Still Adoption Warriors: Remember Von Hughes

 REBLOG FROM 2017

Still #Adoption Warriors

Archive photo

By Trace Hentz  (Blog Editor)

Hi everyone. Huge thanks for visiting this blog and reading this blog.  In case you don't know, I started this blog back in Dec. 2009.  I didn't know what I was doing but I had the notion to find more adoptees like me. Well, well, well... it worked.

Even in 2005 when I was writing and doing research for my memoir ONE SMALL SACRIFICE, I had no idea how many adoptees there are or were... not exactly easy to find out.  There could be up to 7 million in the US right now, maybe even more.  That's not counting our relatives in Canada.

Along the way I found others who were blogging their experiences, like Von Coates in Australia.  She educated me, and helped me become a better adoptee-activist-blogger.  We became friends and Von and I emailed, and both of us contributed our writing to the LOST DAUGHTERS blog.

Read this latest update from Von HERE  (she started this blog in 2012)

From her blog:
In the world of adoption, there are many phrases and words for describing adoption, the process of adoption or parts of it, adoptees and other characters appearing with regularity. So called experts write books about acceptable adoption language and there are regularly arguments in various venues around social medias sites on correct useage, offensiveness, unacceptability and who is right/wrong/indifferent....

Von had her Blogger blog that was taken down. Someone complained about her posts and Google shut her down.  But she is a warrior and didn't stop. She moved her writing over to Wordpress.

After time and so much experience, the activism and blogging changed us.  We may not write as often.  We see the same battles, the same ignorance and we see the same propaganda.  We see over and over how the billion dollar adoption industry silences the adoptee.  In many ways we are seen as the commodity - the one they made their money on... today adoptees are still in the SILENT MAJORITY.

In many states in the United States, adoptees still cannot request their original birth certificate (OBC) or their sealed adoption files. See what states have access in 2016 HERE.

For the past 7+ years doing this blog, I saw that other adoptee blogs were firing up fighting this, as more and more adoptees found their voice. 

And they voiced their anger.  And their disappointment.

And they told their stories of reunions with their first families, or if they were not able to meet their mom or dad, because they were too late, because their parent had already died.

Why?  These adoption laws are archaic and ridiculous. They were written to protect the people who adopted us.

I have talked to adoptees about the anguish of not knowing who they are. And some tell me about reunions that started great and went silent.  (If you don't live close to your relatives, travel and jobs can make reunions very difficult to keep going.)

Adoptees know we have two families to find, our mother and our father's people. We may find one side and go into reunion, after we open our adoption records. The other side of our family might wait years to be found.

I was telling my friend Maggie yesterday (February 6, 2017) that I have not met my two half-sisters on my mother's side.  (2022 - still have not met them)

So I am still an adoption warrior but not as vocal as I had been when I started this blog.  It's time for others to FIND THEIR VOICE and write their truths and BLOG too.

If you are an adoptee and you have a blog and you are writing about adoption, please leave a comment here (below.) Tell us the blog address so we can read you and support you.

We have a long way to go... The Indian Adoption Projects took thousands of us... and many adoptees still need to find our way home.