I see dead people

Repost from 11/12/2010

By Trace Hentz (blog editor)

Well, actually I do not see dead people but I know people who are living like they are dead.

OK, imagine this.... You are a child and you disappear. Not only are you upset, your entire family is crazy with despair and your parents are distraught. They might go on television and beg the people who took you to please bring you back. Your mom and dad might even divorce since they cannot forget you and they can’t seem to heal since you are missing.

You (the child) on the other hand, might be too young to fight back, or even try and escape. But you want to.

That is child abduction and we all take this seriously in American and all over the world.

Now, change the word child to adoptee.

This life changing event: “adoption” does change you and your parents. America and the world do not think of adoption as abduction but I do. Why? It feels the same to the child. And to some mothers, it feels exactly like your child was abducted.

The trauma of being abducted or adopted is the same for the child. You are feeling you are not where you are supposed to be. Let’s not get into the medical terms but those words do exist in medical journals.

So, I ask you, when will people who adopt children begin to understand that adoptees have feelings they cannot describe or display? Some adopters I know have taken this very personally and have tried to make the child feel better and assure them they will meet their natural parents someday. I have friends who have adopted and some are remarkable in their sensitivity. Some of them advocate for open adoption, so their adopted child meets their parent on a regular basis, if at all possible.

So, if you are adoptive parents and reading this, I need you to do something TODAY. Forget that there are laws preventing disclosure when it’s a sealed adoption. I want you to request the adoption file – the legal proceedings. All of it! You signed the documents so you can request them.

OK, you did it. When your adopted child asks, I want you to tell them you have the name of their natural mother and that you will help her/him find their natural parent(s) when they turn 18. It depends on the child and when they ask. If they don’t ask, I want you to give them the file when they are 18 as a gift.

That is why I see dead people. If you are a mystery, it feels like you’re dead.

Staggering Adoption Industry Profits

reblog from Musings of the Lamb blog:

By 2012, Adoption Will be a 5 BILLION Dollar Plus industry

Even the banking and insurance industry has more regulations applied to then than adoption and we know what they do to try and make money at all costs.
An industry analysis of Fertility Clinics and Adoption Services by Market Data Enterprises of Tampa, FL, has placed a $1.4 billion value on adoption services in the US back in’ 99. No other government or private agency has bothered since then. With a projected annual growth rate of 11.5% to 2012, this makes adoption the largest unregulated industry in the US.

Do the math; even if we follow those conservative projections, because the market has exploded since this last study was done making 11.5% is very mild of a percentage, we have a number that is in excess of 5 billion dollars by the end of 2012 with a growth rate of at least a half billion a year and growing.

Let’s all repeat: NO REGULATIONS PLUS LARGE SUMS OF MONEY EQUALS CLIMATE FOR CORRUPTION. That, folks, is human nature.
http://www.adoptionbirthmothers.com/its-not-about-you-but-it-is-2/#more-3268

Reinventing a better world for all children

By Trace Hentz (adoptee-author)

Years ago doing research for my memoir, I spoke with a friend in Austria who told me about SOS VILLAGES. I had never heard of this or such a concept. It's so good it has spread to the US. READ HERE

We know that in Indian Country, taking children and placing them in adoptive homes was to assimilate them, erase them from tribal rolls, an act of genocide motivated by greed and for the taking of more land. We can't change the past in North America. It has already taken place. We are the survivors, the adoptees, left to cure ourselves but also to see to it that this doesn't happen to more children.

In 2015, I will say this: the adoption industry is like a very large building that employs thousands (if not millions) of people -- real people who collect a paycheck. They are lawyers, judges and social workers.  History shows us that children needed more than an orphange and thus began the system we have today - tiers of bureaucracy, unregulated agencies rife with corruption and kickbacks, the trafficking of children internationally to meet the supply and demand here in the US and even the black-marketing of babies. Read about one evil baby trafficker here.

We have to invent something better here in the US. We can't change what exists. We have to replace it and make the old adoption system obsolete!

If ONE TRIBE could make this happen and do this SOS VILLAGE concept in 2015, the word would spread and children would be saved. Children would not lose their tribe, culture or language. Isn't that the purpose and the reason for adoption - saving children's lives?

If someone wants my help to create this new reality in Indian Country, email me.

***************

READ THIS: The New Abolition: Ending Adoption in Our Time | Daniel Ibn Zayd | August 18th, 2012

I invoke this term fully aware of its weight as concerns the movement to abolish slavery, and to clarify this usage I define adoption as follows:

Adoption is, in and of itself, a violence based in inequality. It is candy-coated, marketed, and packaged to seemingly concern families and children, but it is an economically and politically incentivized crime. It stems culturally and historically from the “peculiar institution” of Anglo-Saxon indentured servitude and not family creation. It is not universal and is not considered valid by most communal cultures. It is a treating of symptoms and not of disease. It is a negation of families and an annihilation of communities not imbued with any notion of humanity due to the adoptive culture’s inscribed bias concerning race, class, and human relevancy.

It's that time of year again #FliptheScript #AdoptionAwarenessMonth

By Trace (Split Feather, Author, Blogger)

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

Posted on October 9, 2014

Below is a preview of my latest essay just published in the online magazine, Gazillion Voices. I hope readers will find it useful as a way to think about our responsibility to fix, if not abolish, the broken adoption system.

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!

Stolen Makeni Children

Another example of Americans who adopt internationally to find out they were duped...This has happened before and sadly, it will happen again when children are $old to Americans... Trace

A court finds that the adoptees from Sierra Leone were in fact kidnapped.

Were Samuel Mosley and Adama K. stolen from their birth families in Makeni, Sierra Leone so that Americans could adopt them—and so that greedy middlemen masquerading as child welfare workers could get paid? That question was at the heart of the series published here last August, The Makeni Children, which investigated the torturously complex stories of 29 adoptions in 1998 from Sierra Leone to the United States. Birth families from Makeni had agitated for more than a dozen years, insisting that their children had been wrongfully taken. But the child welfare organization that had taken those children, HANCI (Help a Needy Child International), insisted that the families were lying—that in the midst of the brutal civil war, they had knowingly and willingly given their children away.

Read the story here: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/05/sierra_leone_adoptees_were_found_to_be_kidnapped_.html

It's Complicated, Baby

All across America, people still prefer to adopt babies. Millions of Americans adopted babies and some of us were adopted as babies. I’m guessing it’s because tiny babies don’t show their feelings; baby screams sound just like cries.  This may also explain why so many children languish in foster care: they’re just too old. Older kids do exhibit fear, uneasiness or apprehension; some kids even act like babies.

            Adopting babies is easier. Adoptive parents can hope their new baby will adjust and bond favorably by the time baby will talk. Some adopters believe they saved us as babies since our mother was a slut or wretched teenager, or maybe a sick woman on an Indian reservation or from a trashy tenement. Maybe we're Third World babies from an over-populated Chinese, Russian or African orphanage. Sometimes adopters simply ignore our culture and history, like it doesn’t exist. Some of my friends heard words like “dirty savages and filthy heathens.”

            Adopters might hope to mold “orphan babies” into something they want. They'll try loving us first. Yet we know love doesn’t cure everything. Love can’t erase genetics or ancestral memory. If love doesn't work, the adopters might try bullying us or drugging us into submission until we show them some gratitude.

            An even more complicated reality exists, a much bigger untold desperate story. 

            Adoptable babies are scooped up quick, especially if they are white and healthy and from America. You can even order one, but it will cost you thousands of dollars.

            If that doesn’t work, and if you can afford it, you can always buy a surrogate mother; these women widely advertise now. She’ll carry and deliver your baby for a price. Some sisters will do this for an infertile sibling.

            Then there’s a huge “underground market,” where they still kidnap and sell babies. Baby peddlers, some who practice law, are out there making money, too. Some abducted babies were made child sex slaves. Guatemala is now under investigation for illegal baby peddling. Someone made a ton of money on babies!

            A newer adoption scam is happening online – when a woman fakes a pregnancy, offers her unborn baby as bait, then steals the unsuspecting couple’s money (thousands of dollars) using the internet as a trap.

            There are tragic stories about sick women or couples who will kill a pregnant woman just to take her baby. This happened in Massachusetts recently.

            There are more stories about babies being dumped (abandoned) all across America. One mother dumped three babies in California (two were saved but one died from exposure). In New York, three sisters were arrested for helping one sister dump her newborn girl in the trash, causing the baby to die.

            Some mothers are illegal immigrants and don’t want their new baby. They'll do their child a favor by dumping them off at a firehouse. Those adoptees rarely find their mothers, since birth records won’t exist. There is a slim chance their mother will seek them out for a reunion since they are considered felons and criminals in most states.

            For the millions of us who have been handed over, dumped, or exchanged (or sold, or taken) for a hundred years – has anyone dared to ask how we felt at the exchange? 

            Apparently we are studied, not consulted.

            Bear in mind, babies didn’t create this billion dollar adoption industry or cause infertility. Babies can't solve social issues but we're sold as one solution. Babies can't cure the pain in women who can’t conceive. Babies didn’t create poverty. Some would say certain babies arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time. We were an inconvenience, or a sin, or a mistake.

            How will we ever fix this? It's complicated, baby!

Living a mystery

          By Trace L Hentz (blog editor)

Grief grows when someone’s missing. My “someone” was Helen, the woman who grew me in her womb. Helen decided to sign me away to be raised by total strangers.

            What type of blind faith was that? What was required for her to decide to make me an orphan? How could she know I’d be safe? Someone must have told her.

            Maybe the Catholics convinced her. The Catholics arranged everything for her and for me.

             Why doesn’t America know being orphaned hurts the baby in a profound way? Prisons and psychiatric wards are filled with orphans and adoptees, some of the scariest and most violent offenders. Why haven’t we heard about this? 

            Losing Helen did hurt me in a profound way, but not enough to kill someone.

            Adoption was an experiment. Remember this. No one really knew how closed adoption would turn out. Our mothers never imagined how this could hurt us as much as it hurt them. Mothers were assured giving us up would be ok, and we'd be better off. 

             CUB Mothers are rewriting history and fighting to get us back and fighting adoption secrecy. (CUB means concerned united birthparents). An important essential book on America's unregulated adoption industry is Stork Market (there is a link on this blog). Riben's book will open your eyes in ways you cannot imagine.

            Then I find out our government forgets to count adoptees.  As a journalist, I was disappointed but not surprised to find out their U.S. figures are not recent, reliable or computed systematically. We’re not that important, I guess.

            Writing One Small Sacrifice, I was confronted with one reality then another. I woke up. I lived in a mystery novel. I can say now with certainty, it was an adventure solving the mystery.

             With obvious fear, I opened my adoption, even if it got me banished from my adoptive family or arrested for criminally trespassing in my own family tree!

            What lawmakers decide about unsealing adoption records in 2010, if they were not adopted and if they know their names, they may not get it. Expecting an adoptee to be ok with living a mystery is crazy.

            When you think about this, it’s obvious. The tree roots of trauma takes its hold in children. Orphans roots are scarred. My roots are scarred.

            I don’t think it should be so hard to find the woman who grew you in her womb. I don’t think an adoptee should be denied their name and their family tree and their relatives.

            I think about a lot of things but I pray that moms and dads across the planet can raise their own children and those children become strong and healthy moms and dads. 

** An adoptee wrote on Facebook: My sister and I have so many issues that a shrink wouldn't know where to start… Another wrote: I shut down my emotions at a very early age. Because I agreed with them, I wrote Ghost Shell and posted it on this blog on July 1.