Adoption Trafficking Awareness Event July 20

Join Intercountry Adoptees: "What is Adoption Trafficking?"

Lacey Library,

Saturday, July 20th, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

500 College Street SE, Lacey, WA 98503-1240

SPEAKERS:

Vance Twins

The Vance twins have been interviewed on television, radio, in newspapers and given presentations in the U.S., Canada and in Seoul, South Korea.

Janine’s Limited Edition book:

The Search for Mother Missing: A peek inside international adoption gives an account of the twins journey to the 2004 Korean Adoptee Gathering and is exclusively available at their website. www.vancetwins.com

Peter Dodds

 

Speaker and author of Outer Search Inner Journey the first book written by a foreign born adoptee on the subject of intercountry adoption. 

An international speaker, Peter has delivered keynote addresses at New Zealand's National Adoption Conference and Toronto's Adoption Experience 2012. He has been interviewed on television, radio and the internet. www.peterfdodds.com 

 

 

Giving the families left behind a voice in the matter

 

• Raising global consciousness on the hidden side of adoption

• Sharing an enlightened and heartfelt perspective on adoption issues based on real experiences

• Offering preventative and alternative solutions for an industry currently in flux

• Protecting vulnerable families from a lucrative industry that targets the child and abandons and exploits the mothers

 

 

 

Blog Week: What bugs me about the Adoption Establishment

SHOTGUN ADOPTION
http://www.thenation.com/article/shotgun-adoption?page=0,0
This article is from 2009 but offers an interesting insider view of the Adoption Agencies agenda and their role in coercion of young women to relinquish their babies, instead of supporting them so they can keep their child.

Excerpt:
Carol Jordan, a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1999 when she became pregnant. She'd already decided against abortion, but she was struggling financially and her boyfriend was unsupportive. Looking through the Yellow Pages for help, she spotted an ad under "crisis pregnancies" for Bethany Christian Services.

Within hours of calling, Jordan (who asked to be identified with a pseudonym) was invited to Bethany's local office to discuss free housing and medical care. Bethany, it turned out, did not simply specialize in counseling pregnant women. It is the nation's largest adoption agency, with more than eighty-five offices in fifteen countries.

...instances of coercion in adoption stretch back nearly seventy years.

...CPCs (Crisis Pregnancy Centers) might persuade reluctant women by casting adoption as redemption for unwed mothers' "past failures" and a triumph over "selfishness, an 'evil' within themselves."

...CPCs were wary of looking like "baby sellers"...

Care Net runs 1,160 CPCs nationwide and partners with Heartbeat International to host a national CPC hot line.

... National Council for Adoption (NCFA), the most prominent adoption lobby group in the country, in the company of other benefactors like Bethany; Texas maternity home giant Gladney; the Good Shepherd Sisters, a Catholic order serving "young women of dissolute habits"; and the Mormon adoption agency LDS Family Services.

The federally funded NCFA has a large role in spreading teachings like these through its Infant Adoption Awareness Training Program, a Department of Health and Human Services initiative it helped pass in 2000 that has promoted adoption to nearly 18,000 CPC, school, state, health and correctional workers since 2002.

(Blog Week: http://landofgazillionadoptees.com/2012/02/22/secret-message-for-other-bloggers-about-the-week-of-february-26th-aka-why-the-adoption-establishment-annoys-the-heck-out-of-us-blog-week/#comment-1867)

I added the bold in the excerpt so you can notice the main players in the industry. Stay tuned to this blog - more of my rants coming this week...Trace

First Nations children sold to Americans - new book

The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930-1972, by Karen Balcom. University of Toronto Press May 1, 2011
Trade Paperback

Between 1930 and the mid-1970s, several thousand Canadian-born children were adopted by families in the United States. At times, adopting across the border was a strategy used to deliberately avoid professional oversight and take advantage of varying levels of regulation across states and provinces. The Traffic in Babies traces the efforts of Canadian and American child welfare leaders-with intermittent support from immigration officials, politicians, police, and criminal prosecutors-to build bridges between disconnected jurisdictions and control the flow of babies across the Canada-U.S. border.
Karen A. Balcom details the dramatic and sometimes tragic history of cross-border adoptions-from the Ideal Maternity Home case and the Alberta Babies-for-Export scandal to trans-racial adoptions of Aboriginal children. Exploring how and why babies were moved across borders, The Traffic in Babies is a fascinating look at how social workers and other policy makers tried to find the birth mothers, adopted children, and adoptive parents who disappeared into the spaces between child welfare and immigration laws in Canada and the United States.
[this book will be available in May 2011]