Forbidden Family

Keep your votes coming in! By clicking on this link: http://www.change.org/ideas/view/return_adult_adoptees_the_right_to_their_original_birth_certificates

your vote will help secure civil rights of American adoptees to the truth of our births! Be sure to read all the comments and add your own. Now is the time to be heard!

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.

Fellow adoption reformist, Cully Ray, circulated this email through Adoption News Service. With her permission, I am posting this here. We need your votes! So, please, read on and vote for Adoptees’ Rights by clicking on the link:

Subject: [AdoptionNS] About the Change.org Idea competition
Date: Saturday, February 27, 2010, 11:10 AM

Return Adult Adoptees the right to their Original Birth Certificates placed second (2nd) in the Human Rights category, so get ready to Vote Again during the Finals. Each idea will start anew with zero votes (starts March 1st at 1pm ET and ends on Friday, March 12th at 5pm ET. ).  If we can get this idea into the top ten then this idea will be presented to the news media, the non-profit community, and the Federal administration (where our Passports are approved or not). [And, for those of us who live on the USA-Canadian border, or, USA-Mexican border, the Federal Administration also approves or disapproves adoptees’ applications for Enhanced Driver’s License to cross the border – need to prove your birth with proper ID. ---added by Joan M Wheeler.]

The end of the first round of voting, where ideas were organized into 20 different issue-based categories, was on February 25th, at which point the three top ranked ideas in each category were advance to the second (and final) round of voting, starting March 1, 2010. In this final round, all 60 qualifying ideas (top three in each of 20 categories) will be in open competition. The final round of voting concludes at 5pm ET on March 12th, and the 10 most popular ideas at the conclusion of voting will be named winners – the “Top 10 Ideas for Change in America.”

The Top 10 Ideas for Change in America

To formally announce the winners, Change.org will host an event in Washington, DC, where each of these top 10 ideas will be presented to representatives of the media, the nonprofit community, and to relevant officials in the Obama Administration. After the announcement, Change.org will mobilize the full resources of our staff, our 1 million community members, and our extended network of bloggers to support a series of grassroots campaigns to turn each idea into reality.

Why should a child have his or her lineage falsified? Falsifying a birth certificate for two gay men is to pretend that they can give birth! The same applies to two women! Common sense tells us that a child is created by a man and a woman. To record fictional birth records is to falsify a child’s life, lineage, and facts of birth.

In a similar train of thought, a state legislator, Democrat Henry Heller of Maryland, says it’s time to ban marriages between first cousins and stop playing what he calls “genetic roulette’ with their offspring. He wants to bring Maryland ‘into the world of enlightened world of other states such as West Virginia, Arkansas, and most others which already prohibit unions of first cousins. Heller says couples who are first cousins are at an increased risk of having a child with birth defects.

Yet, in most states, and some Canadian provinces, adoption records and the original birth certificates of persons who have had their adoption finalized in that state,  Washington, D.C., or province, are sealed by that jurisdiction and, hence, are unavailable to ‘said’ person whose name is on this document. This adds a unique definition to an adopted person’s hereditary: their genes must be magic! Their DNA can, mysteriously, avoid pooling with a kinfolk’s DNA, ever, to produce an offspring with undesirable traits. Otherwise, why wouldn’t their original birth certificate be available?

This is pure hogwash! But it does reveal one thing:  We adoptees are defined, by law, to have a different place in a biological definition of what it human. We are segregated as a totally different sub-species, one whose genes are pure and/or never produce bad traits in our babies. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if we marry a first cousin, or a relative to a closer degree….

THIS IS DISCRIMINATION!  Are we 1/16th human? Remember that during the slavery times, a person who had African-American heritage would still be defined as “Negro”, even if he/she had only 1/16th amount of blood from his/her African tribe?

 Mary L. Foess

Bonding by Blood, Unlimited, founder & president, since 1988

Vassar, MI

e-mail:  mlfoess@Gmail.com

Web site: http://www.ArmenianAncestryBook.com

Facebook page: accessible by typing in ‘Mary Foess’ or using the above e-mail address

Twice I clicked “post” and twice my post was rejected by Change.gov in response to http://www.change.org/ideas/view/return_adult_adoptees_the_right_to_their_original_birth_certificates_2

So, censorship is alive and well on even President Obama’s website for Ideas for Change in America.

Here is what is rejected by censors of the truth:

Thank you Diana Iwanski!

A few years ago I was told that the reason this (the government seizure of soon to be adoptees’ birth certificates, and then the mandated falsifying of “new” birth certificates for all adoptees) is not considered a crime is because the Federal Government creates the forms used for amended birth certificates and puts the information on these documents. I was told that if I write about Birth Certificate Fraud in my book (Forbidden Family) that I would look like a fool because this is not an issue.

Well, it most certainly IS an issue!

If I could find a civil rights attorney who would take the case, I would sue the Federal Government, New York State, the City of Buffalo, and the (now deceased Surrogate Court Judge) and the (now deceased) City of Buffalo Registrar of Vital Statistics for tampering with my already existing birth certificate and for fraud of the making of a new document. The Surrogate Court Judge initiated the Order to issue a new birth certificate for me under my adoptive name and with my adoptive parents as implied parents of birth. The fact that the hospital and date and time of “birth” are listed, and that this was a “single” birth are blatant and provable untruths, yet, the Registrar of Vital Statistics of the City of Buffalo affixed his name and the raised New York State seal to this new birth certificate. By doing so, he certified as true the information stated on this document. THAT is not only FRAUD, but it is ALSO PERJURY! Lying under oath is perjury.

I would sue the Federal Government, New York State, Buffalo and Erie County Surrogate Court and the Registrar’s Office, and my adoptive parents, and my extended adoptive family for identity theft, theft of my family of birth, willful and intentional deprivation of family of origin, willful and intentional child abuse and emotional and psychological and medical abuse of my personhood, my personal development and emotional development has been impaired due to imposed adoption fraud. The lifelong identity confusion and humiliation that I have had to endure from being adopted has cost me deep and profound personal destruction, loss of relationships, mental and physical health, job losses, and personal integrity and loss of self esteem.

We adoption reformers must win this fight over the intentional destruction of our personhood. The cost to adoptees is a huge cost, and then the adoptee is held liable to pay for medical costs and mental health therapy due to abuse resulting from deprivation of our family of birth and destruction of our identities.

All people are born only once. To make a NEW birth certificate is to deny facts. Sue the Federal, State, County and City Governments, individual Registrars of Vital Statistics, adoption agencies, Social Workers, and Lawyers — yes, and sue adoptive parents — for the intentional destruction of another person’s vital statistics.

Enough is enough. Where are the attorneys who are in the adoption reform movement? Write the lawsuit, get the proof, file the papers, and make this a Constitutional Amendment or a Presidential Order. Reverse and Repeal and Overturn the 1930 Model State Adoption Act. This has gone on far too long.

Where is the National apology to adoptees and our natural parents? Where is the restitution money owed to us who have had to pay out for therapy and medical tests and to cover the emotional pain we have had to endure for our lifetimes?

Why is it that Australia has had National recognition of the problem, The Netherlands has NEVER sealed nor falsified birth certificates when a child is adopted, and other foreign governments have varying degrees of acknowledgement that adoption destroys the adoptee’s identity of birth?

America is NOT the Land of the Free!

Give me back the right to a CERTIFIED copy of my real and true birth certificate!

Give me the right to have my “new” and “amended” birth certificate declared NULL AND VOID and to demand the issuance of a TRUE adoption certificate to replace my falsified, government issued birth certificate that states that I, Joan M Wheeler, was born to E and D Wheeler. Those are lies and I want an adoption certificate to document what actually took place on January 14, 1957: E and D Wheeler adopted Doris M Sippel and her name was changed to Joan M Wheeler.

What is so difficult about putting the facts on a document?

Angry and Disgruntled? YES!!!

Certifying my amended birth certificate as true is fraud and perjury. Not allowing me a certified copy of my real birth certificate is a National disgrace perpetrated by the government.

 THIS IS TO URGE EVERYONE TO VOTE FOR CULLY RAY’S IDEA FOR CHANGE IN AMERICA. Click on this link to add your vote and your comment: http://www.change.org/ideas/view/return_adult_adoptees_the_right_to_their_original_birth_certificates_2

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.

Cully Ray posted the following today on the Change.gov website:

http://www.change.org/ideas/view/return_adult_adoptees_the_right_to_their_original_birth_certificates_2

The end of this round will be this Thursday (the 18th) and then the Final round will begin on Monday the 22nd… THIS IDEA WILL BE IN THE FINAL ROUND!!  Thank you all so much for your support and All the Information that has been shared in your comments.

The Final round will be from Feb 22 thru Mar 4th.  There will be 60 ideas presented and the Top Ten vote getters will be presented in Washington DC.  As many of us know the amending/falsifying of Original Birth Certificates can and has caused problems, not only on a personal level but on State and Federal levels as well.

Please help get out the vote for the Final round, and again Thank You for everything you’ve done to get this idea to the Final Round!!!

love and hugz to all.

posted by Cully Ray

While the ideas presented by Mara and myself drew considerable less votes, I attribute the reason is because we were short-sighted in our wording. Cully Ray said it best, thus her idea got the most votes. In her above follow-up discussion comment, Cully links the two causes together with a slash: “amending/falsifying of Original Birth Certificates…”

Still, 457 votes for “Return adult adoptees the right to their original birth certificates” is a huge jump from the low-count of 43 for “Make Falsifying birth certificates of adoptees illegal”, and 71 votes for “Release Original Birth Certificates to Adoptees”.

Pay very close attention. I will add this word: CERTIFIED to the idea of “Return adult adoptees the right to their original birth certificates”.

There is no use to the release of UNCERTIFIED Original Birth Certificates to adoptees because that is another CONDITION that the government sets up to perpetuate the infantile treatment of adoptees who were factually born of one set of parents and adopted by another.

To release UNCERTIFIED copies of our true birth certificates is to continue the official lie in presenting our falsified birth certificates as true. Do not let the State and Federal governments get away with this! We know that our falsified and fraudulent birth certificates issued to us at the time of our finalization of our adoptions do not accurately state the facts of our births. THESE documents should be declared NULL AND VOID because of the official lies they uphold. We need to call an end to the issuance of such documents, and call an end to our dependence of the false legal need to have such documents as our legal identity papers!

The message really needs to reach the general public as well as drilled into the heads of adoption reformers: adoptees not only need to demand our civil rights to our true birth certificates, but we need to stop the legal practice of falsifying new adoptees’ birth certificates. We need to create the issuance of an official ADOPTION CERTIFCATE to REPLACE the falsified birth certificate.

Why? Because without stopping the falsifying of adoptees’ birth certificates, the system creates thousands of FRAUDULENT birth  certificates for American citizens each and every day. This horrendous civil rights violation clearly must end.

If this practice does not end, 30 years from now, we will have witnessed yet another generation of adoptees fall victim to fraud and identity theft for the benefit of adoption. Thirty years from now, these fresh-faced adoptees will take over our activism and the right to unseal their (and our) true birth certificates. I don’t want to be fighting the same fight when I’m 84 years old.

We see it happening today. Those of us who are old enough to have been around 30 and 40 years ago at the start of our fight for Open Records know all too well that we have witnessed — and were powerless to stop — another generation of adoptees locked into the falsified birth certificate loop of lies.

Stop the cycle. Vote for the “Return adult adoptees the right to their original birth certificates” in this first round of votes in President Obama’s Change.gov’s website under the Human Rights Ideas for Change. Let the voice of the American people be heard by President Obama and his cabinet. Vote for this idea in the 2nd Round and make sure it reaches the final count to be sent directly to the President. The release of our birth certificates to us is our civil right AND it is our civil duty to prevent the falsifying of new adoptees’ birth certificates. STOP THE CYCLE. STOP THE ABUSE. STOP THE EROSION OF ADOPTEES’ CIVIL RIGHTS.

There are at least 6 to 7 million adoptees in America, yet obviously they are not stepping up to the plate to make their voices heard. Many adoptees still don’t rise up to political action. When adoptees themselves are so worn down by adoption’s dirty little secrets, we cannot stand up to fight the injustices perpetrated upon us. Therefore, it is up to us who do see the connections and injustice to keep shouting our cause loud and clear.

Adoptees … there are millions of you out there! Get off your duffs and vote! Get your pens and pads of paper. Get your computer keyboards tapping. Get to the post office and send your letters to President Obama yourselves. Tell him: Stop the abuse of adoptees. Slavery should hit home to Barak Obama. Slavery is alive and well in the American Adoption System. End adoption abuse now!

Parents of adoption loss also need to get off your butts and take action. Your rights are also being abused by the present adoption cycle. Put an end to it. Fight with all you’ve got.

TRUTH is on our side!

We know who our parents are!

We need to put the emphasis on truth: 1 birth certificate and 1 adoption certificate = Adoption Truth.

See it clearly and get the job done.

Joan M Wheeler

Author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009

The above ideas are laid out in finer details in my book.

Buffalo, New York, USA

1-28-2010

The experience of surviving the earthquake in Haiti is indeed traumatic. I’m glad she and her soon-to-be-adopted-son are alive. They will be coping with that horrendous experience for the rest of their lives.

But that’s not the whole story.

What troubles me is the unsettling details of this boy’s journey from Haiti, to Miami, Florida and then to an undisclosed location, and soon to be in my home town. The pre-adoptive mother is a teacher for a school just down the street from my home. The pre-adoptive father is a lawyer (go figure). They live in a southern suburb of Buffalo.

No indication of where the other 5 children are going when they leave Miami.

One of the Pod-casts below states that there are 254 US families in line to adopt Haitian children. Does this mean these adoptions were already in process? Or are these new families who rushed in immediately after the earthquake?

With all the coverage of adoptions that were in the process before the earthquake, and after, I find this story troubling. Local media sensationalizes and glorifies this couple. Comments of “how wonderful of you to adopt…” and, strangers saying “thank you” to them as if this couple is protecting the larger society’s interests somehow. This just adds more fuel to the fire – to the myths of savior adoptions – that we in the adoption reform community must dispel.

This couple, indeed, had developed a relationship with this three year old boy over the course of several visits and extended time. Links to the pod-casts and newsprint article below tell their story.

It is clear that they had “attached” to each other — not “bonded”as so many people say. Bonding is actually a scientific term. Bonding ONLY happens between a pregnant mother and her child. Bonding is the reciprocal relationship between that mother and her child and NO ONE else. Bonding continues through pregnancy, the birth process, breastfeeding, eye contact, body smells and touch, and continues for about three months. Socialization with the father and other siblings and other family members BEGINS while the infant is in utero as the sense of hearing familiarizes the pre-born infant with voices. Socialization and attachment occur AFTER birth. (Ken Watson, lecture at an American Adoption Congress circa 1989).

So, now, we have a little boy called Geoffrey by his adopting parents. We don’t know anything about his name at birth, the name he went by before his adopting parents came along and spotted him in an orphanage. We don’t know anything about his parents of birth; if he has any siblings nor do we know if he has any extended blood kin family, as in cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Nothing is said about his birth certificate in Haiti. Nothing is said about what the adoption process does to his personal identification papers, or his loss of connection with any of his blood kin family, or his loss of his native culture and language. Instead of being a Haitian citizen, he will now be erroneously be identified as an “African-American” by sight-analysis alone.

It is simply assumed that Geoffrey is his American name.

But what happens with his Haitian birth certificate? Is that placed under seal, as any domestic adoptee’s birth certificate is sealed forever from all domestic adoptees? From what I know about foreign-born adoptees, a “new” birth certificate will be made in his new adoptive name, and his parents of birth will be replaced, legally, by the names of the two people who are adopting him.

Something is wrong with that picture.

Should anyone be allowed to alter the material facts of life for a minor child? This is stealing his right to his name, his country and place of birth, his true blood parentage, and his human right to his name at birth and to his parents and family of birth.

We, in America, still hold onto the myth that adopting parents replace the parents of birth. In reality, they do not.

Other countries, such as The Netherlands, recognize the importance of a child’s birth identity. While the child still loses her legal right to her birth name, and takes on the legal right to be given a new adoptive name, such an exchange is legally documented with an Adoption Certificate, not a NEW “Certificate of Live Birth”, as we do in the United States.

One cannot, or should not, tamper with anyone’s facts of life and papers documenting birth, adoption, marriage, death.

The adoptee must cope with the realities of a dual identity in the face of legal documentation that proves she, or he, has only one set of real parents. The legal paperwork contradicts what each and every adoptee must emotionally deal with every day for the rest of her life after being “rescued” by “wonderful” and “generous” adopting parents.

The United Nations Rights of the Child states:

• Article 7 (Registration, name, nationality, care): All children have the right to a legally registered name, officially recognised by the government. Children have the right to a nationality (to belong to a country). Children also have the right to know and, as far as possible, to be cared for by their parents.
• Article 8 (Preservation of identity): Children have the right to an identity – an official record of who they are. Governments should respect children’s right to a name, a nationality and family ties.
• Article 9 (Separation from parents): Children have the right to live with their parent(s), unless it is bad for them. Children whose parents do not live together have the right to stay in contact with both parents, unless this might hurt the child.
• Article 10 (Family reunification): Families whose members live in different countries should be allowed to move between those countries so that parents and children can stay in contact, or get back together as a family.
• Article 11 (Kidnapping): Governments should take steps to stop children being taken out of their own country illegally. This article is particularly concerned with parental abductions. The Convention’s Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography has a provision that concerns abduction for financial gain.
• Article 16 (Right to privacy): Children have a right to privacy. The law should protect them from attacks against their way of life, their good name, their families and their homes.
• Article 20 (Children deprived of family environment): Children who cannot be looked after by their own family have a right to special care and must be looked after properly, by people who respect their ethnic group, religion, culture and language.
• Article 21 (Adoption): Children have the right to care and protection if they are adopted or in foster care. The first concern must be what is best for them. The same rules should apply whether they are adopted in the country where they were born, or if they are taken to live in another country.
• Article 22 (Refugee children): Children have the right to special protection and help if they are refugees (if they have been forced to leave their home and live in another country), as well as all the rights in this Convention.

It is interesting to note that the United States has NOT ratified the international treaty of The United Nations Rights of the Child. Could it be because we Americans profit by the multi-billion dollar adoption business that deals with the trade of human children from one family to another, from one country to another, without giving FULL consideration and respect due to the rights of the very children Americans are so quick to snatch up?

I urge all people who read this post to read the very important statement issued yesterday by Adoptees of Color Roundtable. This is clearly an appeal by adoptees of different races who oppose the rush to adopt Haiti’s children by white, affluent people. There IS racial discrimination in America, and these Haitian children, whether we want to admit it or not, will face the indignation of racial tensions even with the best of intentions of their adopting parents.

Now, here is the information on the couple from Buffalo, New York (USA) who is in the process of adopting a Haitian toddler:

 Series of 3 NPR Pod-casts tell their story:

•  
  • Lancers reunited with adopted child 2010-10-27
  • Lancers await adoption of Haitian child; Haitian orphanage low on food & water 2010-01-19
  • NPR’s Scott Simon interviews the Lancers about the status of their adopted son in Haiti  (2010-01-15)

 A print story appeared 1-27-2010 in The Buffalo News online, Comments needed.

• Lancers reunited with new son from Haiti Local family greets Geoffrey in Miami

http://bastardnation.blogspot.com/

http://bastardnation.blogspot.com/2010/01/bastard-nation-statement-on-haitian.html

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 

For the last week, Bastard Nation, like the rest of the world, has been watching the devastation of Haiti. The images are frightening, sad, and heartrending, especially those of the children.

We have also watched with alarm the rush to rescue Haitian children by adoption. Within three days of the earthquake, Catholic Charities of Miami had set up a scheme modeled on Operation Pedro Pan, a joint State Department-CIA-Miami Diocese project in the early 1960s to separate children from their parents, creating young pawns in the US war against the Castro government. Although “Operation Pierre Pan” in Haiti is on hold, at least for now, numerous evangelical churches and ministries, adoption agencies, secular organizations, unfinalized adoptive parents and other individuals–many with conflicts of interest–have joined the rescue mission call to remove children immediately, no matter what their family status, to the US for the purpose of adoption.

Haiti is still under rubble. Aid is slow to arrive. Survivors are spread out in shelters and camps, or live in the streets. The dead are unnumbered, unknown, and unnamed. Family members continue to search for each for other, and it will take weeks or even months for final conciliation.

The rush to relocate orphans, quasi-orphans, and potential orphans internationally is ripe for coercion and fraud. Adoption agencies, church agencies, and ministries especially–along with fraudulent and predatory “child welfare” agents–have much to gain from fast removal. The trafficking of Haitian children for sex, servitude, and adoption operated in Haiti before the quake. It certainly operates now. The unethical and possibly unlawful mass transfer of traumatized children, many with family status unknown, to foreign shelters, foster care, and adoption agencies, removed from their culture and language, with little hope of family reunification cannot be allowed or tolerated. We urge US State Department and other US authorities in Haiti to (1) remove private special interests and those with conflicts of interest, such as adoption agencies and ministries, from the child welfare decision-making process and (2) halt the evacuation of children and their placement for adoption in the US.

We also urge the State Department to suspend pending adoptions. Haitian paperwork is lost or destroyed. Rock Cadet, the judge most responsible and knowledgeable about pipeline cases, died in the quake. Though the US Embassy survived, US paperwork is probably unavailable for some time, if it still exists. Without proof of Haitian court or Embassy status, any adoption removal from the country, without thorough background investigation and due process, is illegal and not in the best interest of the child

Needless to say, no new adoptions should be processed.

In the post-quake chaos, children need protection from predatory snatchers. Bastard Nation, therefore, supports the expedited removal of Haitian children, orphans or otherwise, to credible and documented parents or family members in the US for temporary or permanent placement depending on the circumstances. These children must not be assumed adoptable and scooped up for fast-track adoption. They should be a top priority. We urge the State Department or other government or credible private and disinterested agencies to assist Haitians in the US to locate child kin and bring them to the US.

We understand why people want to open their arms and hearts to the children of the Haitian earthquake, but adoption is not emergency or humanitarian aid or a solution to Haiti’s ongoing problems. The immediate rescue effort in Haiti should focus on emergency services, individual and family care and family reunification, not family, community, and cultural destruction and the strip-mining of children.

This statement has been faxed to the US State Department.

by Lori Carangelo of AmFOR – Americans For Open Records.

http://www.amfor.net/babybrokers/#haiti

     Haitian born adoptees currently being adopted in the U.S., Canada and France will have a difficult time when they begin searching for answers to “Who am I?” and “Are my parents looking for me?”  On 1-7-10, a 7.0 earthquake destroyed Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing an estimated 200,000 inhabitants and leaving [at least] tens of thousands of children assumed orphaned, in addition to about 380,000 pre-earthquake orphans (estimates are by UNICEF).  American would-be adopters, the Catholic Church, international adoption agencies and independent adoption facilitators applied pressure on the Haitian government in order to airlift the alleged orphans before anyone could confirm whether their parents or relatives are still alive — At this writing, the first 500 or so alleged orphans were airlifted to the U.S. (according to the U.S. State Department)and 900 children were in process of being adopted from Haiti and placed in U.S. homes.
     According to The Toronto Star (in “First Haitian Orphans To Arrive Today” by Allan Woods, 1-24-10), “In all, 154 Haitian children were approved in a fast-track adoption process, agreed to by the Canadian and Haitian governments…  Officials suspect many orphans, either given up for adoption at birth, or those who lost parents in the earthquake, are being illegally spirited out of their homeland by childless families or organized traffickers [or sexual predators] hoping to profit from Haiti’s administrative chaos… making it difficult to say how many children may have been snatched from hospitals, streets or orphanages in this battered city, or where they are going… The earthquake brought down the government building that housed all those records; it also killed the judge responsible for giving final approval to adoptions.”
    It is known that 53 children were airlifted to Pittsburgh (ABC World News, 1-19-10) and Catholic leaders pushed both Haitian and U.S. governments to airlift [an unknown number of]children to South Miami.  Haitians have long been frustrated by what some call a “double standard” that allows Cubans who touch dry land [Miami] to stay in the U.S. while Haitians who came illegally must hide in the shadows or face deportation. “Haitian parents with American-born children have been deported, even if there is no other parent in the country to care for them,” said the Rev. Roland Desormeaux of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a Delray Beach church with a large Haitian membership. Children born [or adopted] in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens, so they get to stay.  [AmFOR Note:  At this wriing, Haiti has halted the "free for all" airlifting of children for U.S. adoptions but given the high numbers of unattended children, they will continue to be taken whether Haiti approves or not.  

The U.S. is the largest market for stolen children in the world [as reported by the United Nations Rights of the Child Project].  One wonders whether the same number of Haitian children would be stolen for “legal guardianships” that would allow future changes and are not as profitable or as politically correct as the “done deal” of permanent, sealed adoption.]

Lola writes:

I would be ashamed to post the awful things you have on your blog.  I hope you get flamed constantly!  There are orphans in this world that need homes.  Why don’t you adopt some and stop whining?!  Learn what it’s like from the other side as an adoptive parent!  You make me sick!  You need therapy, not a blog.  Being so anti-adoption may be good for your mind, but it certainly hurts all those kids in foster care.  Don’t they deserve a home away from the abusive people that gave birth to them?  Those kids are taken away FOR A REASON!  Hello! Get a clue!  You may be unthankful for being adopted, but ask a 10 year old in the foster system or in an orphanage if they want a Mom & Dad…ask a kid waiting to come home to the US in Haiti right now where they would rather be!  I think you would be surprised by the answer!

Dear Lola,

Getting flamed is not an issue for me since I am paying for this website and am in constant contact with my webhost tech support.

I lived a life of torture and still am — at the hands of my adoptive family and natural family, too, not all, but enough to cause me considerable pain and anguish. Read my book for full details of the crimes committed against me by my adoptive family and others.

Lola, you are the one who is having an emotional reaction to my life. If you can’t take reading the terrible things done to adoptees (I’m not the only one) you are the one who needs therapy. There are thousands of adoptees and our natural parents who have been organizing since 1955 in America and around the world to expose the disgusting treatment we have received: examples: Adoptive parents who are lawyers have destroyed paperwork on their own adoptee’s birthparents. That’s a crime against that lawyer’s own adopted child! Adoptive parents who treat their adoptees like slaves and sex objects – like the rich couple who imprisoned a girl from a foreign country to do their household chores like Cinderella, and the Russian girl, Masha, was adopted by a pedophile and repeatedly raped and then she was freed and adopted by another woman who gave up on Masha and voided the adoption. So much abuse in adoption.

Lola, criticism from people such as you does not bother me. You only have an opinion of what you read. You do not know me personally and you do not know how this adoption has affected me and my children. They were also abused and mistreated by the relatives who mistreated me. The destruction of adoption lies and discrimination and prejudice scars adoptees and their children for life.

Lola, you can attack me all you want, but remember: in my book, I have published proof that our government has frauded millions of adoptees by the practice of seizing our birth certificates, sealing them permanently, issuing materially false statements on a new, amended Certificate of Live Birth in the new adoptive name and naming the adoptive parents as parents of birth. This is fraud and perjury. If that happened to you, you might feel a tad bit offended, pissed off, and disgusted.

I was 18 years old when I had the shock of my life, and then my adoptive parents yelled at me, threw pots and pans at me, and acted as if I had done something horrific. No, I was found by siblings that they knew I had and they prevented me from a continued and meaningful relationship with them because my adoptive parents wanted me all to themselves. Any parents who would do that today would be up on child abuse charges. The only reason they got away with that is because my father signed relinquishment papers.

Do not blame my natural father for it, either. He was used, first by the good old Catholic Church and then by a child-stealer who was procuring a baby for her brother. No one helped my father in his grief that he lost his wife to an early death. No one helped my father keep his kids together. And all you, Lola, can think about are the so-called orphans in orhanages.

I have said this before but it needs repeating: Children who need homes can very easily have those homes through legal Guardianship and not adoption. Guardianship provides a legal guardian (a single person or a couple) who provide a safe, loving, and permanent home for children who need a home. If children cannot be raised by their natural parents, this is a far better alternative than total and complete adoption. Even “open” adoption is not a safe alternative due to the sealing of the child’s birth certificate and a replacement, “new” birth certificate in the child’s new adoptive name and adoptive parents named as parents by birth. Adoptive parents cop an attitude of ownership over the child and see the parents of birth as inferior.

With Guardianship, a child’s legal birth name, legal birth certificate, and status as the child of one and only one set of parents is protected. The legal guardian is under legal obligation to act legally and lovingly for the child as a parent would, as foster parents do, and as adoptive parents do, but they do not have the “advantage” of the law sealing the child’s birth certificate, replacing it with a new one with the guardians’ names on it and changing the child’s name and identity for all eternity.

In situations where the safety of the child is concerned, better to remove a child from the danger, but retain the child’s identity and relationships with that parent or parents. Adoption erases the existing problem as to why removal of children seems necessary, but, the adoptee faces lifelong harm from adoption and must face those issues later in life.

Yes, I am completely anti adoption. No adoption under any circumstances. Not even to save the Hatian children from starving to death after the earthquake. Good grief I hear that refrain already…Family Preservation at all costs, even if their parents are dead, there are other relatives who would be lost to them in adoption by foreigners.

I am not ashamed for anything I write. The only people who are flaming me are my own stupid family members who do not want me to write about my life. Foreign governments and Social Service Agencies throughout America and other countries are reading my website: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to name a few. Why? Because there are active adoption reform movements in those countries who have achieved what America needs: drastic reform in adoption.  

I worked in foster care and in homeless shelters where I have seen kids removed from their parents solely due to poverty, not abuse. Even in the cases of abuse, those parents are still parents and those kids were born of those parents. By your way of thinking, Lola, adoption should totally erase the past and give these poor kids a new and better life. Wrong. Kids do not forget what has happened and they must cope with it all. Subjecting kids to the total identity change of adoption and forbidding them any knowledge of or contact with their own blood kin is child abuse. I’ve been at this adoption reform activism and advocacy for very near 36 years. I’ve worked in and around foster care, troubled youth, homeless families, crisis centers and disadvantaged families for my entire adult life. I went to court with an 18 year old that aged-out of the foster care system and went out on his own because he had no family. He bought me a rose from a street vendor because I cared enough to see him through that last year. He faced the reality of his life and was a strong young man. I did the same for an 18 year old young woman. She was all alone at the end of the court proceeding. Both of these kids went through foster care with their parents in what-ever state that left them incapable of taking care of their children, but both of these young adults had their birth identities intact, had their personal histories, had the rough experiences of foster care, but they also had a determination to press forward and do something with their lives. They also were free to establish some type of relationship with their parents, which they said was important for them to figure out. And they both thanked me for being at their sides when they stepped out of that court room to face the world. Adoption would have stripped them of their names, their birth certificates, and their families. Guardianship would have provided a home and loving family while giving them the right to their own birth identities. Guardianship conveys freedom, adoption conveys possession.

Oh yes, and lets all go over to Haiti to adopt all those poor orphans! That will solve these black kids’ problems, right? No it won’t! Being adopted by foreigners of a different race is an inner struggle for Transracial Abductees: go see their website under my Links page and here. They will face prejudice in this lily-white biased country of ours who hates Obama for being a “light-skinned black man”. You prospective adoptive parents who think it is the loving thing to do to go to Haiti and adopt their children — do you know what emotional damage that will do to these children who have lived through the trauma of an earthquake? They have seen their parents and other relatives die and you want to put a band aid on that by taking them away from that devastation? Do you not see that taking care of them in their own country is the best solution? I suggest you read some other blogs about taking kids for adoption out of Haiti. The Daily Bastdardette: HAITI: OPERATION PIERRE PAN POSTPONED; POLITICIANS PANDER. In that blog post alone, Bastardette has many links to a wealth of information.   You will be shocked by what you read. World organizations are advising against adopting kids out of Haiti for the very reasons I have just stated, and more.

Lola, be thankful that you have led a most comfortable life. Do not suggest that I adopt! I wouldn’t do such a horrible thing to a child! My life was ruined because of adoption.

My goal is to change adoption laws and social policy so that what happened to me will never happen to another child, ever. To be lied to, to be prevented from knowing my own siblings, to be forbidden to grieve the death of my mother, to not ever be taken to her graveside — those are crimes of child abuse perpetrated upon me by my own adoptive parents. That is sick perversion and possession of a human being.

My adoptive mother is dying in a nursing home right now. She has not once acknowledged the damage she caused me. But she is happy that I used a photograph her brother took of me as an infant for my book’s cover. She gets tears in her eyes because she is happy that I have reached my goal of publication. Maybe she cannot accept the horror of the crimes she and others committed against me, but she is happy for me to be published and encourages me to attend the next AAC Adoption Conference. Mom has realized the importance of the falsified birth certificate as being fraudulent. She has realized that her actions and that of other adoptive relatives and my dead mother’s relatives “were cruel” to my natural father, she said so this past summer. My mother now knows the destructive words said to me by my loving adoptive cousins: “Joan, you OPENLY declare you have two fathers, so you must not love this father. We don’t want you here…” at my adoptive father’s funeral in 1982. I had been in a reunion with my natural father and many other relatives for nearly 9 years at that point. The hate directed at me from prejudicial relatives was their inability to let me live my own life.

My adoptive Mom has also lived the destructiveness and spiteful hate from my own full-blood sisters who not only attacked me because they (like you) did not want me to write anything about my adoption (see my horrible articles in the Buffalo News in MY ARCHIVES page) that they repeatedly abused my mother and my kids and my ex-husband by hate phone calls and hate mail and false child abuse charges. Normal people will let go and let the other person live free from contact. Continued harassment because I am an adoption reformer is completely out of line. There is no reason for my sisters to attack my adoptive mother, but they have. My mother is dying. We need to resolve what we can and live in peace, yet, my sisters are still out there harassing me. I have no contact with them for a number of years into our reunion, and do not want contact from them because of their destructive behavior to me, my children, my adoptive mother, and my ex-husband. Why would I want to build relationships with people who have mocked me for decades and now want in on the action because my book is published? Or because they now want to be a part of adoption reform when they mocked me for being in adoption reform since I was 18? They are filled with nothing but malicious slander and defamation toward me. Every word I write is the truth. Even my ex-husband and my young adult children will attest to the hateful behavior of my relatives toward me and to them. Evenmy adoptive mother deserves respect as my mother, instead, she was mistreated by my blood sisters by false child abuse charges claiming she was sexually abusing her own grandchildren! Adoption and its aftermath has negatively-affected entire family ssytems — but you, Lola, want to sing adoption’s praises! 

Adoption, in its present form, has been and is, a destructive social and legal device that splits up families.

Lola, are you under 36? If so, I have lived more trauma since 1974 than you have as a non-adopted person. You sound like a young kid who does not know beans about adoption reform. Keep reading. Visit other adoption reform blogs. See the kinks on the side bars. These links will lead you to other links in adoption reform. Better yet, show up to our Conferences and really learn what it is like to be adopted and to lose your child to adoption:

American Adoption Congress

Adoption Crossroads:  Adoption Healing, Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, Origins Inc. Australia, Origins Canada are proud to announce: Shedding Light on the Adoption Experience VI an Educational Conference About Realities: The Lifelong Effects of Adoption and the Need for Family Preservation. 

Lola, you are living in a fantasy world. You need to wake up and smell the coffee. It is people like you who make me sick.

Happy Adoption Day, my eyeball. The only ones happy were my adoptive parents.

Fifty three years ago, today, at age 1 year, I lost my legal right to be a part of the family I was born into. I lost my legal right to have the birth certificate that documents my birth. I won the legal right to own a birth certificate that says I was born to a woman who factually adopted me: that is misrepresentation of material facts, which is fraud.

Fifty three years ago, today, my dead mother lost her right to be my legal mother. Bad enough she faced dying knowing that she’d leave behind five children, one of whom was a newborn, but she did not know that adoption would not  only take away that newborn, but adoption would prevent her from forever being named on her child’s legal birth certificate.

Fifty three years ago, today, my father walked away from Surrogate’s Court in Erie County Hall, Buffalo, New York, a defeated man. He did what was told to him. He gave away his newborn because a Catholic priest said these words to him at his wife’s funeral ten months previously: “The baby needs two parents.” On top of that, a woman whom he did not know came up to him at his wife’s funeral and said, “I know a couple who will take your baby.”

And to this day, there are members of my dead mother’s family who believe that my father “didn’t want” me.

My father gave me up because he believed I would have a better life with two parents. At the time he relinquished me, he was a single father of five children. There was no help to keep his family together, only vultures swarming to descend and take away the children. “I’ll take the boy”, said one brother of my dead mother. But my father said no. My mother’s brothers got mad at him. My father was an only child. He had his sickly aging parents to help him. His own cousins had children of their own and did not help him keep his family together. Relinquishing me, letting me go, was his only option to save the rest of his family, and himself.

To expect a man in deep, profound grief to make life-altering decisions for his child and himself at a point of personal crisis is cruel. If he had been told the truth: that his dead wife’s family would hold this against him for eternity, that they would spread filthy rumors about him, that the adoptive family into which he relinquished his child would continue ongoing relationships with select members of his dead wife’s family and continue the gossipy rumors, all the while HE was told to stay away, he would never had agreed to relinquish his child to such an adoption. If my father were told that relinquishing his daughter to this permanent adoption would result in the utter destruction of his daughter’s personal papers, personal identity, emotional and psychological well-being, and that adoption would destroy her birth certificate, he would never have agreed to relinquishment and the adoption of his child. My father does not understand the true depth of destruction that adoption has caused me: he does not want to know because the pain is too deep.

That pain is what the adoptee experiences. That pain is not worth the benefits of Happy Adoption Day.

I am a defeated person, a shell of what I could have been. To live my life each day knowing that the very people who professed their love for me, who devoted their lives to me as my adoptive parents, loved me so much that they willfully and knowingly kept me apart from my own father and my own sisters and brother, kept me apart from my own cousins and from even knowing where my dead mother was buried, just so that they could have the luxury of raising a child “of their own”, knowing that my adoptive parents told so many lies to me for the first 18 years of my life, to know all of this was done “for my benefit” makes me so sick I want to vomit.

My adoption wasn’t love. It was possession.

I am supposed to feel grateful. I am supposed to feel happy that I wasn’t raised with my father and my siblings because “what kind of life would you have had with them?” This is the indoctrination said to me, the adoptee, by my adoptive parents and believed by extended adoptive family and the general public’s accumlated “knowledge” of adoption.

The adoptive cousins with whom I have had meaningful relationships in childhood have been what I cling to. Though we are not blood, we know each other as cousins. There are blood cousins with whom  I share closeness also.

But there is also this pervasive undertow of deception, rumor and gossip. What was it that my adoptive mother said to me just a few weeks ago as she lay in her nursing room bed? “Oh, by the way, there are people who believe that you had affairs with two of your adoptive cousins.” What? Who the hell is spreading this filth around? Again? Still? Many people in my extended adoptive family and natural mother’s family, that’s who. They are the ones who are sick. Manipulative. I want no part of perverted minds. I am tired of being the brunt of their jokes.

While Jaycee Duggard has had the unfortunate experience of having been raped repeatedly by her abductor, having two children by him, she is not alone in her captivity. How can I possibly cope with the misinformation and gossip that is said for decades among family members because they “think” or “believe” something is true?

I was raised in a beautiful middle class home in the suburbs of Buffalo, an only child, with all the attention my adoptive parents could give me. It was conditional love: I was never supposed to know my own siblings and certainly not my own father and I should never know about the truth of how my mother died. My happy childhood memories come with a price: no childhood with my own siblings. Yet my adoptive parents had theirs. I loved my parents. I loved my extended adoptive family. Only to find out at age 18 that my life was one lie built upon another. After my Reunion, a shock that sent me into oblivion for years, I was expected to bounce back, to recover, to build my life as an adult as if this shock did not “bother” me. I was accused of “living in the past” and “being obsessed with adoption” and “pulling that stunt” and “knowing my siblings all along”. The ones who “pulled that stunt” were my adoptive parents and extended adoptive family. The ones who were mad that I “was living in the past” had the luxury of knowing their own personal histories while growing up. The ones who accused me of “knowing my siblings all along” were guilty of preventing me from knowing my own flesh and blood: my adoptive parents and all who backed them in their secrecy and deception.

What is it that the psychologists say that Jaycee Dugard must undo? Is it called “Stockholm Syndrome”? Perhaps other adoptees have not had a life so entrenched with turmoil as I have had, but other adoptees sure do have sealed and falsified birth certificates. Many adoptees and adoptive parents will be screaming: “What? She can’t be comparing adoption to what Jaycee Dugard experienced!”

Oh, yes, I can.

I was held prisoner in my sheltered home for 18 years in an idyllic life away from the “crappy” life my siblings lived on the opposite side of the city. (again, indoctination from my adoptive parents against my own family of birth). I should feel grateful I didn’t live with them because they had rags for clothes, or so I was told by my adoptive mother after I was found by siblings she so intensely did not want to me ever know.  Who gets to torture an adoptee like that? I feel very much that Stockholm Syndrome fits my life, too. I was abducted from my own family by adoptive parents who selfishly kept me to themselves, knowingly and willfully depriving me of relationships with my own siblings. That is nothing less than child abuse. Beyond the mixed feelings of love for adoptive parents who “took care of me”, there are a myriad of conflicts I must cope with on a daily basis: the circulating rumors of sexual misconduct, feelings of being tricked by so many people whom I am supposed to love, feelings of wondering what other misconceptions people built up around me because they knew my blood family and I did not, feelings of shame and guilt because other relatives do not approve of my life.

There was a definite rift in my life when I was found by siblings I never knew. Certain members of my adoptive family sank away from me as if I were a leper. I am one person, people. If I am as bad as my relatives say I am, then I surely do deserve the hate mail and the obscene phone calls that have permeated my life since 1974 because I dared to accept a reunion with my father and my siblings. Form my point of view, this is gang-mentality against one adoptee.

Check out the Page on this blog “My Archives” to see the “dreadful” adoption reform newspaper articles I wrote. These articles are my way of defending the rights of adoptees, the rights of the donor-conceived, and the rights of our natural parents. I stuck up for Mary Beth Whitehead, the infamous surrogate mother, and her daughter. I got hell for that from my family members, people who are not in my direct social circle. I wrote against sperm donation. I got hell for that, too, again from family members who did not approve of my public statements against procedures that harm the chidlren created by these means. The general public’s stupidity is to be expected, but to be mistreated by my own families in the form of hate mail and hate phone calls and whispers behind my back and dirty looks and snide comments — all from my own families because I did what was right for me. This is the life of an adoptee well hated for being who she is: an adoptee advocating for humane change in the restrictive, discriminatory and de-humanizing adoption practices in America.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for all the hate and disrespect I have been given because I was born to a woman who died and then relinquished to adoption, was found by siblings I never knew and was hated for that, endured criticism because I was slow to recover or did not do what other people wanted me to do: get over being adopted, I would have rather been born a bastard. Bastards get more respect than this adopted half orphan has ever received.

Happy Adoption Day — Fifty-three years of hell.

Are you catching the drift as to why I am anti-adoption?

I’m happy to fill this post request:

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:17 PM

Hi Joan,

Could you please post the link below? 

The California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee is taking comments until January 22, 2010 on the discriminatory bill AB 1325 “Tribal Customary Adoption”. 

This bill will allow ONLY NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN in the state of California to be adopted WITHOUT THEIR PARENT’S RIGHTS BEING TERMINATED.

The California Assembly Judiciary Committee needs to be reminded that what’s good for one nationality of adoptees should be good for ALL ADOPTEES.  All children should be allowed to be adopted without their parents having to terminate their parental rights!  IT IS DISCRIMINATION TO ALLOW THIS FOR ONE ETHNICITY BUT NO ANY OTHERS!!!!!

Native American adoptees already get their original birth certificates when they turn 18 years old!!!!  This preferential treatment needs to stop NOW. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday is approaching and it reminds me and sickens me how far away his dream still is. 

Here’s the link if you want to comment: 

http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/invitationstocomment/commentform.htm

(Just put W10-06 for legislation to be commented on.) 

—- Guest Poster

… … …

My observations: This doesn’t sound like adoption at all, but rather, legal Guardianship, which is a viable alternative to adoption. As we know, total and complete adoption severs a child from her family of birth and from her legal identity at birth, which means sealing the birth certificate and issuing a new one. However, with this California proposal, Native children in need of a permanent home and family will not lose their birth family nor their birth certifcate. This should not be called “adoption”. It would seem to me that the correct term for this is “Guardianship”.  

Yes, I find this offensive. I am very much for Native American rights, but not at the expense of others. Non-Native adoptees are forced to live lies, forced to give up their rights to their family of birth and relationships with them, and forced to live a new identity for the sole purpose of providing a child for adoptive parents to love “as their own”.

Identity confusion, loss of civil and birth rights, severance of relationships with blood kin, are not benefits of being adopted. These, and other losses, are suffered by adoptees, and our children. Perhaps the entire country of The United States of America could take this California Bill seriously to recognize the very real identity issues that all adoptees, not only Native Americans, experience. All adoptees deserve the truth of our heritage and continued relationships with our people.

 —- legitimatebastard

Well, maybe I should start a Guest Post Regular Feature!

The following came in via email. I normally don’t do Search Info because there is so much out there and my passions are Reunions and Civil Rights for adoptees and our natural parents, but this is important to post:

Thank you to Archie Hyde for this information.

Joan,

Here is something that you might want to put out for the ones that do searches.

Archie Hyde, a_hyde007@comcast.net

the Georgia rep.

27 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: New obituary collections at GenealogyBuff

Please forward

 From GenealogyBuff.com

Hi all,

GenealogyBuff.com http://www.genealogybuff.com has recently placed
several considerable data collections online.

Here’s the list:

ALABAMA – Madison County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/al/madison/webbbs_config.pl

ARKANSAS – Clark County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/ar/clark/webbbs_config.pl

ARKANSAS – Lafayette County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/ar/lafayette/webbbs_config.pl

FLORIDA – Manatee County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/fl/manatee/webbbs_config.pl

GEORGIA – Cherokee County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/ga/cherokee/webbbs_config.pl

KANSAS – Johnson County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/ks/johnson/webbbs_config.pl

MISSOURI – McDonald County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/mo/mcdonald/webbbs_config.pl

NEBRASKA – Dawson County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/ne/dawson/webbbs_config.pl

NEBRASKA – Nuckolls County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/ne/nuckolls/webbbs_config.pl

NEW YORK – Chautauqua County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/ny/chautauqua/webbbs_config.pl

NORTH CAROLINA – Lee County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/nc/lee/webbbs_config.pl

PENNSYLVANIA – Cumberland County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/pa/cumberland/webbbs_config.pl

PENNSYLVANIA – Lycoming County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/pa/lycoming/webbbs_config.pl

VIRGINIA – Smyth County Obituary Collection
http://www.genealogybuff.com/va/smyth/webbbs_config.pl

Each of these data sets are searchable from the upper part of each
page.  The Manatee County, Florida collection is great because many
“snowbirds” from the northern and New England states are represented
there.

Hope this helps,
Bill Cribbs
_______________________________________________
genealib mailing list
genealib@mailman.acomp.usf.edu
http://mailman.acomp.usf.edu/mailman/listinfo/genealib

–
Laura W. Carter
Heritage Room Librarian
Athens-Clarke County Library
2025 Baxter Street
Athens, Georgia 30606

Voice – 706 613-3650 Ext. 350
FAX -        706 613-3660

I was checking my trackers when someone’s search words caught my eye: “adoption reunion resentment”.

Let me make this clear: I will not be the Poster Girl for Bad Reunions. You will have to read my book to know the whole story.

I was lied to be my adoptive parents for the first 18 years of my life. They did not EVER want me to know my own siblings. Siblings that they knew I had! Siblings who lived just a 20 minute drive away! When those siblings called me on the phone and shocked the living hell out of me when I was 18 years old, I was not mad at them. I was in deep, profound, emotional shock! My adoptive parents lied to me and prevented me from having meaningful relationships with my own siblings and my blood cousins, but it was alright for other members of my adoptive family to socialize with my own blood kin!

I was happy to meet my siblings, my niece and nephew, my father, and I was grieving the loss of my dead mother for the first time in my life. Do not for one second label me as against reunions!!!!

My reunion turned sour because I was getting abuse from my adoptive mother who never wanted me to know the truth. I was getting abuse from adoptive relatives who believed I was disloyal to my adoptive parents for accepting a phone call from my own siblings! I was seen as the villain by my many of my adoptive relatives.

A few of my adoptive aunts took me kindly aside to explain what they knew. The point is: if THEY knew, I should have known all along. Not only that, but my natural father was completely unaware that the adoption contract was broken. He put his trust into the couple he chose to adopt me, but he was not told that there would be socializing going on with his deceased wife’s family. If my adoptive father’s family and my deceased mother’s family allowed themselves to socialize, but left my father out of it, then his rights were violated. He was also unaware that rumors were spread about him, rumors that affected how I was treated by my extended adopted family.

In my beginning stages of my reunion, and for decades after, I could not be everything to everyone. I was expected to learn my family history, learn names, dates, go here, go there, finish high school, go to college, and be OKAY. No one was concerned for my emotional or mental health. I was alone, until I went to a support group for adoptees. The group met once a month. Then, I went to an Adoption Forum of Philadelphia Day – long adoption conference. I met authors, natural mothers, and adoptees who felt just like I did. I found friends. Back home, I was criticized for being in a reunion, and ridiculed by natural family and adoptive family for writing Letters to the Editor about adoptees rights. This was in the 1970s.

I have been ridiculed for being an adoption activist, for standing up for what I believe in.

I am not against adoption reunions!!! I am against the lies, the deception of entire family groups, I am against being discriminated against for being an adoptee writing about my life.

My reunion went sour for many, many reasons. Too many for a blog to explain.

Message to adoptive parents: do not ever lie to your adoptees. THAT abuse destroys the parent-child relationship. To prevent an adoptee to live as a “only” child, knowing that there are siblings nearby, is child abuse. Divorced parents would face charges if they did that.

Reunions with blood kin can only work if all people work at it. My father worked at it, but could not handle me going public. He did not understand the politics of me being adopted. He felt guilty for giving me away and I have told him repeatedly that I never blamed him. I have a lovely step mother. My adoptive parents and my natural parents visited with each other. It was hardest on my adoptive mother since she did not want me to ever know my father. And my siblings and I had wonderful times together. I had a hard times adjusting. I was one person. They were many. I was overwhelmed. I was alone in my suffering.

Reunions between families separated by adoption are positive, natural events, that, if handled with respect and dignity and honesty, can and do, work.

Reunions happen with and without open birth and adoption records.

DO NOT pin negativity upon me and blame “bad” reunions on me! Many relationships ebb and flow and some end. It is part of life. Not all families get along even without adoption separation and reunion. It is now nearly 36 years after my initial reunion. There are many relatives that have sustained relationships with me, and many who have not. The younger generations now are asking questions. Adoption, just like marriage, grows and changes as we all grow and age and die.

My adoptive mother is dying. She has faced some difficult issues. She has accepted that the falsified birth certificate must end, and in its place, an adoption certificate must tell the truth.

My natural father read my book as I wrote it, twice, in these last few years. He gave his own input as to what happened. He also answered questions about the relinquishment, and, no, he was never promised confidentiality. He was told by the judge: “you must not interfere with your daughter’s life. She now is the adopted daughter in this new family. When she turns 18, you may find her again.”

Ahh, but single mothers who give up their babies, or rather, who are coerced into giving up their babies, are, and have been, told that they will never see their baby again.

There is so much that is wrong about adoption itself.  We need to focus on fixing those issues, which will then fix the reasons why relationships break down. There is much in adoption psychology of the entire family systems that cannot be explained in a blog. Read some adoption psychology books. They apply to family systems, and not just finger-pointing at the adoptee.

Society always must have scapegoats. That’s why illegitimates are called bastards. Cuss words. I resent it. Especially since I am a half orphan who should have been given respect, dignity, and honesty right from the very beginning of my adoption. Too many rumors. Too many untruths. Too much confusion for the adoptee.