Propaganda, more money chanelled to adoption via #OXYGEN Channel

(2012) Warning: EXTREME ANGER and SWEAR WORDS

By Trace Hentz

First watch their video and read this:
http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/964841/oxygen-media-set-to-premiere-im-having-their-baby

"Oxygen's new series "I'm Having Their Baby" provides viewers with a look at the adoption experience by chronicling birth mothers as they face the decision whether or not to place their children with another family."

WTF?

NOW: I have a better show idea - go interview the doctors who diagnose the adoptees (and some mothers) with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - or adoptees stuck in mental hospitals - or tell the stories of abusive adoptive homes or children languishing in foster care  - or the struggle to keep families intact in poverty-stricken areas - but NOT THIS.
It would be like torture to watch a woman give up her baby - what kind of idiot would think up something so perverse? What planet are we living on here, folks? What century is this?
Why are their unplanned pregnancies in this modern age? How about having a member of your family raise your child if you can't???
Didn't the media get the message yet? Adoption hurts people and even kills people! Adoptees and some birth moms commit suicide! Hasn't OXYGEN done any research?

Instead OXYGEN chooses to glamourize it - and f'cking plug these celebrity adopters again and again:

"Celebrity adoptions"

"In recent years, a number of prominent celebrities have have adopted children through private domestic adoption and international adoption. Though Angelina Jolie may be the first one to come to mind, she's certainly not alone. Sandra Bullock, Kristin Davis, Edie Falco, Joely Fisher, Katherine Heigl, Hugh Jackman, Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman (and Tom Cruise), Madonna, Ewan McGregor, Denise Richards, Meg Ryan, Charlize Theron and many more celebrities are adoptive parents.

If celebrities adopt, then it must be OK, right?
THIS is how they promote selling a baby to the highest bidder?

They choose the word "BIRTHMOTHER" when most of us in the blog world call them mothers and first mothers.  Again, OXYGEN is not paying attention!

"Adoption from the birth mother's view"

We often see stories of adoption from the point of view of the adoptive parents or the adoptees, but there's a third party to every adoption -- the birth mother.

Oxygen Media recently announced the premiere of its newest docu-series I'm Having Their Baby on Monday, July 23, at 11PM ET/PT. The series aims to provide viewers with a sneak peek into the adoption process by capturing the often untold stories of birth mothers as each one is faced with the difficult decision to place her baby for adoption.
Each hour-long episode chronicles the heart-wrenching, powerful stories of two birth mothers struggling with unplanned pregnancies as they decide whether to place their babies in the hands of another family.

The commodification of infants means more babies for sale and more money, money, money.....

I expect some of you will totally disagree with me.

EMAIL ME: laratrace@outlook.com

Enrollment issues affecting ICWA children

Archival Photo

Convincing me courts are doing their best to protect Indian Children today - it's just not happening.
The amount of urban Indians who are enrolled or not is part of the problem and a real issue here.
Here is a case from Michigan where the mother said her children were Delaware and entitled to protections under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
Allowing time for tribes to respond is a big issue since many tribes have few or overworked enrollment officers who can't always get historical information to enroll their members and/or their children who live off rez. If tribes did manage enrollment at birth, it would certainly help.

http://turtletalk.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/20120628_c304669_68_304669-opn.pdf

Making more Native children adoptees is not a solution. Helping American Indian families stay together is federal law!

Book Review: One Small Sacrifice

Review: One Small Sacrifice

By Cris Carl

Trace A. DeMeyer’s most recent book, “One Small Sacrifice,” expresses the experience of adoption in a well-researched and brutally painful light.  Focusing primarily on the travesties of U.S. adoption policies relating to American Indian families and children, DeMeyer carefully illustrates the damage done to a “tribe” of lost children.  These children often referred to by some tribal peoples as “Lost Birds,” suffer more than potential neglect and abuse.  Even in the most loving and well-intentioned adoptive families the sense of lost identity and abandonment can and has created generations of damaged Indian children, according to DeMeyer.

DeMeyer states that the U.S is one of the world’s biggest adopters, with 20,000 children adopted from around the world in 2002 alone.  Adoption rarely makes headlines, but on February 4, 2010, 10 Baptist congregants from Idaho attempted to steal 33 Haitian children. According to the New York Times the children were held in intolerable conditions, they had no relevant paperwork, and some continued to cry that they had parents until Haitian authorities captured the kidnappers.  The practice of removing non-white children, placing them with white American families has a long and well-established history.

Stealing American Indian children has been an accepted and legal practice in the U.S. since the early 1800’s.  DeMeyer notes in her book that congress passed the “Civilization Fund Act” in 1819, the first in a series of laws and acts intended to assimilate American Indian people’s and undermine tribal customs.  The act “authorized grants to private agencies, primarily churches, to establish programs to ‘civilize the Indian,’” states DeMeyer.

DeMeyer goes on to note the advent of the “large, militarist boarding schools or institutions where Indian children were placed involuntarily  and forced to abandoned their beliefs, customs, and traditions.”  The schools, which were established by the U.S. government and private agencies, lasted well into the 1980’s before they were shut down.  “Severe punishment, in the form of beatings, being chained and shackled, bound hand and foot and locked in closets was not uncommon,” said DeMeyer.  Remember, we’re talking about children here.

DeMeyer speaks often of the government policy known as the Indian Adoption Project, which in the 1950’s used pubic and private agencies to remove and place hundreds of Indian children into non-Indian homes.  The practice lasted until 1978 with the creation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.  “By 1900, after decades of forced removal of Indian children from their families and communities, and the stripping of their culture from them, the natural child protection system that once flourished in every tribal community began to break down,” as DeMeyer quotes Terry Cross.

While DeMeyer carefully spells out elements of genocidal government policies that have been destructive to American Indian culture for hundreds of years, far more powerfully, she tells her own story.  At times, reading One Small Sacrifice, I felt I was watching a disaster in the making. 

Painfully, I sensed what was coming with the foreboding that there was nothing I could do but be a witness. 

However, I also found a far-reaching underlying psychology that can be applied to a wide-range of identity and trauma issues – particularly relating to abandonment. 

One Small Sacrifice is a must-read for anyone dealing with not only the aforementioned issues, but for clinicians who wish to look deeper into adoption’s effects.

Cris Carl, (c)2010, All Rights Reserved

Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers...

Note from Trace:
This article is from a lawfirm wesbite - in fact there are special lawyers if you want to return your defective adoptee, special lawyers when you adopt a baby overseas, and now lawyers who will specialize in keeping adoptees "home" in the USA.   Branching out, are we?  So let me get this straight -- Americans pay to adopt you, then forget to pay for a special lawyer to get you citizenship? I wonder if there are lawyers to sue the adopters for forgetting? What about the countries who let their babies leave - do they have lawyers for the babysellers?  In this adoption racket, lawyers just follow the money...

http://www.marcschifanelli.com/blog/2012/06/can-adoptees-in-us-face-deportation.shtml

Can adoptees in U.S. face deportation?

On behalf of Schifanelli & Associates, LLC posted in Deportation on Friday, June 8, 2012

In late May, a Utah woman faced deportation proceedings even though she was adopted as a baby into the United States. The reason? Her mother died before she could finish the adoption paperwork.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) discovered the woman's undocumented status when she was charged with, and pled guilty to, forgery for falsifying checks.
Unfortunately, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the trial court's decision that the woman could be deported.

Older Adoptees Falling Through the Cracks
There is a law in place to prevent this exact situation from happening. The 2000 law grants automatic citizenship to children adopted from other countries as long as they were younger than 18 years of age on February 27, 2001. Yet, older adoptees remain legal residents. This means that, like other permanent residents, they can be deported for committing a crime of moral turpitude or an aggravated felony.
While this is a rare situation, the fact that it happens at all is alarming. Many of these adoptees do not know they are not citizens until they face deportation to countries some of them have never even visited since their adoptions.
A recent article in Multi-American, a Southern California Public Radio website, highlights similar cases:

• A 29-year-old El Salvador-born adoptee, adopted by U.S. parents at six months of age, was sent back to El Salvador. He did not speak Spanish.
• A 50-year-old Japanese-born adoptee, adopted by a Filipino American and Mexican American when one year old, was sent back to Japan. "I grew up thinking I was half Filipino and half Mexican. They could send me to Mexico and I would get by. I can speak a little Spanish. But Japan?" he asked.
• A 26-year-old Brazilian-born adoptee was deported to Brazil where he was murdered.

These are only a few of the tragic cases of adopted U.S. children who face deportation back to countries where they know very few, if any, people. If you find yourself in this situation or face deportation for any other reason, speak with an experienced immigration lawyer to learn what options you have for staying home, in the United States.

Source: Multi-American, "How does an adoptee get deported? More easily than one might think," Leslie Berestein Rojas, May 29, 2012.

60s Scoop update



Marcia Brown, a key plaintiff in the class-action suit, says she won’t give up. “The law process is slow but we will use this time to get the truth of the Sixties Scoop out to people,” she said from Kirkland Lake.

MATHEW HODGINS/for the Toronto Star file photo

Ontario native class-action suit stays alive

Link: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1210395--ontario-native-class-action-suit-stays-alive

Lawyers acting on behalf of aboriginal children who lost their families and culture during what’s known as the “Sixties Scoop” in Ontario have won the right to keep fighting for their class-action suit.

Keeping this story in the news is IMPORTANT! Trace

Adoption Learning and Survival: Loss of mother, father, family, history, ancestors...

This post "Adoption Learning and Survival" and this quote below will resonate with adoptees - please read Von's excellent blog.

http://eagoodlife.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/adoption-learning-and-survival/

"Adoptees suffer many ambiguities in adoption - the loss of mother, father, family, history, ancestors, identity, medical history,birth place, time and date, rights as a citizen, legitimacy and often country, culture, language, food, religion and those subtle things which help us identify with our motherland (the sights, sounds, smells, animals, birds and geology, the lie of the land)...."

Adoption Learning and Survival.

This entry was posted on June 9, 2012, in adopters, adoption, ethics, Food for Thought, life, mothers, pathology of adoption, the adopted life, Uncategorized and tagged adoptees, adopters, adoption, authenticity, childhood, life, pathologyofadoption, primal wound. 7 Comments

Over at my old blog Once Was Von: Surviving, Learning, Laughing. Those of us who struggle for existence, who fight for our place at the table and find every battle is hard-won often manage to use that experience in a productive way, it gives us insight and if we’re lucky, empathy and compassion. Those things are irreplaceable in what some would call ‘the conduct of human affairs’ but I call living. Those opportunities don’t come to all: trauma, pain, suffering, loss are potential human experiences but are not visited on all, as they are on most adoptees. Like oysters we can produce pearls of wisdom, of understanding and develop an ability to empathise with other adoptees which is beyond price. No-one ‘gets it’ like another adoptee even when they’re not reading off the same page
And of course as we discovered this week over at the Facebook Group Occupy Adoption, sometimes Not!

It all began with a quote from adopter and psychologist Dr Whitten. This quote – “It’s important to keep in mind that adoption is not abnormal, nor should discussions about it be stressful for adoptive parents.” Really the point was about the ‘normality’ of adoption and the way in which many involved in Big Adoption like to push the idea that adoption is normal, a valid way to build a family; that adoptees are just like any other kids in families and there is nothing for adopters or prospective adopters or hoping to adopters, the AP/PAP/HAP’s, to be worried or concerned about! To promote those ideas is misleading, inaccurate and mischievous.

Here’s why. There is nothing normal about a child being removed from a mother, being abandoned by a mother or being given for adoption by a mother. Big Adoption has worked for decades on making it seem normal, accepted and a good way to build a family. It appears that this view is now so accepted that those in certain forums are castigated for supporting women who wish to raise their babies following an unplanned pregnancy! Now that is weird! In some circles it seems to have become more important to keep the adoption market supplied with babies than it is to preserve families, support biological connections and ensure that children know their identities and histories and don’t suffer loss and trauma!

I’ve had a few messages and queries lately about Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss which I mention anywhere and everywhere, because I believe it is an essential piece of reading for anyone who has anything to do with adoption in any way. For those involved in therapies, counselling or working with adoptees and mothers, the concept of ambiguous loss makes sense of what has happened and what needs to happen. Loss, as we keep being informed by the ‘experts’ can be healed, and so it can with skilled help and work. Ambiguous loss on the other hand, which is present in mothers and adoptees cannot be healed, has no closure, but can be dealt with, lived with and managed productively if it is recognised and the tools to handle it used effectively.

We see time and time again, mothers going round in circles, over and over their decision, their loss and their tragedy when they chose adoption or were forced to choose adoption. There are many blogs in which the same story is told, retold endlessly, without resolution, because ambiguous loss has not be acknowledged or accepted and guilt, pain and regret take the upper hand. These mothers and many others like them, never appear to fully get on with their lives, some of them appear not to want to, because there is a benefit in retelling the story over and over and the concentration on this episode in their lives is tragic and deeply saddening. Those adoptees who tell us they found a mother in reunion who had discovered  a way to get on with her life were gladdened, relieved and often found reunion went more smoothly and was more lasting. When ambiguous loss is dealt with it provides a much sounder base for a reunion which has some chance of enduring, proving of benefit to all and establishing family connections that were broken.

For adoptees, there is much ambiguous loss in adoption. Loss also, but it is not enough just to deal with the losses. We need to front up to that which is ambiguous, has no resolution but often it appears is helped by the acknowledgement that ambiguity exists. For instance in other situations where a loved family member is missing those remaining are helped by recognising that their loved one may be dead and never return but at the same time holding the thought that there still may be hope that one day there may be a change of some sort. Those relatives of victims of 9/11 dealt with the ambiguity of not having a body to bury by having a funeral or ceremony in which an object symbolic of the person was buried or cremated. Individual rituals were invented which had meaning for the families and we can take a lesson from that in adoption.

Our mothers send us off into an unknown world with strangers and usually have no knowledge of how we are treated, how we survived of if we did survive. They mourn with no body to view, no grave to visit or information to calm or comfort them. It is too big an ask and is often no better dealt with today than it was in other eras of adoption, sometimes it’s worse and even less humane.
Adoptees suffer many ambiguities in adoption – the loss of mother, father, family, history, ancestors, identity, medical history,birth place, time and date, rights as a citizen, legitimacy and often country, culture, language, food, religion and those subtle things which help us identify with our motherland (the sights, sounds, smells, animals, birds and geology, the lie of the land). Many of us have no way of discovering that information and it is lost, as we are lost, in the limboland that is adoption. We never know if it will be possible to recover that information; those who have little reason to hope, cling to any vestige of optimism, knowing in their hearts that the chances are so slight as to be a miracle if it were to happen. That is not curiosity about our beginnings, as non-adoptees would have us believe and convince themselves and others, because it is safer, easier and less threatening. That is ambiguous loss asserting itself and wanting to be dealt with.

With the Indian Adoption Projects, they had a goal - assimilation. Removing us from our families would ultimately remove our culture and language. But adoption never erases our blood... Trace

Kansas adoptees are in luck!

Paula Alwin embraces her son, David Hattaway of Shawnee, who recently tracked her down -- 45 years after she gave him up for adoption. Alwin, who lives in Gatesville, Texas, has visited Hattaway and his family twice during the past few weeks, and he paid her a surprise Mother’s Day visit in Texas. See link: happy reunion

Kansas agencies aid in searches

For Kansas-born adult adoptees wishing to learn a birth parent’s identity and, perhaps, establish contact, the journey begins at the state’s Office of Vital Statistics.
To obtain a pre-adoption birth certificate, adoptees 18 and older can go to www.kdheks.gov/vital, click on the “adoption” link, then click “Obtaining a Before Adoption Birth Certificate.”
The next step is the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, which can be contacted online at www.srs.ks.gov. To obtain a form titled Adult Adoptee Searching for Birth Parents, click on the “Services” tab, click “Adoption Services,” then click the “Children and Family Services” link. That will open a page allowing the user to select “Adoption Records and Search,” which leads to online forms for adult adoptees seeking birth parents or siblings. A form for birth parents requesting contact with adult adoptees is also available.
Patricia Long, an SRS program administrator, said her office processes the forms, searches for adoption records and provides them to the adult adoptees requesting them. The agency also will conduct free searches for birth parents and for adult birth siblings the adoptee had an established relationship with prior to the adoption.
With approval of the birth parents and siblings, the agency also will provide current contact information to the adoptee. It also facilitates reunions when requested.

Read this happy reunion story: http://www.shawneedispatch.com/news/2012/jun/05/search-birth-mother-has-happy-ending/

Supreme Court won't hear case

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Supreme Court rejects adoption case involving Cherokee Nation

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday (May 21) declined to hear an unusual adoption case from Utah involving the Cherokee Nation and the question of when a person becomes an Indian.

Without comment, the high court let stand a decision by the 10^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that a child's natural mother could not regain her parental rights by claiming that the child she gave up for adoption was an Indian who was subject to the federal Indian Child Welfare Act.
The mother of the child terminated her parental rights in court the day after the child was born in 2007. However, a month after the adoption was finalized in 2008, the mother filed a federal court petition seeking to nullify her voluntary termination of parental rights because the Indian Child Welfare Act required a 10-day waiting period in cases involving American Indian children.
The Cherokee Nation intervened for the mother, arguing that because the child's ancestors could be traced to the original tribal rolls, the child was automatically given temporary tribal citizenship at birth and that the Indian Child Welfare Act prohibited the mother from terminating her parental rights within 10 days.
A federal judge agreed. But the 10^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the question wasn't the Cherokee Nation's citizenship laws, but the federal law. The court said the law applied only to children eligible for tribal membership because their parent was a member and the child's mother was not a Cherokee citizen.
Utah attorney James B. Hanks, who represented the couple that adopted the child, said in an email response on Monday that the Supreme Court decision on Monday ended the case.
The Cherokee Nation declined comment on Monday.

Read more: http://newsok.com/washington-briefs-supreme-court-rejects-adoption-case-involving-cherokee-nation-majority-of-oklahoma-congressional-delegation-speaks-at-level-above-congressional-average/article/3677448#ixzz1wdyz6700

It's sad these news stories never mention the child as sacred or worthy of protection. It becomes the colonial mindset of who is Indian enough to be protected by federal law - which speaks volumes about court cases involving Indian children.... Trace