As a direct result of our hard work, your unwavering support, and the assistance of other adoptee rights activist groups we can now announce that the bill NYARC supports and assisted in drafting, A55494/S3419 is officially live on the state pages Continue Reading →
As you can see, it’s only the beginning of February, and already there are plenty of screwy bills up and running to screw over adoptees. New York A2691/S2492 (aka the Benedetto bill after House sponsor Michael Benedetto) is by far the screwiest. It mandates unrestricted certified OBC access all right, –but there’s a catch. The OBC would contain the “circumstances of the adoption,” which translated means (according to the bill’s pimps) that the name(s) of your adoptive parent(s) and the date of your adoption would appear on your ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE. This fake OBC would include the disclaimer that it could not be used for identification purposes. So, you’ll get a special second fake “Amended Birth Certificate” to add to your original fake Amended Birth Certificate instead of your genuine OBC, adding one more link to the chain of abuse. This scheme, which we are all supposed to be grateful for (again!) not only defaces the OBC, but de-centers adoptees by giving adoptive parents a documentary role in our birth, and upends one of th core principle of the adoptee rights movement–access to a clean, unaltered OBC. Continue Reading →
Bastard Nation is thrilled to announce that the long-awaited update of our state pages is finished. This has been a slow, time-consuming, often mind-numbing off-and-on project for quite some time. Each state page has been updated to include links to current OBC and records access laws and state legislatures. (Special thanks to Greg Luce from the Adoptee Rights Law Center for his generous assistance). We have added hundreds of links to BN and BN-Partner state activities, news stories, and graphics. The state pages not only serve the immediate purpose of educating and alerting our readers and members to actions in their state but serve as a repository of BN history as well as adoptee rights history since our founding in 1996. When we moved our webpage to Word Press a few years ago, some of the material on our original page went missing. We have been able to reclaim some of it through the Wayback Machine and will continue to dig around when time permits and add more. With so many new additions and improvements, there are bound to be some bad links. If you find any let us know and we will try to fix the problem, In addition, if you have any material you would like to add–especially pictures from various Continue Reading →
The Bastard Nation webpage, up since 1997, is down. After investigation, we learned that we had some type of malware malfunction. We have had to move to a new hosting site and need to pay for the recovery and transfer of the files. We need $800 to cover this cost Continue Reading →
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 →
On January 23, 2018, The Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys (formerly known as the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys–Quad A) did the unthinkable. The traditional adversary of the adoptee rights movement came over to the dark side. It endorsed the right of Class Bastard to our own adoption records. In fact, AAARA went a lot further than OBC access. Taking a page from the Bastard Nation Handbook, it resolved: Continue Reading →
Compared to Uhrlaub, Bill Pierce and the National Council for Adoption in its anti-adoptee heyday were pikers. Uhrlaub claims irrationally that adoptees do not have rights– that adoptee access to OBCs and other state-held adoption documents is not a right at all, but a matter of tweaking adoption procedure and process! The ability to access our OBCs, etc. already exists, he claims straight-faced, and is recognized (for instance via court orders). Access, it seems, has just not been interpreted or utilized correctly by legislators, policy wonks, courts, and bureaucrats –or something like that. Using Uhrlaub’s logic, woman suffrage or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were about legal tweaking, not voting rights. Continue Reading →
A clean bill was just introduced today in Florida. While we think based on last year’s experience, as well as the presence of the Uhrlaub bill, a clean bill will be a challenge to get through the Florida legislature this year, it is at least an opportunity to educate legislators and to use it to point out the significant flaws in the Stark/Uhrlaub anti-adoptee bill. Continue Reading →
This makes 25 national, state, and international organizations opposed and 0 (zero) organizations that support the bill unless you count the murky anonymously-operated Occupy Florida FB “group” that claims legislators want to hear “rights” connected to adoptees. Occupy, instead, spouts nonsense that the sealing of OBCs and other adoption records are just a matter of “policy” not “rights.” In a November 17, 2017 FB post* Occupy Florida got even sillier: Continue Reading →
ecause today is Veteran’s Day, I am writing about my biological and adoptive family members who died in the nothingness of World War I: Private Frank Lawrence, Private Charles Carey and Captain James Robertson Carey, Jr. Continue Reading →