I am not an orphan (I had two living parents) but I was adopted out to strangers. I lost my name, ancestry, family ties and medical history. All because of the unregulated adoption industry.
It's that time of year when the US adoption industry pulls out all the stops to boost its profits, making November "ADOPTION AWARENESS MONTH." They'll tear at your emotions using children they cleverly proclaim to be "orphans!"
Those who read this blog know we call this Adoption BE-wareness Month.
This is our month to make you aware (via blogs and tweets) that all the devious propaganda out there is nothing more than a sales pitch.
When you think of the profits --- billions of dollars each year --- the adoption industry has to keep potential adoptive parents (PAPS) in the mindset of "saving orphans" or they'll lose their income-stream.
What the adoption industry doesn't want is scrutiny!
They'd like you to believe there are orphans out there waiting to be adopted!
My job is to keep you educated! This month, all month, we are using the hashtag #flipthescript on Twitter! Join me and use the hashtag and share all the posts about the ongoing adoption industry propaganda! We can change the script - we are adoptees and we have a VOICE!
Latest Gazillion Voices article
Here’s the preview:
Another way of putting it is this: There is no “post-adoption” until we have ended adoption, once and for all. Just as the boarding school experiment for Native American children has been discredited as genocidal, just as the Indian Adoption Program has been disbanded… so too, I anticipate that the transracial and transnational adoption experiments will be replaced by a much more just and humane practice that is less about the business of selling children (and in the process, disrupting extended families of color), and more about ensuring justice and care for the most needy and vulnerable—namely, poor women of color and their children around the world…
Child removal: What problem are we solving?
The systematic and widespread removal of Indian children for placement off the reservations, whether in residential boarding schools or later, through foster care and adoption by non-Native families, is shown to be part of a continuum of ongoing strategies to rid settler nations of their “Indigenous problem.” Interestingly, Canada and Australia have issued public apologies for their nation’s genocidal treatment of Indigenous families. The USA has yet to do so.
Much can be learned from the organized resistance, led primarily by Native American women, which will be of particular interest to activists working in other struggles facing communities of color. One of the most inspiring lessons from Jacobs’ book is seeing the ways that first/birthmothers empowered themselves by blending their roles as mothers, nurturers, healers, and keepers of the culture with efforts to become professionals themselves, or by working alongside pro-Indigenous educators, social workers, and researchers. Not only did they fend off sexist insults and racist attacks from professionals who degraded Native women’s ways of knowing and being, they also thwarted assaults from reform-minded white women whose racist thinking limited their ability to stand alongside Native women as sister-mothers in solidarity.
Jacobs’s brilliant contribution is towards re-humanizing the victims and survivors of well-meaning attempts to “rescue” needy children within a discourse that demonized Native women as unfit, immoral mothers. All of us touched by adoption would do well to develop a similarly humanistic view of the first mothers and fathers of adoptees of any race, and to reject simplistic notions of family dysfunction, immorality, and parental unfitness when it comes to the family origins of the adopted individuals we know and love.
Read more>>> http://gazillionvoices.com/seeking-justice-when-systems-fail-personal-responsibility-in-the-age-of-child-removal/#.VFavixb4KjJ
I'll be back with more this entire month!
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