The National Council for Adoption is getting a hammer taken to it on Facebook.
The organization posted a bunch of soft posts for NAM/NAAM and the response has not been pretty. I wrote a short response on one video , and to my surprise, it stayed. Back in the day, it and I would have vanished post haste. No! I take that back. NCFA would never have posted on FB.
____________
Today is World Adoption Day. I must be out of it. I’ve never heard of this celebratory day. Surfing for information, I learned it’s been around since 2014 (yikes!) and is an evangelical mission to push adoption and to “lift all voices in the adoption community. “It was founded — I kid you not– to gather support for families struggling to pay for adoptions.” I will probably write more about this, but in the meantime, Patheos has a rundown on the project. It is…disturbing.
Here is the NCFA World Adoption Day video that adoptees went bonkers on:
&I
And here is a sample of their bonkerism. (I am notoriously bad with screen shots so this is cut and paste.)
How about World Adoptee Day? Put the focus on the ones that bear the consequences of the child trafficking market. Adoption does not make families when another is destroyed in the process. Glossing over the effects of adoption on adoptees is disingenuous and harmful.______
It’s National Gaslighting Day, when we’re told to be grateful that our identities were erased so strangers could cosplay as parents.______
Penny Drapkin Most of the criticism you see on these comment sections are from adopted people. We are the experts – not adoptive parents, not adoption professionals, not people who “know” adoptees. We are the only ones that have lived it. It can be lifelong pain and trauma. Unfortunately most people dismiss us as angry or bitter because they don’t want to admit that they have participated in an unethical system. They don’t want to acknowledge that adopted children grow up – and we as adopted adults have things to say about the legal contracts we couldn’t consent to but are bound by nonetheless. We have things to say about our identities being erased and our birth certificates falsified to say that strangers birthed us. We have things to say about the trauma, feelings of not belonging, having no strong sense of identity, of losing our connection to family, heritage, culture, of having C-PTSD.Yet we are ridiculed, told we are ungrateful and bitter. What many don’t realize is that many of us have healed enough to have the courage and strength to speak out against injustice and advocate for more ethical, child-centered solutions.
We hope that society will listen so that others are not harmed as we were.______
Penny Drapkin hi lifelong lived experience in this irrevocable contract I never had a say in. Lifelong trauma to include preverbal. No rights to myOrigins medical Heritage or simple real Birth certificate. Hi it’s meand too many others.
______Then why aren’t you helping the mother?? Manipulating and coercing instead?We see you!!These are the hands of Human Trafficking!!Because every child deserves their OWN loving family they were born into, and what they don’t deserve is someone preying on their poor young mother!Stop the savior role.______Incredible how people who are not adopted tell adoptees how they feel. You get this in no other traumasome of the gaslighting comments on here are a downright disgrace.
____________
My only “criticism” is that this new cadre of beautiful Class Bastard loud-mouths are focused-pissed over NCFA’ promotion and celebration of adoption. and the adoption industry. That’s fine. That kind of criticism is always welcome. Adoption as an institution, loved by everyone but those victimized by it, however is not going away and it’s not nfortified hill to die on. There is so much more.
They seemingly have little idea that the NCFA, was established in 1980 to keep OBCs and other records sealed from us. and they did a damned good job of it. NCFA founding president Bill Pierce spent decades of vicious arm- twisting, smearing , and attacking adoptees, birthparents, adoptive parents, adoption professionals, policy makers, scholars and lawmakers who fought to restore our right to records. A lot of people were hurt. P erce even went after Ronald Reagan for giving his adopted son Michael information about his birthmother. I imagine that the current staff of NFFA has any idea why everybody hates them.
Dr Pierce retired in the early 2000s and died in 2004. For some reason a lot of people believed that with him removed from the equation, records rights would be restored. easily. I knew better. The poison pill had been swallowed. Pierce’s influence spanned the political spectrum from RTL to the ACLU. The myths and lies he and NCFA spread for decades, are alive and engraved in the brains of individuals and organizations that count against us. Slowly the indoctrination is fading as a new generation of lawmakers and policy wonks have come to the fore with different ideas, more aligned with ours about “privacy” in general and adoption and adopted people more specifically. This can retro if the US continues on its path to Christian National totalitarianism. But…
NCFA’s apparent de-prioritization of adoptee rights is extraordinary. We beat them. Certainly, the organization still holds on to other issues we don’t support, but they have moved from Dr Pierce’s secrecy obsession to the center. I can’t remember the last time I saw the organization interfere with rights legislation. Now it’s marginals–anti-aborts, evangelicals and their friends in dark low places–who have nothing to do with adoption that have taken up the sword.
____________
Back in that day (again!) Bill Pierce called BN and our allies socialists, anarchists, and hippies in Birkenstocks. He accused us of buying the M58 election in Oregon. I’m down with those labels and accusations, but it looks like NCFA has taken the unPiercian strategy of remaining silent while Proles throw cowpies in their face. That’s no fun!
In May 1999, Bastard Nation shut down NCFA with the In Belly of the Beast Protest. 7 cop cars showed up. Read about it here (When we moved the BN webste to WordPress some pages never made it over, so it’s on the Wayback Machine which I need to fix. For now go here.)
Filmmaker Sheila Ganz and BN Education Chair Cynthia Holub ,.later member of the BN ExCom in front of NCFA HQ in WDC
Dr. Pierce responded to the protest in Washington CityPaper with typical Pierican bombast:
Records could induce future relinquishing birth parents to lie about vital medical information, included now in the limited “nonidentifying” information legally accessible to adult adoptees. “They might have had some sexual activities, might have indulged in some recreational drug use,” he says. “Let’s assume I used marijuana in the past and had sex and also had anal sex with a woman who may have had anal sex with a guy who is gay. And I also had a bout of depression, and there may be some biochemical or genetic thing. There is zero chance you’re going to get a candid background history if they know it will be accessible. So they’ll say, ‘My health is perfectly good.'”
Oh, to live in Bill’s head!
I’ve got no desire to re-open that war. I do, however, enjoy the hammer. When he departed NCFA Dr Pierce warned the new leadership that they should listen to Bastard Nation. *We were the only force that counted because we do what we say we will. We still do.
____________
Cross-posted to the Bastard Nation website
(No, it will never be X!)
Daily Bastardette
Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now!
Poke the Bear 2025
Day 9 – 21 days to go!
<