What does adoption reform mean to you?

Go here, everyone. It’s hot.

Filed under: adoption, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , adoption, adoption reform

Adoption: Thinking about my daughter’s first mother

I do fantasize about Simone’s first mother.

She is the woman who joins our Curves workout around 9:40, about 10 minutes before we wrap up. Asian, small, slim, in her 40s and you could bounce the proverbial coin off her. It’s more what she projects mentally. Her hair is neat, chin length, and she always wears a cool T-shirt in a cool colour.

At our location, we’re now supposed do extra moves at the mats. A piece of paper in front of each mat has a drawing on it and some instructions. A punch here, a kick there. She does all the moves and more. I believe she makes up her own moves too. If my daughter saw her on TV, she would immediately label her “feisty-tush”–her newly minted word for somebody old (25 and up) who still has brisk locomotion.

When I mumble to my Curves buddy about life, work, or H1N1, this woman often looks over at us and grins.

I know she has nothing to do with me or with my daughter. She is little more than condensation on a window, something breathed out of my own longings and fears.

But that must be how it starts, right?

How you form the picture of someone who might be connected to you?

You look first at the people you’d like to be connected with.

Tradition and demographics suggest that S’s first family is likely to live in a rural area, as this is the largest group that surrenders girls. Then again, they might not; my daughter was found outside a police station in a city with a population of 3,700,000. There may be an older sister, or possibly a younger boy. Or multiple daughters ferried away through international adoption to different families. The fact is, you can’t predict any of this stuff. You can only look at what’s most likely and you could still be dead wrong.

If farmers, her parents could be comfortably well-off or extremely poor—the distance between those two possibilities hard to fathom. The poorest areas of the countryside are places where it’s harder to grow food and people have literally nothing. From a 1999 New York Times article:

In a crumbling mud-brick house, nestled against the untidy heap that holds her family’s entire wardrobe, Zheng Xingrong defines her life with a series of emphatic negatives.

How often do your children eat eggs or meat? ”Never!” Do you have a radio or television? ”No!” Is your 14-year-old daughter in school? ”No!” Does your 8-year-old boy have any toys? ”None!”

Stops your heart, doesn’t it? And yet, that is exactly how this could end. What would any of us do, I wonder, after coming face-to-face with poverty this complete. I hang my head as Zheng Xingrong has a way of waving my own fantasies in my face and saying one more time,“No!”

Why should any of this be easy? It didn’t start out that way.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life, solo life , adoption, China, city, Curves, first mother, H1N1, rural life

Adoption: Born in the Federal Prison for Women

Deborah Jiang Stein has sent me an article she just published with Adoptive Families. It’s called Second Chances, and it details her discovery of being born in the Federal Prison for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. How she found out was . . . whew . . . her a-mom wrote the family attorney trying to change the place of Stein’s birth so she would never know she was born in prison. Stein found the letter.

Stein later went on to volunteer in the prison system and adopted her two daughters from China.

This is a thought-provoking piece that lots of people will have different opinions about. The theme of “second chances” will no doubt irritate some. I urge you to go and comment.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life , adoption, Adoptive Families, China, Deborah Jiang Stein, Federal Prison for Women, prison, Second Chances

Elizabeth Bartholet mourns international adoption slowdown

On November 6, 2009, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet will testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding the “Human Rights of Unparented Children and International Adoption Policies” in the Americas. Adoption from Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru will be highlighted.

Bartholet is presenting along with Paulo Barrozo and Karen Bos, who provide additional legal (Barrozo) and scientific (Bos) evidence that slowing down international adoption–even in the face of documented corruption–amounts to a human rights violation and why human infants need “nurturing parenting,” not institutionalization.

You can find the presentation, along with slides, here.

Bartholet is a fierce advocate of international adoption who once said:

Adoption abuses exist, as in every area abuses of the legal system exist. But there is no persuasive evidence that adoption abuses are extensive. Nor is there reason to think that they would be extensive.

Evidence of corruption in the three aformentioned countries has been widely documented. Go here and click on the individual countries in the country list.

A few paragraphs from her upcoming presentation:

International Adoption functioned in the past to place many thousands of children per year from these three countries in permanent nurturing homes, with many placed as young infants, giving them a good chance for normal development. International Adoption has now been largely shut down in these countries, reducing the total number of children placed in the United States to less than 1% of the number placed in the peak placement years. Placement for even those relatively few children typically occurs only after lengthy, damaging periods in institutional care. There continue to be very few domestic adoptive homes available in these countries, nowhere near enough for the children in need. Almost no domestic homes exist for older children or children with disabilities.

The many thousands of children per year who could have been placed in permanent nurturing families abroad are now almost certainly languishing in institutions or on the streets. Our information is that growing numbers of children are now crowding the existing institutions, and new institutions are being built.

Many of the children in institutions are orphaned, or have been abandoned. While many others have biological parents who can be identified, very few of these children will ever be sent home to live with those parents, either because of inadequate welfare support, or because of parental unfitness. Yet there is no adequate system to identify children who should be freed for adoption.

. . .

Similarly there is dispute about the impact of shutting down International Adoption, and whether it is more likely to stimulate domestic reforms helpful for children, or to harm children as we believe the facts show. And we need more specific information about the number of children held in institutions, the length of time they are held, the conditions in which they live, and the harm they suffer. We need more specific information about the parental status of children held in institutions, the need for systems identifying those who should be freed for adoption, the nature of current adoption regulation, and the need for adoption reform ensuring that as many children in need of homes as possible be placed as early in life as possible.

Bartholet’s presentation ends with reference to “the egregious violations of children’s rights in Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru” that occur when they are not adopted.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life , Elizabeth Bartholet, Guatemala, Honduras, Inter-American Commission on Human rights, international adoption, Peru

Closed-records advocate wants to be called biological expletive-deleted

A truly bizarre website has surfaced belonging none other to than Katherine Hoy Foley, who supports birthmother anonymity and opposes open records. Foley sued New Jersey in June 2009 because its Division of Youth and Family Services allegedly gave out identifying information to her daughter a year earlier. That daughter tried to contact Foley, first via letter, and then in person.

What complicates the story on some levels is that Foley was raped as a teenager. That single historical fact permeates her website, Women in Hiding, more than any other. As a site exploring the brutality and trauma of rape, it succeeds on some level. Foley is an artist and a okay writer and her gallery and articles are stomach-churning but real. This is the experience of teen getting raped.

On the other hand, she’s also bat-shit insane (in the parlance of a pal) and the implications of her stand for adoptees and surrendering mothers are awful. Weird how Foley appears to be the perfect symbol for closed-records contingent—fragile, wounded, driven insane by contact. Possibly unable survive the “rampage” of the “the stranger-adoptee”  and the “personal damage” done to her family.

Foley does not refer to her daughter as daughter or my. She calls her the stranger-adoptee.

She does not refer to herself as birthmother:

Do not dare refer to me as birth mother.  Don’t try Biological Mother, either.  Or even call me Parent to what gained life from my ordeal.  And do not be cute by using Mom, as in Birth Mom, Bio Mom.   

Biological Source is a description I can force-feed myself, grudgingly accept.  It is, after all, the truth and nothing gets to change that.  However, I prefer Biological Cunt.  Biological Cunt speaks my personal truth.  It does not fake a smile and make nice.

When Jason Nash wrote the story referenced at the top of this post, she wrote back chastising him for referring to her motherhood. That whole nutty letter is here.

As for her campaign, she’s totally serious and has her lawyer-husband backing her up. He apparently wrote this section of the website which claims, among other things, that anyone placing a child for adoption should be included under domestic violence legislation so they can be protected from all contact and requests for information disclosure. Adoptees will find the Strategies section of her website (how to deal with the aggressive stranger-adoptee) sick-making and hilarious.

It is terrible that Foley was raped as a teen. It’s also terrible that her view of pregnancy, motherhood, and adoption are so warped by that one event that she would rather stay hiding (or would she?) than give people their civil rights. Nauseating.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life , adoptee, adoption, birthmother anonymity, closed records, disclosure, Kathleen Hoy Foley, New Jersey Family Services, rape, Women in Hiding

Rescued from Buddhism: A brief history of the Christian adoption movement

A few years ago when the 2008 US presidential election campaign was getting underway I became interested in the left wing of the evangelical movement. Remember the book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It? That book, written by Jim Wallis, examined how the Religious Right had “hijacked” religion, making it synonomous with Republican Party principles and reducing it to a few hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Wallis, himself a noted evangelical, charged that the Christian Right’s narrow focus on these two issues was often mean-spirited (read: intolerant and homophobic) and ignored the social gospel entirely. Where was the concern over “issues such as poverty and pandemic diseases, environmental care and climate change, trafficking and human rights, genocide, war and peace”? Recall that in 2005, the year of the book’s publication, objections to the Bush admin and America’s presence in Iraq were peaking and leftie evangelicals were a big part of that movement.

Filed under: adoption, critical thinking, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , Abba Fund, adoption, Christian adoption, Christian Alliance for Orphans, Cry of the Orphan, GOP, Great Commission, international adoption, Jim Wallis, Orphan Care Initiative, Orphan Sunday, Rick Warren, Russell Moore, Southern Baptist Convention, Together for Adoption

Single moms need reform school?

At NewMajority, where they have boldly dedicated themselves “to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement,” the following photo was selected for a story about kids of single moms doing badly at school. (“No School Reform Until Single Moms Reform“)

Isn’t that ripe?

How sweet and innocent the child. How awful that mother, bold as brass in her bikini . . . dragging on her cancer stick and throwing her son a baleful look. Why not just stick a thought bubble on top of her head that reads, “Look kid—you’re interrupting my tanning time and I gotta hot date tonight. Now beat it.”

No wonder all our kids are doing badly, right?

Filed under: Single parents have stupid kids, critical thinking, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , achievement, NewMajority, school, single moms, single mothers

Adoption: When Satan doesn’t want you to

It’s been brewing for some time but now appears somewhat official: there is a Christian duty to adopt. Christian evangelicals are being commanded to “be at the forefront of the adoption of orphans close to home and around the world.” Why? Because

The Lord is calling them to that ministry.

and

What better way is there to bring the good news of Christ than to see his unwanted little brothers and sisters placed in families where they’ll be raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? (Adopted for Life, p. 75. See details below.)

and

[God] predestined the path of the child by adoption.

and even

Adoption is war because Satan and unseen beings contest it.  They oppose adoption . . .

If you want a brief overview on the recent phenom of Christians adopting as a Christian thing, go here.

In that article you will find reference to the recently published Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches by Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Several years ago, Moore adopted two boys from Russia with his wife Maria.

This is the book that has upped the ante. Google it and you will find pages and pages of positive reviews from Christian commentators, families, and adoption agencies swept along by their recent discovery that adopted children are really real children and they really, really belong in Christian homes.

What you won’t find is any frank discussion of the ethical challenges posed by adoption. Corruption* doesn’t exist. Abandonment is abandonment—never a crushing last resort. Adopted children get new families, new names, and new identities but don’t, apparently, think about the original ones. Race and culture are ultimately non-issues because

As Christians, we can’t see things that way. Our love for neighbor means we must prioritize the need for families for the fatherless, regardless of how their skin colours or languages line up with one another. (p. 156)

Moore even goes so far as to say that those who question the practice of transracial adoption probably do so out of racism. Referring to the former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, and his racist policies, he writes:

Wallace and his segregationist cohorts didn’t usually argue their case on the basis of raw racial hatred, at least no openly. Instead they argued that separation was best for both black people and white people. After all, it’s human nature to want to be with “one’s own kind,” to honor one’s own traditions, one’s own culture.

Wallace’s progressive heirs are now using a very similar apologetic for preventing transracial adoption. They’re not nearly as crude as the old governor. But they’re vowing segregation forever, just like he did. They’re standing in the orphanage door. And they too are pretending that they’re just being ‘realistic’ about the possibility of racial reconciliation. (p. 155)

If you detect a tone of moral certainty in the writing, that would be the same certainty that lets Moore dismiss his sons’ original culture as a collection of Russian folk tales, songs, and holidays. More important in Moore’s mind is to keep the focus on what’s real and enduring for him:

It didn’t matter to us that the nurses in the orphanage across the seas still called these boys “Maxim” and “Sergei”; we had on their walls nameplates reading “Benjamin” and “Timothy.” It didn’t matter what their current birth certificates read; they would soon be Moores.

This newness of identity also informed the way we responded to questions, whether from social workers or friends, about whether we planned to “teach the children about their cultural heritage.” We assured everyone we would, and we have.

Now, what most people meant by this question is whether we would teach our boys Russian folk-tales and Russian songs, observing Russian holidays, and so forth. But as we see it, that’s not their heritage anymore [O: Yes, this guy believes adoption changes heritage], and we hardly want to signal to them that they are strangers and aliens, even welcome ones, in our home.

We teach them about their heritage, but their heritage as Mississippians. They learn about their great-grandfather, the faithful Baptist pastor, about their countrymen before them in the Confederate army and the civil rights movement. They wouldn’t know “Peter and the Wolf” if they heard it, but they do know Charley Pride and Hank Williams and “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” They are Moores now, with all that entails. (from Chapter 2, published separately as the article “What Some Rude Questions About Adoption Taught Me About the Gospel of Christ”)

For obvious reasons, I don’t recommend buying the book but you can read portions of it at a time online here (the publisher times you, so don’t expect to read for hours).

_________________________________________________________

*Another a-mom recently sent me the ABC Foreign Correspondent story on Christian World Adoption operating in Ethiopia. See it here. Video, transcript, response by CWA and rebuttal by Foreign Correspondent included.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life , Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches, adoption, culture, George Wallace, orphans, race, racism, Russell Moore, Russia, segregation, transracial adoption

Adoption gave her cachet

Biting satire alert.

You know those people who return from their international adoption trek feeling so . . . international?

Someone has captured that here.

Filed under: adoption, critical thinking , adoption, international, satire

Adoption: Vote for Dawn

Most of you have heard about the Best Adoption Blog Award that’s part of The Bump mommy blogger awards.

But if you haven’t, I’m confident that most of you have heard of Dawn at This Woman’s Work. Vote for Dawn. She’s now neck and neck with Another Ordinary Miracle, and. . .um, AOM is adoption pap compared to Dawn’s blog, which is a lot of straight talk on what it’s really like to live an open adoption and other non-lollipops-and-roses-stuff in general. Sometimes she leaves me gasping. Seriously.

You can vote as many times as you want. Just vote. Please. As Dawn says, the other side deserves a fighting chance.

More than 27,000 votes have been cast. Add your voice today.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life , adoption, Best Adoption Blog, Dawn, open adoption, straight talk, The Bump, This Woman's Work