Forbidden Family

Mary L. Foess, adoptee and activist, founder & president of Bonding by Blood, Unlimited, of Vassar, Michigan (since 1988) writes today’s Guest Post:

Wednesday April 21, 2010 (yesterday) is our THIRD hearing in front of the committee for the House of Representatives in our state of Michigan. I will be there, again…for the 3rd time. The irony is, speaking from a non-legal lawyer type convoluted laws angle, it is ironical that those of us who have American Indian blood have to have about 25% to qualify for having our sealed, OBC unsealed. This is discriminatory toward we ‘mostly ‘white’ people. My ancestors on Father’s side go back to the VERY earliest settlers from England…and many signers of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution, 2 direct line veterans of the Revolutionary War (great times 5 and great times 4 grandfathers in my bio-dad’s line), and at least 8 U.S. presidents…yet I cannot get my OBC unsealed from Washington DC. Their excuse is ‘jurisdictional boundaries’ between Washington DC, and Maryland, where my adoption record/file was unsealed. Washington DC won’t give it to me ’cause the finalization was in Maryland. My American Indian ancestors OWNED Maryland and Washington DC…and Virginia. An illegal alien can sneak into the U.S.A, give birth, and the offspring has full rights – - – citizenship and his/her birth certificate. Yet, I cannot. I am a descendant of 3 lines from Mayflower family lines. YET, I AM DENIED MY TRUE RECORD OF MY BIRTH.

~ ~ ~ Written by Mary L Foess.

~ ~ ~ Posted by Site Administrator Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.

Distribute Freely and Quickly!

BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT!
URGENT!
ILLINOIS GROUND ZERO

CONTACT GOVERNOR PAT QUINN NOW

Don’t let Illinois gut what few rights
Illinois adoptees still possess!

This afternoon the Illinois Senate passed HB 5428:
the Illinois Adoption CI/Registry Cash Cow Protection Act

HB 5428 is NOT an original birth certificate access bill
HB 5428 is NOT an adoptee rights bill
HB 5428 is NOT an adoption reform bill

HB 5428 is an adoption industry bill, dressed up as obc access, intended to kill rights-based adoptee access to our own birth records.

HB 5428 is an Illinois Adoption Registry and Medical Exchange (IARME) promotion bill with virtually no support from adoptee rights and adoption reform advocates and organizations.

HB 5428 separates adoptees into two classes by date of birth and then into numerous subclasses of “access” and “contact” eligibility dependent on parental and state “consent”

HB 5428 “grants” rights to some at the expense of others.

HB 5428 criminalizes adoptees that use information from the IARME to locate and contact families of origins.

HB 5428 dictates relationships between adults

THE BILL IS HERE: http://www.ilga.gov/ legislation/fulltext.asp? DocName=09600HB5428eng&GA=96& SessionId=76&DocTypeId=HB& LegID=50466&DocNum=5428&GAID= 10&Session=HB%3C/span

GO HERE FOR BN TESTIMONY AND TALKING POINTS http://bastardnation.blogspot. com/2010/04/bastard-nation- testimony-hb-5428-oppose.html

Contact Governor Pat Quinn immediately and ask him to veto HB 5428

 

Springfield Office
Office of the Governor
207 State House
Springfield , IL 62706
Phone: 217-782-0244
TTY: 888-261-3336

Chicago Office
Office of the Governor
James R. Thompson Center
100 W. Randolph , 16-100
Chicago , IL 60601
Phone: 312-814-2121

 

EMAIL TEMPLATE: http://www.illinois.gov/gov/ contactthegovernor.cfm

Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization
P.O. Box 1469 | Edmond , OK 73083-1469 | Phone / Fax: 415-704-3166
www.bastards.org
bn@bastards.org

~ ~ ~ posted for Bastard Nation by Site administrator Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.

Nancy Grace’s spotlight on baby Gabriel Johnson still has not posted my three Comments. Not that I mind. It’s not my name that matters. What matters is the safety and life of this baby. What also matters is the pervasive attitude of adoption-is-superior-to-not-married-parents.

Sure, it is easy to point the finger of blame at Elizabeth Johnson, the baby’s mother. She is in trouble. How did she get to the point of taking drastic steps to prevent Gabriel’s father, Logan McQueary, from obtaining custody of his own son? What support systems were not in place for these parents and for their baby?

Even though Nancy Grace may not print my comments, I am. Questions beyond finding Gabriel Johnson alive or dead need to be asked. These questions currently are being banned from online airtime on Nancy Grace’s CNN article, Rpt: Potential Adoptive Couple may take 2nd Poly (January 12, 2010): 

There are still more questions. If Elizabeth Johnson signed away her parental rights by signing formal Relinquishment papers, she does not have parental rights. Gabriel may be in the custody of the State in which he was born. He may be a ward of the State. If Elizabeth Johnson did not sign any formal papers of Relinquishment, then any connection to the Smiths is purely social and not legal. The same goes for any couple Elizabeth Johnson says she gave her baby to in a park. Purely an emotional and desperate act on her part. Elizabeth’s text message to the baby boy’s father that she killed their son seems like a revenge tactic to me.

There should have been professional intervention way before Gabriel’s birth. This is so sad.

I am making this both a Blog Post and a Left Side Widget for emphasis. 

My 3 older full-blood sisters are TROLLING our blogs.

Their names are: Ruth Sippel Pace who goes by the name of Lady Moondancer and sometimes uses her employer’s computers to Troll (kaleidahealth.org of Buffalo General Hospital in Buffalo, New York), Katherine or Kathy Sippel Inglis who also goes by the name of Chayelet (Liverpool, England), and Gert Sippel Finken McQueen (Watertown, New York).

Do not give them a voice. Do not let them post comments on your blogs. Their only purpose is to cause harm to me.

It does not matter that I took considerable care to write a book with changed names and disguised identities to protect them. Because of their continued slanderous attacks on the Internet involving other relatives and non-relatives, I am posting their names and locations here permanently.

They ridiculed me for 3 decades for writing about Adoption Reform and now they are self-appointed experts on adoption by reading what we write, and, especially, what I write.

They instigate and inflame with their false accusations of abuse from me. I have not seen the one in Liverpool since 1979 and have not spoken to her since 1988. The one in Watertown I have not seen her since 1992 and before that 1981. The one in Buffalo continues to harass me, even though she knows I want no part of her crap, or her, in my life. Our relationship went sour decades ago. How many times must she weasel into my life? We last saw each other at our father’s 80th birthday party in 2004 because our father asked us to be there. I attended for his sake, not to be dragged into her messes. She was told then, as well as countless times in the past, to stay away from me. 

My sisters have again reported me to WordPress dot com, but this is not a WordPress dot com website. They were instrumental in shutting down my other previous blogs, forcing me to pay for this website that will not be shut down. This is an Adoption Reform Website, not a bickering forum.

I repeat: I have had no meaningful relationship with my 3 older sisters for 3 decades. They are vindictive, obsessed, and irrational. They have caused me and my children, my adoptive mother, and my ex-husband lifelong damage.

I have had to change my unlisted phone number, again, because they get my phone number from our father. He was instructed NOT to give out my phone number and did.

My Reunion with these 3 women went bad because they ganged up on me and continue to terrorize me. There were terrible things that happened to them before I was born. I refuse to let them hurt me by their blogs posted for the sole purpose of hurting and discrediting me. What I do with my life is none of their business.

TO THOSE WHO WANT TO BLAME ADOPTEES FOR SEARCHING AND TO KEEP RECORDS CLOSED –

I was FOUND by siblings who wanted their baby sister, but they did not take responsibility for causing tremendous personal injury to me as a result of their interference. Finding me was their way of making sense of our separation by adoption, but they did not know what this caused in my adoptive home. Any reunion from that long ago (1974) was doomed to experience multi-family disruption because of secrecy in adoptive family lies and existing family problems within the natural family that did the Finding and made initial contact. However, my sisters did not have respect for my adoptive parents, or me, and pretty soon their own pasts caused problems for many people. Reunions can be positive experiences, and my Reunion is not totally about my sisters. They think it is and they are wrong.

This does not mean I am against Reunion or Searching. This means that my 3 sisters (and other relatives in my adoptive family who have since backed away from hurting me) are only concerned for themselves.

Searching and Reunions and Open Records are not the problem here: my sisters are the problem. Attacks on an adoptee are the problem.

My dying adoptive mother is afraid of my 3 sisters. I am afraid of them. My children and I want nothing to do with them.

Each Reunion and each person affected by adoption separation reacts differently to trauma.

If there was cooperation and respect, we would still be in Reunion. My sisters have destroyed relationships with their hate mail and verbal abuse, and now, written Internet abuse.

I am not participating in back and forth petty sibling rivalry. I simply want them to stop bothering me.

I have to concentrate on a dying mother — a mother who raised me. But she is not my siblings’ mother so they have no respect.  

My Reunion does not revolve around my 3 full blood sisters. I have meaningful relationships with other family members, but my sisters have done considerable damage that caused other relationships to end.

The most important ingredient to Search, Reunion and Open Records is the Adoptee and the lifelong impact of lying to the adoptee by family secrets, rumors, and discrimination against adoptees in the whole of society.

It amazes me that people really do not understand this issue. Adoptees do not falsify their own documents. Adoptive parents do no falsify the documents. Natural parents do not falsify documents.

When a baby or a child is relinquished to adoption, that infant or older child maintains her/his birth certificate (and religious baptismal certificate) from birth. That is the child’s legal identity. That birth certificate names the parents who are responsible for creating that infant whose birth is recorded on the birth certificate: “Certificate of Live Birth”.

Only when an  infant or older child has undergone the legal process of adoption, a six month or longer process, at the moment the Judge and the adopting parents sign the Final Order of Adoption, only then is the legal process set in motion to change the legal identity of that infant. This legal process takes from  about 1 month to 3 months for the Judge’s Order to arrive in the hands of the Registrar of Vital Statistics. Then, the Registrar takes the information that the Judge sends over, and puts the new name of the child and the names of the adopting parents and the birth information onto a form that closely resembles the actual birth certificate. But this “new” birth certificate is not the exact same form. It is, however, a legal form. It is a legalized method of lying. It is a legal “Certificate of Live Birth”.

All adoptees have a legally falsified “Certificate of Live Birth” that states they were born to parents who did not create them biologically. The mother named on this ”Certificate of Live Birth” did not give birth to that named child!

This is fraud perpetrated b y the government.

Fraud perpetrated by any Church (does not have to be Catholic, but in my case, is) to issue a certified religious document stating that an adopted child was baptised in the adoptive name is jiust that: fraud. If, on the other hand, a child is baptised AFTER an adoption, then that baptism is correctly done and correctly documented.

In my case, the Catholic Church falsifed my baptismal certificate to indicate that I was baptised in my adoptive name, which I was not. You will have to buy my book to see all of these documents clearly printed in black and white. 

Adoptees are not guilty of fraud. The State and Federal Governments are guilty of fraud. It is time to put an end to adoption fraud.

In the past 35 years of being in reunion and having my true birth certificate and true baptismal certificate, along with my legal birth certificate that states that I was born to a woman who did not give birth to me, and a baptismal certificate in my adoptive name that states that the person named was baptized three years before that person legally existed, I find it amazing that many other people are confused by my identities.

I, however, am not confused. It is troubling to view my true and falsified documents, but I know who I am, and I know my legal name prior to adoption. I know my religious name prior to adoption. Actually,my religious name will always be Doris Michol Sippel because, according to the Catholic Church, once baptized, a person is always that name in the eyes of God.

Because I have these documents, people assume all kinds of nasty things about me. They assume that I falsified my own documents. Some people have accused me of fraud. Some people are so confused themselves about who I am that they argued with me because they could not warp their brain around my life’s complexities.

It is not the fault of reunion, nor is it that my adoptive mother threw my sealed birth records and adoption decree at me three days into my telephone reunion in 1974, that caused this “identity” problem for me. Opening up adoptees’ sealed records will not cause otherwise intelligent adoptees to go into a tale-spin. The identity confusion for the adoptee comes in when the adoptee realizes that the government is at fault. Changing an adoptee’s birth certificate is inherent within the process of legally adopting an adoptee. It is part of the legal documentation of the exchange of that baby or older child from one set of parents to the other set of parents. The parents do not change the infant’s name: they do not cause the legal incongruities — the court and Registrar of Vital Statistics do that.

However, adoptive parents come to accept, expect, and eagerly await their new adoptee into their lives and with the receipt of that baby, they (the adopting parents) wait for the “new” amended birth certificate to arrive in the mail. This “new” birth certificate “proves” that they are the child’s new parents! The “old” parents now no longer exist, so adoptive parents develop an attitude of Entitlement over their adoptee.

But they forget: they would not be ADOPTIVE parents if it were not for the conception and birth of that infant to another set of parents.

When we get to the point of telling  the truth in both adoptive-parent-to-adoptee relationships and on the documents that record adoptions (a falsified birth certificate should actually be a Certificate of Adoption), then this adoptee who sometimes feels like an impostor in her own life, will be happy.

Truth in adoption and reproductive technologies needs to happen.