The Indianapolis adoption agency has jump-started its annual November #NAAM child sale. This year, the agency, long known for #NAAM commercial gimmicks to reel in customers,,is offering a $500 discount on PAPs’ second installment payments.
The story is making the rounds of social media, and let me tell ya,,,,adoptees are what we used to call hoppin;’ mad. Below is a copy of the coupon with a sampling of adoptee comments from one Twitter thread alone. Of course, unpleasant comments .of which I am sure there are many, have been scrubbed from the MLJ Twitter account
- And at a reduced rate! Nothing like feeling less worthy.
- For #NAAM they provide a *coupon* for the children they openly solicit to traffick.Isn’t that special? #Adoptees are NOT commodities.
- This actually makes my stomach hurt. I’m having a physical reaction. A real slap in the face to see adoptees being treated quite literally like New shoes reding to be merchandise. Happy #naam everyone!
I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what the shoes are about. I think they are a visual metaphor for us. Objectified as merchandise. Or stepping into our new lives tossing out our dirty old shoes on Gotcha Day. Or something equally insulting.
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Notorious MLJ’s tag line is “Compassionate and Attentive International Adoption Agency.”
Farther down its webpage we learn that MLJ is a
Non-Profit, Hague-Accredited adoption service provider serving families across the US with 9 international adoption, primary provider and home study services.
It is also a member of the National Council fo Adoption. Note to Chuck Johnson: What were you thinking? There is time to recant!
And talk about a marriage made in hell!
On August 1. 2018 MLJ entered into an affiliation agreement with the popsicle baby folks–Nightlight Christian Adoptions— you know– the business that sells “places” left-over frozen embryos. and was instrumental in stopping funding for much stem cell research under Bush2 . The two companies merged on January 1, 2019. Of course, one cannot actually adopt an embryo, since they are legally deemed property, but who cares about semantics or law? And the cherry on top of the sundae!! Nightlight also moves already-born live babies and was the placing agency in the infamous Baby Veronica Brown case. In 2013 the owners of the agency received the prestigious Demons of Adoption Award.
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In 2013 I wrote about MLJ under the title.International Adoption: The White Woman’s Burden:. Agency staff picture is worth a thousand words. I had forgotten all about it lest I suffer a permanent migraine until the coupon slithered on to my screen. the other day, I was struck at the time I wrote it by the all-female white-saviour-in-uniform staff group shot. Since then MLJ has added diversity to its image hiring a black home study social worker. I wrote in part:
Certain white males (at least in the US) are burdened with the hard corporate task of cajoling or stealing the natural resources of other countries, destroying economic systems, fixing elections, and if called, to overthrow governments, friendly and hostile, for that country’s “own good,” Certain white women carry the soft cultural concomitant burden of child saving–cajoling children out of the hands of their families and into the US adoption market.
Both burdens are glossed over as “doing good,” “spreading democracy,”, “empowering the “dis- or unempowered, “and inculcating “American values” in the losers who fall under the gaze of US corporate state scrutiny.
Please go over to that essay, I think it stands up well. And you can learn more about Notorious MLJ.
And please join me this month #NAAM in speaking out about the broken corrupt thing called adoption. Your stories and opinions are important. Adoption is about us.
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