Last Friday. November 18 was National Adoption Day. Baby Love Child, in her blog for that day, National Adoption Day: A celebration of sealed records & inequality, wrote in part:
BLC pointed out that by the end of the week culminating with NAD, approximatley 4500 children would be adopted. Except for those adopted in the six free states, all of them will have their identities and histories obliterated by the state forever with the impounding and sealing of their birth cetificates. Unless, that is, we can fix it.
It kinda made me sick.
Making me sicker is the number of obcs that have been sealed alone on that “special” day since NAD’s inception in 2000. According to the Tri-State Defender: more than 30,000.
That’s about the same number of people who live in Alton, Illnois or Menlo Park, California or Jeanu, Alaska or Olveido, Florida.
If jackboot government agents marched into those towns and confiscated and sealed up the birth records of their citizens, they would be riots in the streets. (Or maybe not . USians seem to put up with any infringement of their liberties lately.) As long as it’s childen, being saved from their own personal information and it’s done for their own good, it’s OK. That this gross injustice is being prepetuated by adoption agencies, public policy, national courthouse “celebrations,”pandered and pimped by the national media, and marketed by presidential decree and a big hoo-ha at the Superdome is a sign of how broken adoption is. This is not a time for celebration.
It’s horrific! Such a sad time and so destructive.
The US is in love with the idea of adoption. And, it is in love with the idea of profitable business. Adoption Day celebrations are, for the average person, a win/win/win for all parties. They cannot and will not allow themselves to go to the place where they examine it too deeply. We are a superficial people who want desperately to hold on to the idea that this is indeed the “BEAUTIFUL THING” it is proclaimed to be. To think about it too deeply is troubling, and we don’t like troubling thoughts.
The sealed birth certificates allows the fiction to be maintained and continue.
There’s never going to a perfect system or perfect families. There will always be some people who shouldn’t rear children and there are people who don’t want them. But adoption and foster care are bandaids to cover up the real problems. Funny how you don’t see these huge numbers of adoption and foster cases in prosperous Western countries that aren’t bullying around the world spreading “democracy” and “christianity.”