect it.

I’ve met so many new friends and staunch supporters, some where I sometimes least expected.

I’ve corresponded with people, a number of whom I gladly call friend, or ally from around the world simply for having put words and a translate button to a page.

It never ceases to amaze me, and I am always in awe of their own tenacity, dedication, and work.

Many of the conversations that have come out of those interactions have challenged me, solidified things for me, and deeply affected me. All the more so in that if learning from other Bastards or those in this strange field teaches you just one thing, it’s that there’s always more, the rabbit hole always goes deeper.

Through that connecting with others enduring these injustices, I have found friends, allies, and those so dear to me as to consider them my family.

Tonight is about saying thanks to those who read, or who have influenced my own Bastardly thinking, or supported me, and encouraged me through these past 3 plus years of blogging now.

I didn’t really mark the blog-o-versary back in October, but somehow more than three years have gone by.

There’s an odd little collection of work here now that wouldn’t exist but for those around me who have been core to my support system.

My gratitude goes out to all those I chose to consider family for the many years of  both supporting me, and helping me think through bits and pieces of this out loud, and providing their insights and their wisdom. Some over endless cups of coffee, others in mere passing comments or email.

They know who they are, and they know I wouldn’t be the person I am today without each and every one of them.

Most of all, though, my deepest most heartfelt thanks go out to my life partner, Mike.

In every way imaginable he has been there for me through all of it, both the writing and the living adoption. He has been a true partner to me and a friend beyond measure.

His willingness to jump in with both feet, and not only be by my side, but in bringing his own unique perspective, skills, and voice to the Bastard rights movement (as with all our work) leaves me almost speechless.

This past year has run the gamut of adoption related almost everything imaginable for us, but through it all, he has been not only someone solid that I can count on, but also wise counsel, my support system, a fierce advocate, and a one man tech department.

He has always urged me on, helped me not give up, and always, ALWAYS not merely made room for my writing, but actively supported my writing in every way.

We sometimes half jokingly state that “he makes it all possible,” but it’s true.

He tends to be a very behind the scenes kind of guy when it comes to much of this, but he’s an all too often unsung hero of sorts.

Both personally and politically, he has been rock solid. “Dependable” doesn’t begin to cover it.

He is the primary person I turn to to parse these odds and ends apart with and I learn from him constantly.

It should also be noted that he is the writer in the family.

I don’t celebrate thanksgiving, but I do spend this part of the year marking the final harvest, noting the bounty that surrounds me, taking stock before the cold and dark of the year, taking the time to see who my family is, and offer gratitude for all those who feed me, both physically and metaphorically.

To all of you who have in any way supported me or my work, thank you.

Just a brief post this evening pointing readers across to this article, Childless couples face jail as part of international baby ban as one of many possible entry points discussing the unfolding story in Australia.

Unlike the United States, Australia has been feeling its way forward much more cautiously concerning issues of surrogacy and what has been termed “reproductive or fertility tourism,” grounded firmly in its own criminal history pertaining to childless couples and adoption.

As a result, it has recently passed a law banning travel overseas for the explicit purposes of obtaining a child born of a surrogate Mother.

But it has also passed laws bypassing adoption requirements in surrogacy cases, instead simply applying for orders pertaining to parenting, largely for pragmatic reasons in that the need for adoptions was creating various bureaucratic and logistical problems, thus taking surrogacy one step closer to a hybrid form of direct legal parentage and that much closer to erasing the role of the (surrogate) Mother in legal parlance. This “streamlining” has implications for both Mothers and the resultant children.

The impact on Queer couples has been front and center through all of this and may have been one of many factors that went into the creation of the law in the first place, again raising questions of the ways in which discrimination can creep into such.

Pulling just a few brief quotes from the article:

In a move that has outraged would-be parents – whose only option left for starting a family is to travel to countries like India or the US to pay a surrogate mother – the NSW Government has extended the ban on commercial surrogacy to arrangements made overseas.

NSW residents who go overseas to countries where commercial surrogacy is a legal and thriving industry face up to two years in jail, a $110,000 fine or both on their return.

The change is designed to deter people from dodging the local prohibition and to prevent the exploitation of poor foreign women.

Unfortunately, comments like this from the Gay Dads Alliance (whether taken in or out of context) leaves the appearance of being tone deaf to the plight of women, both abroad in countries like India where reproductive tourism reduces a number of women to practically incubator status, as well as within Australia itself, in that there are a number of very solid historical reasons finding a woman willing to consentually engage in surrogacy can be quite tricky, not the least of which being Australia’s criminal adoption history in which children were literally taken from their Mothers without consent.

Gay Dads Alliance spokesman Sam Everingham said NSW was becoming a “nanny state” with laws to protect people from irrational fears.

He said finding an altruistic surrogate in Australia was almost impossible and the amendment sent a blunt message to parents who had already used commercial surrogacy that their family was wrong and unlawful.

These fears based on Australian history and present day global reproductive exploitation are certainly not irrational, though it remains unclear whether the Gay Dads Alliance spokesman intended his comment to be applied to such or not.

As for both the industry and this particular spokesman’s concerns about parents who have already used international surrogacy services or kids who are a result of such being left with concerns about legality and “legitimacy,” they, not dissimilar to Americans who appear to have adopted children babyfarmed or even kidnapped in places like Guatemala yet “legally” sold for adoption are left to deal with the aftermath of things that were legalized, yet often not the least bit consensual for the Mothers involved nor ethical.

Rather than attempting to sweep such actual practices under the rug and pretend they do not exist, getting to the truth, and making decisions from there sooner rather than later should be policy.

All the more so if there are cases in which the mothers never consenting to losing their children and want their children back.

The article also makes mention of how some women may participate in commercial surrogacy as a matter of beliefs, and attempting to do good works as a part of working out their personal karma in addition to their need for money.

…Bangkok, where commercial surrogacy is reportedly as much about the Buddhist ideal of “making merit” – the karma that comes from doing good for another – as it is about making money.

It also brings up the complex issue of the law’s actual enforcement, and how such can be tangled through the need for self reporting and displays of intent.

Mr Lynch said if faced with a lack of evidence that an arrangement made overseas was commercial in intent, the new laws would be difficult to police.

“What’s to stop someone from saying I had sex with a woman while I was overseas?,” he said, and added it would force “genuine couples” to engage in a “victimless crime”.

While the new laws are aimed at preventing exploitative practices and at least the Australian cash feeding those portions of the fertility tourism industry as well as protecting women and their genuine consent, it will be very interesting to see how they play out in practice.

I am not familiar with Australian law, but here in the United States there are essentially two classes of those who parent, those who are biological parents and need no licensing nor approval from the state and those who are not biological parents who seek state approval for fostering, adopting, etc.

For those in that second classification their parenting of these particular children is not an inherent right, but a state granted privilege that comes as a result of at least some stab at a vetting and approval process.

One may have an inherent human right to be a parent, but one does not have an inherent human right to another’s child.

(This is why adoption industry lobbyists here in the States twist the argument around, claiming a lack of being adopted “interferes with a child’s right” to being raised in a family or having parents, when what they are really claiming is that it constitutes a form of discrimination for would-be-adopters to not be able to adopt any given child. They understand all too well that would-be-adopters do not have an inherent human right to someone else’s child. Smart marketing that, on behalf of their clients, would-be-adopters, but a co-optation of Bastard voice and genuine rights to industry purposes.)

Part of the problem that Queers, Trans and Gay men in particular face across the board is that other than kids from previous marriages or Queer women giving birth, Queer parenting is often tangled through an approval process.

This is why until fairly recently, living with a Gay male partner often meant being childless save for kids from previous marriages, helpful Lesbian or Bi friends, etc. Gay adoption, more so than Gay fostering (here in the states at least) is still legally, a relatively recent phenomenon.

Heterosexual couples dealing with fertility issues have a similar problem, they cannot reproduce on their own, and then must rely upon that second classification, whether turning to surrogacy, fostering, or adoption.

Once those who want to parent no longer fall under the first classification of being able to do so completely on their own, they then fall under the second category, under which parenting someone else’s child is simply not an inherent “right.”

The key here of course is that once you have entered the realm of someone else’s biological child, these systems should not go on autopilot. There are responsibilities and emotional components that simply are different from raising a child biologically related to you.

This becomes all the more convoluted when there is provably, an industry built upon women’s reproductive capacity and lack of consent seeking to harness that market of those who are willing to pay to become parents who fall into the second category.

Australia is attempting to deal with those realities. How it turns out remains to be seen.

I’ve blogged before about how the prospect of adopted people regaining access to their original birth certificates is opposed and seen as a threat by the catholic church.

See, Prospect of open records makes IL Catholic Conference fearful of potential lawsuits and how in the course of that, the Illinois Catholic Conference outright admitted that they may have falsified information on a number of those original birth certificates.

As Marley wrote in a comment to my post at the time:

I have never heard any industrialist admit falsification of government birth records before. While some women may have put false information on a bc of their own volition, this statement comes out of nowhere. Absolutely no context. It suggests that there was a systematic program to place false information on a government document. Who put those thoughts and actions into women’s minds? Who instrumented falsification. If a systematic pattern of falsification is uncovered in even one diocese, the game is over.

Marley’s post covers it pretty well:

I 100% agree with Gayle that the Illinois Catholic Conference put its foot in its mouth by admitting that some obcs may contain fraudulent information. Amended birth certificates aside, placing false information on a birth certificate is illegal. We can only wonder at whose suggestion false information was placed on the obc document. Could this be one of the causes of adoption industry fear of unrestricted records access? Adoption professionals advised their clients to falsify government documents, and the chickens might be headed back to the barn?

I’ve also blogged about the ongoing case in New Jersey, where NJ Catholic Charities facilitated “reunion” turned out to be nothing more than yet another lie.

Catholic Charities has for all intents and purposes “lost” a child placed for adoption, and offered up another adoptee completely non-related in a false “reunion.”

DNA testing revealed the lie, but NJ catholic charities response was essentially, tough shit. They are now being sued.

To say this has been heartbreaking for both the parents and the (non-related) adoptee would be a gross understatement. They each “found family” again only to find it to be nothing more than a lie.

As for the adoptee’s authentic parents, or the lost child, there whereabouts are simply unknown, lost in catholic charities system. Any documentation may simply no longer exist.

(The entirety of the New Jersey open records fight, and the current ANTI-adoptee bill S799/S1399/A1406 must be understood within this broader context of the catholic church’s interest in working to cover its own ass. )

But beyond the church’s fear that their paperwork lies may be unconvered lie whole other interests to protect, and stories far more damning.

What hides in some of those adoption records that the catholic church is desperately working to either keep closed (or at minimum inject themselves into process of passing the information out as a means by which to maintain control) are secrets that cut to the very core of who catholic priests say they are.

Secrets that stand to rock their followers’ faith in them and the church itself as an institution with it’s “celibacy” lies and sexual problems front and center.

Meet the lovers and secret children of the priests, who are organizing themselves and bringing suits of their own. (This is an older article, but a good overview.)

Errant priests’ secret children to sue church

When Pat Bond told her lover Henry Willenborg, a Franciscan priest, that she was pregnant, he urged her to have an abortion.

Bond, who was 28, had a miscarriage and then became pregnant again. This time Willenborg’s superiors urged her to give up the child for adoption.

Bond, from Missouri, kept the child but agreed to a vow of silence. In a signed contract with the Catholic Church, she undertook to keep the priest’s identity secret in exchange for financial support for her son, Nathan.

In America, Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy and Austria,women made pregnant by priests have signed such pledges in exchange for hush money from the church.

When we as adoptee rights advocates argue for the restoration of access to our original birth certificates, a right adoptees used to enjoy just like anyone else, some of the adoptees we’re going to end up talking about are the secret children of catholic priests, their origins hidden by the church in collusion with the state’s sealed records policies.

As the evidence of such comes to light, the church’s adoption scandals stand to rock parishes and may potentially rival the church’s child molestation scandals in terms of trust and faith in church leaders.

Damn straight they don’t want any of this coming to light.

Hence the decades worth of hush monies.

Bond was 25 when she started a five-year relationship with Willenborg in 1983, after going to him for marriage counselling. He kissed her passionately as she left his parlour, then she left her husband.

After Bond became pregnant by him for the second time in 1986, Willenborg’s order, the Order of Friars Minor, offered her $50,000 and a confidentiality contract. “They said: ‘Here, take this money, sign this contract and you’ll have support for your child’. I was very naive and I signed,” said Bond.

She broke her promise of silence last year after the Franciscans refused to meet part of the cost of treatment for her son Nathan, then 22, who died in November from a brain tumour.

When Willenborg’s liaisons with Bond, now 53, and another woman became public, the priest was suspended from his parish in Ashland, Wisconsin. He was treated for sex addiction, then returned to his pastoral duties. Catherine Schroeder, a St Louis lawyer for the Order of Friars Minor, declined to comment. Willenborg and the order failed to return calls and emails.

We’ve got a local case here in Maryland.

Other cases are reaching the US courts. In Maryland, two children of the late Father Francis Ryan are suing their local archdiocese and a religious order for $10m after discovering through DNA tests that he was their father.

Carla Latty, 58, and Adrian Senna, 65, say Ryan never admitted he was their father or made any payments to their late mother. Senna was sent to an orphanage, while Latty was put up for adoption.

The scope of the problem is massive, it’s worldwide, and it certainly appears to go all the way to the top, up to that asshole Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI himself, as he was part of the clean up crew when it came to making these little indiscretions disappear. (Emphasis added by me)

Cait Finnegan, of the Good Tidings association, an American charity for priests and their lovers, has been contacted by nearly 2,000 women who had relationships with priests. She said one pregnant friend had been told by a bishop to “get rid of the child” — a comment she took to mean she should have an abortion. The woman kept the baby.

Thousands of priests in German-speaking countries are believed to have fathered children. Paul Zuhlener, an Austrian theologian, has estimated that up to 22% of Austrian priests have sexual relationships.

Sabine Bauer of the Austrian branch of We Are Church, a reform group, predicted a spate of lawsuits. “The children of priests, and their mothers, are the next ones who will take legal action against the church. Their numbers are large and they have been denied basic rights,” she said.

In Britain, Adrianna Alsworth, who has two children by a priest and runs the Sonflowers helpline for those who have had relationships with priests, said she knew of several women who had been offered confidentiality contracts in return for child support.

“The children aren’t given an opportunity to have a normal family life, and they suffer,” she said.

In Ireland, the former Down bishop Pat Buckley, who runs Bethany, a support group for women in relationships with priests, said he had dealt with two whose abortions had been paid for by priest lovers. In one case, the priest had accompanied the woman to England for the abortion.

In central Italy, Luisa, a psychologist who has an 18-month-old son by a priest, was told by her bishop: “If you give up the baby for adoption, you can stay with the priest and I’ll pretend there’s nothing wrong.” She refused but the couple have since broken up and the priest refuses to recognise the child.

Lorenzo Maestri, a former priest and member of Vocatio, an association for married priests in Italy, accused the Pope of leading a cover-up. “Benedict is responsible for the secrecy, because in 2001, as head of the Vatican office which dealt with all sexual problems involving priests, he ordered the bishops to send these cases to him in Rome,” Maestri said.

In many states what Bastards fighting for open records are up against is nothing short of the full resources and efforts of the Catholic Church. (Though as Marley has noted, the Archbishop in Portland, Oregon had the decency to stay out of the way of the Measure 58 effort that eventually opened records there.)

These were kids no one was supposed to know about.

An untold number of dollars were spent to ensure those secret children remained secret.

We’re talking about the likely possibility that monies went from the collection plates through the churches back out into hush money for priests’ lovers and their children.

And Rat-Benny appears to have been right in the middle of it.

As for the kids themselves, this pretty much says it all:

Benedict, whose fifth anniversary of his election is tomorrow, may acknowledge the child-abuse cases by agreeing to meet seven victims on his Malta visit. There is no such prospect for the children of priests. When asked what she would like the pontiff to do, Bond quoted her late son: “Nathan told me, ‘I want the Pope to tell me he’s sorry. The church abandons us, it calls us legal obligations. It doesn’t even call us by our names’.”

This is the post I don’t want to have to write.

Roughly two days ago B.J. Lifton passed away.

I’ve been grappling with what to say and how to say it ever since.

More to the point though, I’ve been stewing on this post since the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) conference last April. Bear with me.

At the time I wrote two posts about the single most pressing aspect of what I saw at the conference (Please read, or re-read them to have context for the rest of this post):

• Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) conference screens racist misogynistic objectifying anti-abortion maternity camp propaganda video &
  
• ASAC adds an addenda to the description of the racist misogynistic objectifying anti-abortion maternity camp propaganda video that it screened

but I alluded to the fact that there was more to it than that, and that I might eventually blog about the other aspect.

Hence this post. That “eventually” is now.

Lets be clear from the outset, this is a post about the pitfalls of hero worship, about cultural aspects that are genuinely standing between Bastards and where we’re trying to go politically, and perhaps most sadly of all, about the tactics so often used against us.

Yes, I’m going to have to write about B.J. to get through to those, but I hope others will be able to hear me in this writing in that what I am a speaking to is a far broader Bastard political critique.

---

After much thought, early Saturday morning, I wrote a little on my facebook feed, knowing that a number of Bastards and Mothers are my friends there and that they too, were in the process of hearing about and dealing with the news that B. J. Lifton had passed.

My short bit seemed very different than almost anything everyone else was writing.

Marley’s initial post in particular reflected the thinking of a number of Bastards.

We Lose Another One: B J Lifton &

I know that for many, reading B. J.’s writings was the first time they ever saw their hearts reflected on the page. Things so often left unarticulated, B. J. gave voice to, all the more importantly in that she did so at a time when such was all still so very new. She was a pioneer and vitally important to the process for many Bastards. She fought for our rights.

That said, having done so does not put her actions or tactics beyond criticism or political critique.

One can hold whatever feelings they do about someone personally or politically, or even historically without putting them on a pedestal too high to ever evaluate.

The adoptee blogosphere, small fishbowl that it is, is filled with personal remembrances and tributes at the moment, including some from those who didn’t always see eye to eye with her. Mrs. Lifton’s acceptance of and support for “adopted child syndrome” was one of many sticking points for some number of us, and those were certainly discussions if not debates many had with her while she was still alive.

Others of us always took issue with her arguments being predicated upon the idea of open records, search and reunion, etc. as grounded in healing or a quest for wholeness, arguing instead that these were simply human rights, what we did with our records once we had them, or how they made us feel was always in the personal realm and individual not the core argument to be taken before for example, legislators.

We seek equality under law, and at the end of the day no ‘quest for personal wholeness’ is even relevant to that fundamental demand.

As B.J. was a psychologist, these realms were her bread and butter though, and her practice dealt with the emotional aspects of adoption and implications to adoptees. It is little surprise that her adoptee rights work then, was grounded in that professional work.

Unlike many of us on the adoption pentagon, B.J. occupied multiple points as both an adoptee and a psychological professional in the realm of adoption. As part of that straddling, she had a particular responsibility to be aware of how that played out in her practice and her advocacy, as these points are at times in potential conflict with one another.

There are always potential conflicts of interests at that juncture where one’s loyalties to class Bastard and one’s profession in relation to class Bastard intersect, and sadly that lies at the core of the story I have to tell.

But her passing does mark an end of an era of sorts, and pretty much all adoptee bloggers have something to say about such.

Unfortunately, I do as well, though I truly wish these events had simply never happened.

As I said, I’ve been wrestling with this post, whether or not to even write it, whether gosh darn it, someone else could guest blog it for me, Sadly that would have to be my partner, Mike, (“Sleeps with Bastard”) and while he would no doubt say this more articulately and clearly than I’m capable of doing, in the end, this does come to down to me. (Mike has told me he himself didn’t fully comprehend or have a means of expressing what went down in real time.) I’m the one who directly experienced it, and for whatever value, it is important this be written by a Bastard, not someone else.

So this is clumsy, but conscience demands I at least try, despite the fact that it is all too likely to be misunderstood.

---

That wordy introduction of a sort out of the way, we come to the events of the ASAC conference last spring.

This was perhaps my primary interaction with B.J. personally, and thus it constitutes much of what I have to go on in terms of my personal opinion.

Yes, I had seen her at various points previous, but what unfolded at the conference is pretty much the only direct interaction I ever really had with her.

I made several mentions at the time of what what happened and how this post I now write was eventually going to have to be written.

First these bits from this post:

One last key point I did not have the opportunity to make in the Q&A session after the video (which I will address in a separate post, as reaction to the propaganda deserves a post all its own)…

I’m getting well ahead of myself, but when I went to the microphone to comment before it became clear that leaving the conference was the only option,…

Sadly, I suppose I may have to write a part II if only to explain my own intentions, and what happened once the presentation ended for those who were not at the conference. It may be some time before I get there though.

And secondly, my vague description of the incident from this post:

It came down to people in the audience to even begin to question aspects of this film.

And in the end, yes, it came down to me personally, to decry the film as “propaganda” and “vile” in the Q & A session.

As I wrote for the about page on my personal Stormcoming blog, speaking of a completely different, non-adoption related context at the time:

“…I’ve never been good at not saying what desperately needs saying when no one else will.”

Maybe I’ll write about the aftermath of my comments at ASAC eventually, maybe I won’t. For now I’ll simply say the response to my comments was both surprising and perfectly predictable.

Surprising, in that to my utter shock, a few people in the audience applauded.

Perfectly predictable, in that after I spoke my POLITICAL analysis of what had just happened, I was accused of being “wounded” and “hurt.” The same old tactics always used to shut down and derail Bastard political criticism.

Once you’re to that point, there’s no point in hanging around. Attempts at rationally discussing the content of the propaganda film had devolved down to personal attack decrying how “wounded” I personally was.

It’s impossible to discuss the actual content of the film in such a context.

When those who dare reject have their political criticism ignored as nothing more than some aspect of being personally broken, said conversation has ended.

I also tweeted briefly at the time:

Baby_Love_Child
I’ve left the ASAC conference. Disgusted. You’d think they know better than to run a propaganda flick about a maternity camp, but no.
30 Apr

Baby_Love_Child
The Belgian film makers denying racism the kids face AFTER one of the kids in the film reported being called “chocolate” & “shit”…
30 Apr

Baby_Love_Child
…among other such egregious examples was simply more bullshit than I was willing to sit there and take. I may blog, I may not…
30 Apr

Baby_Love_Child
But for now I’m headed home. Done accommodating industry crap in spaces I support. Very disappointed to be missing people & sessions…
30 Apr

Baby_Love_Child
But I’m done.
30 Apr

Privately, on my facebook with my friends, I was more explicit about the other, then completely unblogged aspect of what I had experienced at the conference, my political criticism having been dismissed as nothing more than personal “hurt.” Both of these entries are also from the evening of April 29th:

well, it isn’t everyday you get the usual ‘what you say is invalidated because you’re just emotionally broken’ bullshit (that’s constantly used to shut down bastard criticism) by the likes of B.J. Lifton.

&

then again, the overly emotional bastard is of course what she’s built a career off of.

Therein lay the unstated reality of what had happened at the end of the session just prior to me walking out, B.J. Lifton was the previously unnamed person who had personally (well, as personally as can be in an auditorium filled with the film’s audience) attacked my analysis as nothing more than “wounded” emotionalism.

Obviously, to this day, I had not publicly fleshed out the details of the reaction to my comment in the Q &A, but it has been for several good reasons.

One of which I alluded to at the time in one of my comments to that post:

…this past week had been both profound and a bit of a roller coaster for me personally, yes separate from the conference, yet still in its own way, “adoption related” shall we say.

The other of which being, it was more important to keep the focus on the anti-abortion adoption ministry related propaganda film and ASAC’s decision to run it, than for me to blog about the way B.J. dismissed my critique of it.

But I have always known it was ALSO important to eventually revisit that second aspect as well.

Unfortunately, I never got around to writing the piece while she was still alive.

The showing of that film at the conference led some of us to make our choices.

For me, and several mothers, sitting silently by and watching this pro-maternity camp/anti-abortion/compulsory pregnancy propaganda film and the racist, Bastard denying, pro baby farming comments by the filmmaker  go by without rejecting it, allowing it to go by unquestioned was unconscionable.

Pretending everything was ok was not an option.

And so in the Question and Answer segment some of us took our turns at the microphone and asked our questions and said our piece.

ASAC showed a complete lack of basic awareness of the politics of adoption to screen such an abomination and expect Mothers and Bastards to sit silently by. Those putting on such conferences need to understand that if they genuinely want our participation, they must in turn provide a space that will not subject us to for example, propaganda films praising maternity camps and baby farming operations.

Others in the audience also had their own choices to make.

• They could sit silently by
• They could support those who rejected the film and the characterizations by the filmmakers (which a number of people did, by applauding)
• They could support of the film and filmmakers
• Or, as B.J. Lifton chose to do, they could attack and dismiss the concerns of those who dared reject

The propagandists and industry didn’t need to champion their own work, as sadly, a fellow adoptee did their dirty work for them.

When that crucial moment of choice came, B.J. chose her loyalty to the theraputic aspect of the adoption industry over the voices of Mothers and a Bastard (who well, happened to be me this time around.)

I can’t call her a fallen hero, as to me, she was never my personal hero, but what I can say is that her actions were a betrayal of those who were standing against the industry in that auditorium.

It was sad to see.

It was also disgusting, in that there was nothing new to what she said. My political criticisms were brushed aside, as merely the ramblings of a “wounded” adoptee lashing out out of some notion of  being “hurt.”

Let’s be clear, it had nothing to do with the substance of what I said, (as she never addressed any of my criticism) nor me personally, considering she and I had never so much as had a previous conversation.

This was a dismissal based purely upon the myth of the “broken adoptee.”

I’ve blogged about similar in relation to Nancy Verrier’s so called “primal wound” psycho-babble and how such is used to derail adoptees politically.

Oddly I find myself unable to take B.J.’s dismissal personally, as there was simply nothing personal about it. It was the one size fits all way to quietly shout down any Bastard who dares question, let alone criticize, let alone decry.

For others, they would take such personally and potentially spend years focusing upon somehow attempting to “fix” their “wounds” rather than focusing upon the systems at work here. Systems that are intrinsic to the very maternity camps in South Africa the propaganda film extolled the virtues of and systems of self blame and recrimination that keep Bastards locked behind concepts like “primal wounds” rather than working politically against the genuine unequal treatment under law Bastards endure.

That is precisely part of what stands between us and where we are trying to go politically.

The professional unnecessary theraputization of adoption,  (including the “attachment therapy“/child torture industry) and on the individual level pathologizing of individual adoptees is ultimately a means of derailing political work and attempting to discredit those doing that work.

When these problems are framed purely in terms of the individual instead of the broader classes of people directly affected, people seek personal solutions, and maintain the illusion that they have authentic control of the situation, delaying if not outright preventing the authentic realization that the sealed records system is not under your individual control and that even if you do manage some form of a “personal solution” work around that gains you your records, hundreds of thousands of other Bastards (if not more)  remain locked within the broader system still unable to access theirs.

Any form of class based empathy demands that “personal solutions” ultimately aren’t.

The negation and betrayal of that broader class is part of the problem.

My point is not that B.J. attacked ME.

My point is that near the end of her life, rather than siding with Mothers and a Bastard who dared speak out against industry propaganda in the somewhat difficult context of an academic conference (hardly a hotbed of rowdy activists!)  she chose to attack those who rejected women’s lack of autonomy and economic circumstances that had led to the loss of their children to adoption.

Her attack had nothing to do with the substance of the objection, it merely consisted of precisely what those joined against us and our interests have always done, it attempted to isolate such to an individual psychological problem” rather than a systemic problem affecting classes of people, (women in particular.)

It would be bad enough had such come from just anyone at the conference, but sadly this is where that hero worship thing kicks in.

For many people, all substance aside, when a “hero” (any known hero figure) speaks out against someone who to many is simply an unknown, detail means nothing, reverence for the hero simply takes precedence, outweighing any validity of the unknown figure’s words.

When movements move from a point of people who are personal heroes to individuals (yet still fully human complete with human failings open to genuine evaluation) on to those simply considered iconic figures/heroes of “the movement” some of that critical thinking can begin to get lost.

The attack didn’t come from just anyone, it came from B.J. and thus carried weight that had  just anyone said the same, it would not have carried.

It was disappointing to see, but hardly unpredictable.

At the time, I was waiting in line for the microphone to ask a follow up question of the filmmaker.

In light of being addressed directly and reduced merely to little more than a cartoonish figure “the wounded adoptee”  I decided I had had enough. I gathered my belongings and with my partner at my side, we walked out, in what I suppose one might characterize as “a huff.”

I was left shaking my head, in both frustration at the stupidity of everything I had just seen and yet practically laughing at the absurdity of the ‘broken adoptee’ tactic coming from another adoptee, as opposed to say, a JCICS spokescritter.

The gut instinct was very much one of “you’ve got to be kidding, right?” I offered up a political critique to be hit with what, this again, HERE?

I vowed I was done supporting conferences that do not support women and Bastards.

No doubt there will be those outraged that I dare put up a post like this, they may loudly exclaim that I’m speaking ill of the dead or slinging mud at “the saint of adoptees.”

To which my answer is simply, the minute we start building people into “saints of adoptees” is the moment they lose their humanity.

One of the key aspects of the history of adoptee rights is that it has been populated by everyday people. Not super-adoptees running around in blue tights and a cape doing things mere mortals can’t.

That sets up a false dichotomy between the heroic unreachables and lowly mere mortals doing the everyday ordinary work of adoptee rights.

Whatever heroes we have, they also belong in the realm of the personal, as that way, any one of us can do that work. Our liberation should not be and cannot be left to some notion of “super-duper adoptees,” some mythical altogether different breed from the rest of us.

Adoptee rights work is the everyday ordinary work of everyday ordinary Bastards and people. It always has been. We call, we write, we volunteer and simply do what needs doing.

When people begin to grant additional weight to the opinions and actions of others because their books were meaningful, or one views them as a hero, it can signal the beginning of the end of careful evaluation and genuinely listening to those who are saying something other than those “heroes.” As that critical thinking slows, we all become the poorer for it.

But sadly, for me at least, some of B.J.’s legacy, even if she were “sainted” would have to be that of a saint of adoption, not adoptees.

At a crucial moment of choice and conscience, the therapeutic end of the adoption industry and the myth of the “broken adoptee” was more important to defend than to join with the very few voices in that room that dared speak out against industry.

I wish I could say otherwise, but regrettably, that is my experience and what I take away from my interaction with her.

Over roughly the past week 4,500 kids have been adopted as part of America’s hypernatalist “National Adoption Day” (“NAD”) rituals, the vast majority of them have also had their records permanently sealed.

Each year this so called “National Adoption Month” (“NAM”) builds to a frenzied peak culminating in courtroom based media friendly spectacles of mass adoptions.

As kid after kid is processed their adoptions are finalized in assembly line fashion.

But the key feature of the day (many of the events held on Friday this year as “NAD” fell on a Saturday) is that in the course of those adoptions, the vast majority of those kids lost access to their authentic documentation, their original birth certificates.

All but 6 states are sealed records states, so unless one happened to be “celebrating” National Adoption Day in Oregon, Alaska, Kansas, Alabama, New Hampshire or Maine, another key aspect of those observances was a celebration of sealed records.

“National Adoption Day” like all adoptions in sealed records states offers up a Faustian bargain, the State will give these kids “permanency” but (in most states,) only in exchange for their access to their original birth certificates.

It is rarely left up to the kids themselves to decide.

The cost of a home should never be one’s identity.

“National Adoption Day” must be recognized for what it is from the adoptees’ perspective rather than the adoption industry’s perspective; it represents the single largest number of sealed records of any day of the calendar year. A collective loss of thousands of kids original identities one stroke of a pen at a time.

The implications to the adoptees themselves last a lifetime.

From the point of adoption finalization forward they will not receive equal treatment under law in relation to accessing their own original birth certificates (OBCs). Their original documentation is impounded by the state, locked away from them (in some states, literally locked in vaults)  often never to be restored to them.

To foster kids in particular, who are adopted at ages when they are old enough to remember family members, siblings, and original homes that loss can be devastating.

But all adoptees living under the sealed record systems lose their equality.

Many adopters at these ceremonies are unaware of this aspect of adoption. They see a long desired child finally being granted to them. As to what comes years down the road, when the adoptee’s paperwork or lack thereof begin to cause problems for the adoptees themselves isn’t even on their radar.

While “NAM” was originally focused on foster adoptions, often by extended family members, the events have morphed over the past 11 years.

Foster adoptions are still front and center, but as I’ve documented previously, even foster adoptions can be just another path to gaining a newborn. When foster care becomes a means by which to provide children to adopter demand rather than solutions for kids, even foster adoptions must come under scrutiny.

But alongside slamming through case after case of kids in the foster system, plenty of  inter-country adoptions are also rubber stamped through as a part of the “NAD” ceremonies. Kids from Ethiopia, China, and an assortment of other countries have been added to the mix.

National adoption day rituals are all about mass spectacle, it’s about numbers, it’s about processing through as many cases in a single day to grab media headlines as possible, complete with cupcakes, clowns, balloons and teddy bears.

Not on the agenda are these kids civil rights, equal treatment under law, or preservation of identity.

Step right up, have yourself a teddy bear, an adoption certificate, and a sealed original birth certificate, next!

“National Adoption Day” is only slightly over a decade old, yet already, it has grown to the point of a little under 5,000 adoptions being rammed through on that single day.

The coalition that has built this Frankenstein beast, made up of the adoption industry, government officials, social welfare organizations, adoption marketers,  pediatricians, and children and foster care advocates claim over that past decade nearly 30,000 adoptions have pushed through in NAD ceremonies.

Front and center throughout “NAD” are faith based adoptions (largely for christian movement growth) and the role played by the White House office of Faith Based and Neighborhood partnerships.

“NAD” serves a very special purpose theologically within the context of the broader “orphan care” ministries and efforts.

As for adoptees ourselves, there are a number of criticisms of the event, from the comodification of adoptees, and the sealed records, on through to how some adoptions may be sped through the process in order to meet that late November date, to name just a few.

The pressure to produce children available for these spectacle events in courtrooms, civic centers, private venues, and even the superdome is very great. Each year, the expectation is to try to produce more adoptions than the previous year’s event. What that means to the kids, their families of origin, and their rights remains simply unexamined.

Bastards who dare question these events and what “NAD” means from the adoptee perspective are unwelcome. We’re perceived as spoilers, who ‘intrude on everyone’s happy day.’

Yet we are the experts.

When it comes to adoption, we ARE adoption.

We know what some of these kids are in for down the road and we know what can happen when  later in life adoptees try to apply for passports or even driver’s licenses only to be told our state created amended birth certificates are “unacceptable.”

We know that today’s media stunt is merely that, a stunt.

Unless and until the core inequalities are rectified these events merely focus on quantity, not quality, let alone adoptee equality.

Thus “National Adoption Day” becomes a day not about adoptees as individuals but about adoption, the act.

It is about repeating that act over and over again before the cameras, not about the lifelong needs of adopted people.

As a an adoptee, adopted out of the foster system myself, I find this spectacle disgusting, commodifying, and all about form, not substance.

Substance, would require treating adopted people equally and treating their individual adoptions with the full gravity the situation entails.

Instead, bystanders are treated to what the cameras show them, the state acting as a machine, processing as many kids as possible on a single set  idealized date.

The framing is that of the adopters point of view, they celebrate as today they got what they wanted.

The industry and other social movements focused on adoption as a growth tactic celebrate any +1 they can get.

Adoptees on the other hand, lose basic rights all others take for granted when adoptions are finalized in all but the 6 “equality states.”

That’s nothing to celebrate.

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That said, I leave readers with a few snapshots from these celebrations of adoptee inequality:

Secretary Sebelius Hosts Special Event in Washington D.C. To Celebrate National Adoption Day (link opens a PDF)

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will host a special National Adoption Day event in Washington D.C. Friday to celebrate the adoption of 25,000-plus children from foster care over the last 10 years.

Sebelius will be joined by Joshua DuBois, director of the White House office of Faith Based and Neighborhood partnerships, U.S. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-LA) and U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), who will speak at the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, 200 Independence Ave. S.W. Rita L. Soronen, executive director of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption will speak about the impact of National Day and the importance of foster care adoption. Also sharing the stage will be the Executive Director of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute Kathleen Strottman, and Deputy Assistant Secretary and Inter-Departmental Liaison for Early Childhood Development, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Joan Lombardi.

53 children welcomed to new homes

A special event was held at the Oncenter in recognition of National Adoption Day. 53 children were formally adopted during the event with the help of local judges.

Note that under half were from foster care.

At least 25 of the children adopted were from the Onondaga County foster-care system.

Newly adopted, Angel stars in probate court

Probate Judge Paul Ganim’s bench featured dozens of fuzzy brown teddy bears.

Angel, who was about to become a Bauro, eyed the teddy bears while entering the courtroom. Before Ganim could finish his opening remarks, Angel blurted: “Can I have one?”

“Angel,” Ganim answered, waving the Bauros and Bauro-to-be to the bench. “So you’re adopting a couple of parents?”

Angel nodded.

“Well, you’ve got a big job ahead,” Ganim said. “You’ve got to make sure they have food, that their laundry is done, that their lawn is mowed. Are you ready to take on this job?”

“Yes sir,” Angel said.

“Because truly, an adoption is a two-way street,” Ganim added. “For years and years to come.”

“Years,” Angel said.

The gift of family

Six courthouses in Massachusetts finalized 149 adoptions of children from foster care as part of an annual statewide celebration of National Adoption Day.

Families grow at adoption day

Meanwhile, in Hadley, the ceremonies upstairs were punctuated with cries from restless children.

But downstairs, cakes bearing each child’s name were waiting, and Poppie the clown, also known as Melha Shriner Al Surprenant, was fashioning hats out of balloons.

A family is born as National Adoption Day arrives

“I have a deep love for all my kids,” Collamer, 40, said of her preschoolers, “but with her it’s very profound. I could never imagine going back to the way it was, without her.”

That might have been the case, though, if she had adopted from a Kyrgyz or Kazakh orphanage, as she once contemplated. Collamer was willing to spend the $40,000 cost of an international adoption, but realized the limitations were too great. Some countries don’t release orphans to single parents, and investment doesn’t guarantee returns.

Passaic County celebrates Adoption Day

Deciding to go to China to find their children, rather than go the domestic route, was about more than just trying to avoid the “beauty pageant’ they mentioned earlier.

“We also didn’t want someone knocking on our door some day,” said James, who said he and his wife don’t think they could handle having the biological parents walk into their lives.

Enabling all this?

It’s all taxpayer subsidized by way of tax credits (see It’s National Adoption Month & the IRS Has Good News) and Federal subsidies to the states for moving kids off the foster care rolls, see my post Federal bonus bucks to the states for moving kids out of foster into adoptions (regardless of the damage.)

Thus this “National Adoption Day” brought to you by the federal bailout bucks for the adoption industry.

(This post is a continuation of National Council for Adoption celebrates 30 years of opposing adoptees’ human rights- part I)

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In part 1 I made mention of how NCFA attempts to market itself as merely an advocate for children and as not taking sides when it comes to a variety of key issues related to adoption and reproduction in order to gain the broadest possible audience and support for its output, I said:

NCFA has made a point of pulling the “Fox/Faux” news trick of leaving an impression of having “hearing both sides” in some effort to maintain the pretense that what they offer is in some way to be considered “fair and balanced” but for NCFA, just as for Faux, such is merely a tactic.

Now in part II, I intend to go into a bit more detail.

NCFA has always been very aware of public perceptions of its work and thus decided upon the format of a non-sectarian organization from the outset as part of its marketing efforts, regardless of the fact that many of its founders were explicitly religious adoption agencies and individuals involved were deeply sectarian.

But the Carter administration’s Draft Model State Adoption Act was enough to put the fear of the loss of the entire industry into adoption marketers and thus NCFA, originally the “National Committee for Adoption” came as a result of sort of a treaty moment when Catholics, Mormons, Protestants, Jews and others made the decision to work collectively to save their own asses.

On paper, NCFA’s abortion stance is carefully crafted to appear some version of neutral, thus enabling them to garner support from both compulsory pregnancy advocates and pro-choice individuals and organizations.

In NCFA’s “Factbook III” lists both their position and the process which resulted in it.

NCFA’s position is listed as:

NCFA’s Board, the objectives and work goals of the organization, and the Staff do not take an organizational position which is either for or against abortion. What NCFA is working for- the rejuvenation of adoption as an option of choice for young, single or troubled parents- will require us to sit down around tables with those who describe themselves as “pro-choice” and those describe themselves as “pro-life” to discuss programs which include adoption.

But to truly understand NCFA’s stance one has to examine both the process by which that statement came to be, and the nature of who has held and continues to hold power organizationally.

As the “FB III” piece explains, at the initial founding meeting for NCFA:

…the founding board discussed a number of public policy issues. Among the topics discussed was abortion. Some of those present favored taking a stand opposing abortion. After extensive discussion, including the fact that NCFA is a sectarian-voluntary organization which seeks to speak to all segments of the pluralistic American society, a motion was made by Marjory Mecklenberg, at that time the President of American Citizens Concerned for Life, and one of the founding board members…

Her motion was and is the NCFA public position.

After being debated and seconded, the motion was passed unanimously.

NCFA has revisited the issue in both 1990 and 1995, but has left Mecklenberg’s motion intact.

There are a number of reasons it may have done so, not the least of which being how useful that stance has been to worm their way into various pro-choice organizations and legislators good graces.

By tactically leveraging this allegedly “neutral” position, NCFA has parlayed its lobbying efforts into what has amounted to not merely the massive international child grab it and its agency members benefited from, but now a public bailout for the adoption industry, sucking on the governments teat for cash, under the guise of a number of programs:

• adoption tax credits
• federal incentives for child placements out of foster care
• various adoption subsidy programs
• cash for Coercive Pregnancy Indoctrination Center (so called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers”) under the guise of “abstinence only”  programs
• and  “infant adoption awareness trainings”
• as well as legalized child abandonment/”safe haven”/”baby moses law” funding.

They have carefully positioned adoption (and themselves) as  an issue neither left nor right, when nothing could be further from the truth.

As we’ve seen with the “choose life” license plate debacle, for many compulsory pregnancy advocates (CPAs) the “opposite” of abortion is adoption. Or returning to the core of NCFA’s stance, “Adoption- the best option.”

When legislators noted that funds raised by the plates only went towards adoption services, not women who wanted to keep their babies, recommending the plate be changed from “choose life” to “choose adoption” to more accurately represent where the monies would go, the proposal was rejected, as to other legislators both “life” and “adoption” in the “crisis pregnancy” context were essentially synonyms for their desired outcome.

Which leads us to the second aspect of how NCFA handles abortion, as it hardly needs to take an organizational stance against abortion for those with the power and decision making within the organization to be compulsory pregnancy advocates.

For let’s face it, every woman’s abortion to those in the industry, ultimately represents the loss of a potential eventual child they stand to potentially make a living off of by passing it along to adopters.

NCFA’s founding president, William Pierce wore a number of hats, but among them, his work as a senior fellow and the DC office of the anti-gay, anti-evolution, and anti-abortion Discovery Institute. He was also the national Vice President of Democrats for Life.

In Kristen Day’s book “Democrats for Life: Pro-Life Politics and the Silenced Majority” she describes Pierce and his work thusly:

My mentor and first vice president of DCFL, Bill Pierce, dedicated his life to promoting adoption as an alternative to abortion and bringing the Democratic Party back to Life… .

As I wrote previously,

Bill Pierce always viewed his baby Moses laws work as crucial to and within the broader context of his anti-abortion work. In short he viewed adoption as a zero-sum-game way of working against abortion.

Early NCFA materials reflected that “Life” centric rhetoric before such was scrubbed in an effort to win broader appeal.

Posters and other materials marketing adoption were emblazoned with the early NCFA slogan,

Adoption. It’s a Choice for Life

“Factbook III” contains both Compulsory Pregnancy (CPA) and Pro-Choice chapters.

The CPA  chapter is titled “Pro-Life Approaches to Adoption.” It comes first in the book and is authored by Donna Warner, the then  director of center development for Care-Net, a national chain of Coercive Pregnancy Indoctrination Centers based out of Columbus, Ohio.

The abortion supportive chapter is written by Frank Bonati, the then president and CEO of  Family Health Council (FHC) of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. FHC is described as “the only non-profit organization in the United States to offer both public funded family planning and state licensed adoption services. ” The chapter is entitled “Pro-Choice Family Planning and Adoption: a Case to Strengthen Mutual Support”

It’s important to bear in mind that the NCFA “Factbooks” were provided to lawmakers and policy wonks and that the inclusion of an essay such as Bonati’s served as a foot in the door, allowing NCFA to maintain that illusion of “neutrality.”

NCFA pulled the same tactic out for objection handling how they organizationally handle Queer adoptions.

First up is Lynn D. Wardle’s essay “Adoption by Adults involved in Homosexual Lifestyles” arguing against Queer adoptions. Wardle (see his resume and obsessive publication listing here) is a well known rabidly anti-Queer crusader who has made a career out of fighting Queers where ever he may find them.

His writings have appeared in the frothing at the mouth National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) Bulletin. (For more on the nature of NARTH’s publications see this post from Box Turtle Bulletin.)

He personally, played a key role on behalf of the Mormon church in the way prop 8 played out in California, see Prop. 8 lawyer vetted first gay marriage initiative with Mormon leaders.

This is then “balanced” by Shannon Minter’s “Lesbians and Gay Men as Adoptive Parents.”

But again, Minter’s essay is there to keep that foot in the door with those NCFA is attempting to market to. Pierce of course was the Howard and Roberta Ahmanson funded Discovery Institute’s presence in D.C..

From those early days with Pierce at the head NCFA has served as a real crossroads of major wingnut funders, political figures, and corporate interests.

Factbook III, published in 1999, was funded by a number of NCFA friends, among the other notables is the wingnut  Scaife Family Foundation, a major source of funding for “far right” causes for decades now.

Bill Pierce eventually left NCFA and has since passed away, but those who followed in his footsteps are of similar ideology. Chuck Johnson is the latest in quite the interesting line of NCFA heads.

NCFA’s boards have always been a who’s who of wingnuttery, from that anti-abortion billboard Catholic wingnut Mary Ann Kuharski:

Mary Ann Kuharski
Mary Ann Kuharski is President of ProLife Across America (The Billboard People) and a nationally known author and speaker. She has appeared on many local and national television and radio programs including the Phil Donohue Show. She was a founding member of and past president of Prolife Minnesota and an advisory board member for the National Committee for Adoption. Mrs. Kuharski’s articles have appeared in Newsweek, Our Sunday Visitor, Christian Living, Catholic Digest, and many other periodicals. She is the author of Raising Catholic Children (Our Sunday Visitor 1991), Building a Legacy of Love (Queenship Publishing 1997), and Outnumbered! Raising 13 Kids with Humor and Prayer (Servant Books 2006). Mrs. Kuharski is a loving mother of 13 children (six of whom are adopted and several with special needs) and a grandmother of 12. She and her husband, John, live in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

on through to the current chairman of NCFA’s board, Mormon Stanford D. Swim, and his GFC Foundation in Utah.

See a profile of Swim’s GFC Foundation in Philanthropy The GFC Foundation: Serving God, Family, and Country.

Swim also sits on the board of the Sutherland Institute with it’s “stand up to protect marriage” petition, fighting Queer marriage.

For FAR too long now those who might be considered “left” in their political orientation have given NCFA a pass. They see the magic word “adoption” and their eyes glaze over. They overlook the growing church based “orphancare” movement’s efforts at church and movement growth through adoption.

Whether they do so out of their own complicit involvement in the industry, their own internalized squeemishness about abortion after more than 37 years of nonstop CPA propaganda, or out of a more general feel good longing to aid what they assume to be “child welfare” efforts they do so not from a position of knowledge or of careful study of what the National Council for Adoption and its pals are up to, but more often than not out of their own responses to the cues NCFA is intentionally sending to keep others from looking too closely.

As Pound Pup Legacy and others have documented, see The adoption industry and politics, an incestuous embrace, “adoption” is a singular realm,

an incestuous copulation of industry and politics under the pretext of the well-being of children.

Looking the other way only allows the adoption industry to utilize the pretext of “choice” and “chosen children” to their own ends.

Non-Legally binding “openness” and “open adoptions” are mere marketing positions for the industry turning to any available strategy to talk women into surrendering their children. But long after the promises of letters and contact disappear in a poof of the adopters moving out of state and cutting contact, at the end of the day, marketing tactics, whether on the political level or the most personal levels are nothing more than that, tactics.

NCFA has no use for legally binding open adoptions. (See the chapter “How Court-Enforceable Contact Agreements Undermine the Adoptive Family” for example.)

They utilize pretty words and pretty promises to ultimately get what they want.

Speaking as a one time kid on the other end of the equation, I’m simply a proud Bastard.

I don’t run expensive fundraisers in Washington, I don’t auction off Tiffany necklaces to support a child selling industry already awash in wingnut funders, and I don’t have multiple lobbies in Washington giving awards to politicians and sipping champagne.

I’m a grassroots activist.

I want all adoptees’ and our families’ access to our own authentic original documentation restored to us.

I’ll be celebrating the day these years of state confiscated records ends.

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For more, see my NCFA tag and Bastardette’s NCFA Names Chuck Johnson Permanent Prez and more generally, her NCFA tag.

Tonight the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) has been living it up in style in Washington at their 30th anniversary gala.

Their “Bow Tie and Pearls” gala at the Willard Hotel is a fundraiser schmooze and booze chance to rub elbows with politicians, agencies, and of course, major donors.

The event is also somewhat of a pre-publication party for the forthcoming latest propaganda tome from NCFA “Adoption Factbook V,” due for publication (and freebee distribution if it follows in its predecessors footsteps, to politicians, various government agencies, think tanks and other opinion influencers) in 2011.

All through the awards and the toasts the adoption industry will take the time for some self congratulatory pats on the back.

As I wrote in an earlier post by way of a basic introduction to NCFA,

As for NCFA itself, it is an industry trade group and lobby founded in 1980, (Originally as a the “National Committee for Adoption) as a direct reaction to the 1979/1980 Carter administration’s Draft Model State Adoption Act (DMSAA) which had called for restoring records access by adoptees to their own adoption records. NCFA was created very specifically by industry interests to derail and defeat the open records provisions of the DMSAA.

Similar to NCFA’s reactionary founding, Pierce and NCFA became early promoters of baby Moses laws in the wake of Oregon’s historic Measure 58 (passed in 1998, tied up in legal challenges until 2000), the statewide referendum that restored records access to adult adoptees, as a strategic means of circumventing the open records victory.

After all, how can one have open records when there are no records to get? Baby Moses laws ensure that children, particularly newborns and infants, are relinquished in a ‘paperfree’ manner, and made available almost immediately for fast track adoptions.

NCFA can thus be viewed as  the adoption industry’s reaction to the open records recommendations and other recommendations of the DMSAA.

Rather than accepting the restoration of adoptee’s civil rights, ensuring they be treated just as anyone else under law, portions of the industry chose instead to fight against adoptee equality and for the then sealed records hegemony, working to maintain industry secrecy and preserve the industry’s ability to fabricate and at times outright falsify adoptees’ documentation.

Simply put, the industry wanted to maintain their control and ability to continue conducting their business in the dark, utilizing the state support of the sealed records system to provide cover for their actions.

Bastardette has documented the gratitude those in the industry felt toward NCFA’s founding president Bill Pierce,  and the organization’s work. She recently blogged about it in a piece entitled National Council for Adoption Saves Adoption in the US!

NCFA’s co-opts of the voices of adoptees and even language such as adoptee’s rights, reframing such as some new found supposed “right to be adopted”, rather than the human/civil/identity rights of adoptees to authentic personal history, identity, equal access to our original documentation, equal treatment under law, ethnicity, original nationality, etc.

Let’s be clear, the National Council for Adoption is an industry trade group that lobbies on behalf of its member agencies, their interests ARE its interests.

Thus when NCFA publishes its “Adoption Factbooks”  and distributes them to legislators, governmental agencies, media and others these are materials produced by an industry trade group designed to further the adoption industry’s interests and agenda, not some “non-biased” research volume.

NCFA has made a point of pulling the “Fox/Faux” news trick of leaving an impression of having “hearing both sides” in some effort to maintain the pretense that what they offer is in some way to be considered “fair and balanced” but for NCFA, just as for Faux, such is merely a tactic.

NCFA, similar to other adoption industry trade organizations like the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, or JCICS is ultimately of the industry, for the industry.

Key chapters in their “Factbook III”, similar to sessions held at the NCFA annual conferences make it abundantly clear, NCFA not only understands their industry stands vulnerable to lawsuits over its behaviors, but sees its role as helping agencies protect themselves from those whose children were taken illegally or those who have come to understand their placements had more to do with crimes than child welfare.

Discussion of “Wrongful adoption” suits  are covered in a number of places, for example, under chapters titled:

• Emerging Liability of Adoption Agencies and Attourneys
• Protecting Adoption Agencies from lawsuit

The day to day work of NCFA has everything to do with industry viability, marketing the concept of adoption itself and protecting the industry from both criticism and investigation.

Their place on the adoption pentagon is that of industry,  that is, industry holding a very special relationship to the State, and representing their clients, adopters. While they may employ the occasional adoptee or Parent, they do not and cannot speak for others of us most directly affected by adoption every day of our lives.

As for those of us adoptees and parents, NCFA doesn’t even think we should use such words for ourselves.

“Real,” “Natural,” or even “biological” Mothers  become “birthgivers” or “Woman who gave birth” or the backhanded “Genetic Mothers” in the world of NCFA speak. Don’t even dream of simply calling them Mothers unmodified.

Likewise, Fathers, “Real,” “Natural,” or “biological” are also reduced to “Man who shared in the conception”  or “Genetic Father.”

Both are very specifically,

…not the child’s “parents”…

according to NCFA’s “Factbook III”

The only “parents” in NCFA speak are those who adopted the child. (They must remain without modifier at all times.)

Similarly, “adoptee” is dismissed as

a negative term

we are now supposedly simply

“sons and daughters”

or “an individual who was adopted,” as in NCFA speak, adoption is a one time occurrence, clearly in the past, and certainly not any form of ongoing status.

This linguistic obliteration of adoptive status aims to prohibit any form of class consciousness of adopted people as having an ongoing identity as a result of having been adopted.

It disempowers and diffuses even our own ability to self identify, let alone speak about the structural aspects of the circumstances we are forced to live out the rest of our lives within the confines of.

There are no adoptees within NCFA’s notions of what the world looks like.

Bastard reality is simply erased.

In NCFA speak, there are no “blood relatives.”

This phrase can carry symbolic weight, but it can undermine the adoption bond.

Watching NCFA’s own lists of approved terminology change over time makes quite the study.

The 1989 version of the “Adoption Factbook,” for example, terms “biological” Mothers and Fathers makes for “Positive language” a decade later in “Adoption Factbook III” the entry for “Biological Mother/Father” is listed as a “No” (or do not use.)

In fact, NCFA believes any language that might validate Bastard experience or lead to what some Bastard rights activists have termed a “Bastard moment” are to be eliminated.

That has been a core focus of its work.

When adoption language culturally falls in line with the industry’s imposed standards rather than the language Bastards and our Families use to describe our own experiences we are marginalized and hidden even by discourse or legislation allegedly “about us.”

Our voices are co-opted, and our rendered voiceless existence used to validate the industry’s schemes for what it wants done.

Over time as language is intentionally changed across society the terms in which people think begin to change as well.

Thus when NCFA rebrands restoring records access and ensuring equal treatment under law to “mandatory openness” people begin to falsely equate adoptee equality to something forced and as coming at some kind of cost to others.

Instead of discussing genuine personal medical history privacy and proposed legislation (such as NJ’s bill) under which mothers would be forced to register with the state keeping both health information and their current address on file,  NCFA rebrands state sealed records as “mothers’ privacy” and intrusive measures such as these, which would compel mothers to hand over their personal medical histories as a means by which they can “maintain their privacy.”

Restored records access of course is not an interpersonal matter pitting mothers and adoptees against one another. It is instead a matter between adoptees and the state and between parents and the state.

Yet due to tangling states up in knots over blatantly false notions of “competing rights,” states have gone on to make matters even worse by trying to build structures predicated upon those false models, such as confidential intermediary programs, medical history exchanges, and contact vetoes.

No matter what effects adoption has in the long term to the individuals most directly affected, the National Council for Adoption cares first and foremost about maintaining the viability of the industry itself, a mission that has taken on even greater importance as the international adoption market has felt the full brunt of both American economic woes and other countries closing to adoption in the wake of vast adoption related crimes being uncovered.

NCFA is firmly invested in both “next quarter” short term thinking, and in preserving the viability of the industry itself over the long term.

Long term consequences to adoptees and their families, on the other hand, are both considered dismissible and dismissed.

Take for example, this from the “Adopted Children’s Issues” section  of the Factbook published in 1989, written to teen adoptees themselves (clearly written before terms like “biological parents” and even “adoptee” fell into NCFA’s list of no nos terminology-wise.)

Most adopted kids have some curiosity about their biological parents.

It is natural for teenagers to wonder about their biological parents, what their lives may be like now, whether they are still alive, and what circumstances made them decide to place you for adoption in hopes of giving you a better life. Usually these things remain as curiosities, sort of like people wondering what life was like for their great grandparents in the old country before they migrated to America to start a new life. For many of you, this curiosity will have been pretty well satisfied by now, and you have more immediate concerns, like struggling with math, buying the latest record, developing a new friendship.

NCFA’s “solution” is of course to resolve such feelings by reading, from their recommended list, naturally.

But Bastards will not be deterred from their desire to understand their authentic origins. We are not so easily distracted by quests for “the latest record” or our struggles “with math.”

Also note how NCFA ascribes motivation to parents, “in hopes of giving you a better life” as a way of framing the experience for adoptees. Yet years later, some adoptees have found that far from intentionally giving over their parental rights in hopes of giving their children some form of “better life,” a number of mothers were coerced, their children taken often without their consent. Some were even told their children died after childbirth only to be secretly placed into sealed records adoptions.

For NCFA, though, adoption is always the “Best Option.”

“Factbook III” takes aim at both “Family preservation” efforts and “family reunification” as archenemies of both the industry and adoption as an institution itself (never mind the fact that the vast majority of foster kids will be reunited and that many adoptions in this country are kinship adoptions, not adoptions by strangers.)

NCFA disdains the very concept of, and all practices related to family preservation.

In one of the key essays in “Factbook III”, “Twenty-One barriers to Adoption to Address in the Twenty-First Century” William Pierce, the founding president of NCFA goes to far as to compare family preservation services to “kudzu” vines.

The books also take aim at the Indian Child Welfare Act or ICWA repeatedly as well, calling for its outright repeal:

9. Repeal the Indian Child Welfare Act because it is an unconstitutional discriminatory law

“Discriminatory” to NCFA means the law prevents adoption agencies from selling off native kids to white would-be-adopters at will.

ICWA instead, recognizes First Nations’  peoples tribal sovereignty and independence, particularly in regard to native children, particularly in light of the history of how native children have been criminally removed from tribal contexts in efforts to “de-indian” them.

Pierce, in typical Piercian fashion, reframes enforcement of ICWA as a form of “discrimination” against “children with Native American blood” depriving them of their “right” to be adopted by whites. Worked up into a full froth, he begins tossing about terms like “racial and ethnic apartheid in America.” All because these are marketable kids he and his industry have some difficulty getting a hold of.

All genuine rights, such as the right of the child to grow up within a tribal context are “barriers” to be overcome for Pierce.

NCFA’s demand for access to saleable children is not limited to First Nations kids though. Just as much ire is in store for parents and others abroad who might not wish their children disappear into American adoptions. See “Factbook IV” published in 2007, in which NCFA brags of:

Fighting nationalistic opponents of adoption who would keep children trapped in foreign orphanages

NCFA shows none of the nuance of what role “orphanages” play in other societies, where they are often marketed as more of a “time out” option for short term child care for those parents or families unable to afford to care for their child at any given point in time.

The American impression of the word, that of “orphanages” as child warehousing operations misses much of the nuances to the roles these institutions play in other cultures.

What NCFA decries as “nationalistic opponents of adoption” are sometimes nothing more than those objecting to the way American adoption marketers have moved into countries such as Guatemala and had adopted out 1 out of every 100 babies born in the country. When babies become a primary export product of any given country, no one should be the least bit surprised when some raise an objection.

But again, to NCFA, adoption is always the “best option.”

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Rather than cut this post short, I have decided to break it into two pieces. Tomorrow I will continue on to part II.

But I leave readers with Bastardette’s parody post about NCFA’s festivities at the Willard in DC this evening, Exclusive Video from the Willard: What the American Adoption Industry Doesn’t Want You to See

Women who donate eggs, what the assisted reproduction industry sometimes refers to as “hens” are often treated as unworthy of even so much as basic follow up in any kind of effort to establish the potential long term health risks to them.

Here in the United States, recruited through various forms of advertising, particularly college newspapers, women are promised a quick means by which to gain thousands of dollars in a relatively short period of time.

For the most part, they are not informed of any potential health risks, in part, because no one has bothered to collect the data to determine some of the long term health risks to them.

Thus they stumble headlong into an almost completely unregulated industry that tends to regard them as little more than walking talking raw materials.

Internationally, human egg harvesting operations are geared primarily towards the purposes of reproductive tourism, selling the materials gathered from what are often impoverished indigenous women to wealthy infertile couples from other countries.

We have little to no data on the long term consequences to these “hens” as building those studies would first require any form of genuine concern for these women.

If the industry were to be regulated to allow no more than 2 or 3 courses of egg harvesting, they would then have to advertise all the harder in a desperate attempt to attract an ongoing stream of women willing to submit their bodies to these experimental treatments. Costs would rise.

They, and the couples that utilize the industry prefer things just the way they stand today, with a single “hen” undergoing round after round of harvesting and prices staying roughly where they are.

Should something go wrong, for any given individual woman, when and if she is admitted to her local hospital often enough, her illness is not recognized as being related to the multiple courses of hormone injections.

Once again, the lack of tracking, data collection, and long term data analysis only serves to mask the genuine nature of her condition.

See, Potentially fatal fine print of fertility ads.

To change this current state of affairs would mean to care about women, not merely what they can be used for, but about them as individuals and as people rather than as a means to and ends.

Doing so would mean women’s lives would matter enough to insist that the prevention of their deaths took precidence.

Building even basic data sets and examining the long term risks would be required, long before an undertaking of this magnitude and potential risk was unleashed upon the open marketplace, where women in need of cash can always be found.

In times of economic hardship, the number of “hens” goes up, as does the number of rounds any individual “hen” undergoes in an attempt to gain more access to monetary resources.

As I wrote last year in Outsourcing reproduction, fertility tourism, and the money (or lack thereof) at the heart of it all:

a sampling of just a few of the domestic economic articles that speak to what happens when times get tight:

Sperm, egg donors increase during recession

Need Money? Donate Your Eggs!

Sperm and egg donations up in South Carolina

also note-

New York State Allows Payment for Egg Donations for Research

There is little to no regulation on the industry, thus leaving individual women left to fend for themselves.

They have great difficulty suing those who did this to them, without so much as informing them of the risks as showing what was done would require tracking to show a pattern, and that these symptoms are common to women who have undergone such.

The industry has worked diligently to ensure that precisely that lack of data can be used to assure “hens” on the front end that there are few known risks.

Furthermore, proving that any illness one suffers in the aftermath is related to the “treatments” or what was done to her likewise becomes a difficult case to make precisely due to that lack of data and track record through time of what other “hens” have experienced.

“Patient confidentiality” provides a useful shield for the industry ensuring that its victims have difficulty getting in contact with one another. Compartmentalizing the women, one from another.

The government has left the industry unregulated, and neither mandates any research or tracking nor allocates any money for such.

(Obviously on a much larger scale,) exploring the history of  Diethylstilbestrol or DES 1938-1971 and the multi-generational tracking that was finally implemented as the evidence of the damage it was doing began to come to light has SOME interesting parallels, (as well as key differences.)

Back in egg collection-land, these women are in essence reduced to mere hens. Should one die, another will be added to the coup to keep production steady.

In the U.S.  there’s a better understanding of health risks and history as it relates to real poultry than the mass experiment playing out across these women’s bodies and lifetimes.

Women, women’s lives, and women’s health apparently means that little to those in any position to change this status quo.

Tonight’s brief post is another of these, ‘look over here where someone else has written something terribly important, I want you to read it’ posts.

See Taking Babies from Undocumented Immigrants.

I’m pointing at Jill’s post over on Feministe rather than the raw articles she links as I think her analysis is important, but be sure to read both.

Her piece starts here:

Encarnación Romero was an undocumented immigrant working at a poultry plant in Missouri when she was arrested in 2007 during a raid by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was jailed for two years for federal identity theft, because she used a fake name and Social Security number when applying for her job (those charges, notably, would not stick if they were filed today — the Supreme Court rejected the use of identity theft prosecutions in simple immigration cases like this one). In prison and unable to care for her infant son herself, Romero did what many parents would have done (and what my own parents certainly would have done): She asked her sister to look after the baby, Carlitos, until she could come home. The sister was already overwhelmed with her own three children, and sought help through her church. An acquaintance took Carlitos to the home of the church’s minister, and the minister and his wife contacted another couple who were looking to adopt.

Romero’s parental rights were then terminated, and Carlitos was adopted by Seth and Melinda Moser.

Unsurprisingly, Romero did not have adequate legal representation, and does not speak English. Lawyers for the Mosers, who adopted Carlitos, say that Romero abandoned her child, and “She went by different aliases, and therefore all the correspondence that the court sent her, and that I sent her, even that her attorney sent her, all came back refused.” Romero’s attorneys, though, say that while she did seek employment under an assumed name, she gave ICE officers her real name shortly after being arrested. The fact that she was booked under a false name doesn’t mean that she abandoned her child — it means that there was a clerical error (and possibly that there wasn’t proper translation, and that she didn’t have a lawyer).

The case has all the usual hallmarks from there.

• Romero’s lawyer was hired by the Mosers.
• the lack of language skills being used as an argument against restoring the child to Romero (mind you, the fact that adoptive couples going to China and picking up a kid and then forcing the kid to learn English, but first going through a period of being unable to communicate with the child they adopted is viewed as ‘cute’, and ‘necessary to the process’ not some reason to prevent them from having the child).
• the usual “possession is 9/10 of the law” and “finders keepers” type arguments.

Jill manages to articulate the fundamental truth of the matter, there are winners and losers in this, and the ‘winners’ as always, are not the the undocumented immigrant, nor the child.

A lot of the commentary on this story says it’s a “tragedy for all involved” and that we’re all hoping for “the best outcome for everyone.” Except, well, no. It is a tragedy for all involved, but it’s more of a tragedy for the woman who had her baby taken from her and for the baby who was taken than for the couple who knew that parental rights hadn’t properly been terminated, but apparently thought that their desire for a child trumped another woman’s rights to raise the child she carried, birthed, loved and raised for his first six months of life.

Money, power, and adopter status trumps human and parental rights quite consistently.

The consequences in cases like this do not fall evenly. A mother’s “tragedy” results in direct personal gain to the Mosers.

Jill pulls her punches a bit in the piece, hedging and giving some benefit of the doubt to the Mosers:

I don’t want to impute too many motives on the Mosers, because who knows what the whole story is from their perspective.

But for those of us in this field, who have seen cases like this again and again and again, this is simply adoption business as usual.

This being the industry’s “national adoption month,” (supposedly at least) focused upon foster adoptions,  it’s long past time everyone put down the pom poms and began to question how those terminations of parental rights came to be in the first place.

By focusing on foster adoption merely as something that takes place in the space between foster care or state “in loco parentis” and adoption, far too many conveniently sidestep all the pertinent details of how kids came under state custody and the state’s ability to redistribute in the first place, in other words, that line of rationalization erases Families and Mothers.

Encarnación Romero’s case is one of many ways kids are made available to the adoption system.

I recently wrote about the role of the hideous “Adoption and Safe Families Act” and it’s mandatory trigger dates in relation to termination of parental rights.

More recently, adding new pressures on those in the system and parental rights (as well as siblings ability to remain together etc. ) has been the addition of laws like the “Adoption and Safe Families Act” that went into effect in 1997. It has been widely criticized both within the Bastard community and by those who advocate on behalf of parents ability to retain their parental rights.

It has had numerous effects upon children in foster care, not the least of which being the setting of time frames for almost mandatory terminations of parental rights, (thereby increasing the number of children made available to the adoption process.)

In that post, I spoke specifically to how parents entering prison can lead to the loss of their parental rights:

See this article, A Tangle of Problems Links Prison, Foster Care as but one of many examples criticizing the effects of the law on some of the most vulnerable of parents in terms of defending and retaining their parental rights:

“The hurdles facing imprisoned parents grew higher in the late 1990s with the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act. If a child has spent 15 of the previous 22 months in foster care, the law requires that child welfare authorities file for termination of the birth parent’s rights. The aim is to set a time period so the child can find “permanency” instead of foster care — generally, either reunification with the birth parent or adoption by another family.

Though child welfare agencies can make limited exceptions to the timetable based on family circumstances, the law has tightened pressure on parents to defend their custodial rights. Meanwhile, state policies make no specific exemptions for incarcerated parents, whose sentences typically exceed the time line. According to research led by Columbia University law professor Philip Genty, in the years following the act’s passage — 1997 to 2002 — termination proceedings for incarcerated parents more than doubled.”

Romero’s case must be viewed within that broader context.

Parents in prison (or even military service) and charges of having “abandoned” a child must be understood as the crowbars they are, tools that serve to sever parental rights even when the parent has no means by which to fight back.

Couple this with the federal financial incentives states now have for doing so, and outcomes like this become an inevitable by product of the system.

That’s the meta-picture and systemic adoption problems at the heart of this.

But as always, it comes back to all the old prejudices and assumptions as well.

• who in American society is viewed as a “legitimate” parent?
• who is considered “brown” and who is considered “white”?
• who has money and who is not merely poor but economically vulnerable to manipulation and coercion?
• who is considered “legitimately” American, and who is undocumented?
• The role religion plays in all of it, including this case, and who has privilege and lack thereof in relation to such.

Etc.

When children are collected from undocumented immigrants you almost need a new adoption category as this is neither precisely akin to domestic adoptions not inter-country adoptions. These form some third classification whereby people who were previously the “other country” come to the adopters.

Child collection for purposes of adoption injustices like this inevitably play out against the broader fabric of race, class, and societal power and lack thereof.

These cases are never apart from the cultural assumptions that form the backdrop adoption itself plays out against.

In light of such the “winners” naturally, have become little more than a foregone conclusion.

Giving any benefit of the doubt when states are literally being paid to do this shifts the burden of evidence towards forcing individual women to prove the existence of the system by which they are strip mined for the children.

The burden should be on the state and the adopters in light of the system, to prove they aren’t.

(That is my Feminist stance on the matter.)