NAM/NAAM Day 28: Stop Erasing the Adoptee Lived Experience. We Know Our Stories. You Don’t.

ike Annette, this is what riles me:  the troll that decides to “interpret” and re-write –in public no less!–someone else’s lived experience to fit their own mythology or own lived experience, which one would dare not ever question. Of course, this trollery isn’t limited to chasing down adopted people. This institutionalized trollery extends to every possible group and experience of everybody who isn’t them. Not a day goes by when I don’t read on Twitter the I-know-better-than-you-do-about-yourself crowd lectures to people of color, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Catholics, Protestants (SBCs love to correct other Protestants they deem doctrinally errant); the poor, alcoholics, drug addicts, the mentally ill, immigrants, queers, feminists, women who have had abortions, the childfree by choice, rape survivors, abuse survivors, Europeans, Democrats, academics, the under- and unemployed. and women in general. Not surprisingly, most of these trolls come from the dominant class who don’t want to share their American apple pie with us. Continue Reading →

Students for Life America Has Plans for Adoption and It Doesn’t Include Adoptees

There is no mention of adoptee civil rights. Did you see a word about original birth certificates, adoption records and files, search and reunion, medical histories, the re-homing epidemic, adoptee abuse and murder, adoptee mental health issues, family policing, societal dysfunction vis a vis adoption, the foster-to-prison pipeline, racism, classicism, sex and genderism in adoption policy and practice, corruption, graft, neo-colonialism? The over-arching control of evangelicals-with-agendas in the adoption industry? Did SFLA even ask adoptees how they feel about their adoption demands? Continue Reading →

Adoptee Deportation: State-sponsored Adoptee Abuse

The vigil brought one thing home to me: Adoption is how adoptees live abstracted lives without context, beginnings, endings, or agency. The rules are made and played by patriarchy, church, and state with all their subsidiary isms, ideologies, and agendas. For the first time, viewing the vigil performances, I seriously considered–felt–what it is really like to be sent away, first via shuttling us down the adoption chute—then through a second shuttle through the state. Adoption is analogous to deportation. To exile. No matter what happens later, we never really have a home we can go home to–and certainly not by state force. No home is ever forever. Continue Reading →

Huxley Stauffer: The best gift until you’re not. Short update and more questions

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Newsweek reports that the Delaware County Sheriff has confirmed that Huxley Stauffer has been located.  I love the lede:

YouTuber Myka Stauffer’s ex-son Huxley is not missing, say authorities. This confirmation came after claims that the five-year-old child was unable to be located after he was “rehomed” by Stauffer.

Nobody is saying where, of course since–you know–adoption is confidential.

But the investigation continues, which makes me think the Sheriff is taking this seriously. A welfare check on the bios is expected.

It looks like Huxley was non-bureaucratically re-homed with the current endgame of private placement. The Stauffers are being represented by Columbus adoption attorneys Tom Taneff and Taylor Sayers.I have never heard of Sayers, but Taneff is a very familiar name. I can’t reach into in my memory deep enough to remember why (though it may be obvious) whenever I read or hear his name I get queasy.

But I do remember this:

Twenty years ago I was part of a panel discussion on OBC access during a 2-day adoption law conference on records access and open adoption held at the Capital University Law School Center for Adoption Law and Policy (then the Dave Thomas Center for Adoption Law and Policy). The presentation went really well. The then-director of the law center hated Bill Pierce and NCFA. He refused to invite him to present an opposition argument, so he got a proxy, who actually supported records access, to play the heavy and present the opposition argument. She did the minimum and squirmed a bit.

Eye Roll: Later,Taneff sat behind me and another Ohio activist.  We were confounded and baffled when he informed us that he had no idea that post-1963 OBCs were sealed. And he was Quad A; a leading adoption lawyer in the state! Indeed!.

More questions:

  • Did Taneff get involved with the Stauffers from the beginning, or did he sign on when the frying pan sizzled hot.
  • Did he get pulled in later to make the transfer “legal?”
  • If he was facilitating a legal re-adoption from the get-go, why didn’t the Stauffers say so and refer questions to him?

You’d think if he were involved in the re-homing scheme he would have intervened publicly for the Stauffers early  on to protect his clients from public outrage, shame, embarrassment, and accusation. Sounds like he’s their cleaner. I hope he’s charging them $650/hr.

I wonder how long it will be before the Stauffers hire a white savior PR firm?

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See my previous blog, Huxley Stauffer and the Pattern of Re-Homing. Making Connnections: The best gift until you’re not for more.

 

 

 

Which side are you on, Rich? Anything or nothing is not devisive, Throwing away rights is.

I first heard this no-such-thing- as-adoptee-rights hog swill two years ago at the Denver AAC, when Uhrlaub  theorized that the Colorado bill that he worked on that opened records and files in that state, was accomplished without a single mention of “rights.” Legislators, you see, are scared away with terms like “rights” especially when prefixed with “adoptee”  so they need to hear softer less “divisive” language.Perhaps beggary will do. Perhaps scabbery. Continue Reading →

Two More Angels Lose Their Wings: Angels in Adoption winners charged with child abuse

It’s getting to be a habit. Two more Angels in Adoption winners have fallen to earth with a big thud and are currently sitting in a well-deserved slammer.

Fox29 in Kansas City reports that Topeka City Councilman Jonathan Robert Schumm, 34, and his wife Allison Nicole Schumm, 32, were arrested last Thursday (Thanksgiving) and charged child abuse and aggravated battery. Continue Reading →