Adoption Swag: Are Adoptees Immaculately Conceived?

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Until 1980 when  I read BJ Lifton’s Lost and Found   I felt like I’d been dropped out of the sky like Clark Kent, only without his super powers.I knew I had a “mother” out there somewhere who for some reason couldn’t “take care of me.” I pictured her as a no-nonsense  business woman in a brown suit. I have no idea where that came from except the  idea revealed itself shortly after I watched Katherine Hepburn in Desk Set. A couple years later, my sophomore year in high school to be exact, I was horrified when a classmate mentioned to me casually, as we lolled against the gym wall eying boys at a school dance, that her parents had married a year after she was born. I was not as much horrified for her as I was for her icky parents who had had sex before marriage. I think I kept my facial composure.  I actually wondered what I’d do if I learned my parents (adoptive, I suppose) had had sex before they were married. I was a slow learner. Only later that year did it occur to me that I might be the product of two icky parents who couldn’t Continue Reading →

Welcome to National Adoption Awareness Month, Again. Getting ready for the collective upchuck.

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It’s that special time of year again when adoptees young and old, are objectified, commodified, homogenized and monetized by the media, the adoption industry and its special- interest hangers-on– consumers, lobbyists, politicians, anti-aborts, evangelicals, white saviors, neo-colonialists, social engineers, nation builders, and kitchen table entrepreneurs–rallying ’round the flag chanting their good works. Note the invisibility in this celebratory circle jerk of producers (natural, birth, first, original biological parents) and products (hapless schmuck bastards) and the emphasis on white picket fence consumers with disposable–or crowd funded– incomes in need of “a child” to make them “complete.” With their stories dripping in sentiment, personal drama, and public theatre, you’d never know that the adoptee rights movement is well into it’s 7th decade or that not all adopted people are enamored for a myriad of reasons, with adoption in general or their adoption in particular. Hell, most people outside of AdoptionLand don’t even know that our original birth certificates are sealed. NAAM, in essence, is a time for hard core primal woundies and reunionists, and hard core political organizers and activists, often at odds, to issue a collective projectile upchuck. Continue Reading →

National Adoption Awareness Month Prequel: Blessed by Adoption

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Life is a gift, NAAMsters proclaim, and adoptees are a gift, nonetheless erased curiously +from the adoption narrative, snuggled safely and quietly inside “the family”–or in the case of Blessed by Adoption hoodies, between two hearts. An odd position for the symbol of” life” they purport to cherish. Continue Reading →

Michigan LGBT: Stop building your social desires on the backs of adoptees and our rights

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Now the LGBT assimilationist community joins the state (which until very recently repressed them) in repressing the documentary and identity rights of others by demanding it create scientifically and legally spurious documents–similar to ABCs– for themselves and their children: adoptees, adoptee lites, DI’s, and creations of other high tech repro breeding schemes that create the non-traditional traditional family. Closets abhor a vacuum.

This nonsensical demand for a special favor goes even beyond sealed adoption records by demanding a charade of two same sex parents conceiving and birthing a child. It’s another layer of secret bureaucratic fiction to dig through thanks to a need to… Continue Reading →

What Ohio’s new OBC access law really restricts. Critical Left-Behinds told to behave

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Proponents of the law, though not pleased with this spanner in their work, readily took their last minute compromise with the bromide, “but nobody will do that.” knowing full well that somebody would. By the time OBCs were released in March, 115 Ohio adoptees (and possibly more) had been slapped with redactions. 115 people out of the 400,000 adoptees whose OBSs opened that day, were still barred by law from a true and accurate copy of their state-generated OBCs. Instead they got mutilations. The law’s proponents and pimps remained silent on this abrogation of their constituents’ civil rights while blasting out happy dappy reunion porn to local, state, and national media. The incurious media either didn’t know or didn’t care about the Left Behinds stuffed and abandoned in their blackhole.

And little did the Left Behinds, already humiliated and ostracized by the new law and their own biological parents, realize they were about to get screwed by the state some more. Continue Reading →

BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: Pennsylvania HB 162 Amended and Gutted. Contact Rules Committee Today! Vote No!

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Current Status: Having passed out of the Children and Youth Committee, Pennsylvania House Bill 162 has been recommitted to the Rules Committee.

Mandates:
Section 2 (3)(a) requires the adult adoptee requesting a copy of their original birth certificate (OBC) to be 18 and have had graduated high school, received a GED, or “legally withdrawn” from secondary schooling.

Section 2 (3)(a) contains a Contact Preference Form provision.

Section 2 (3) (c) allows the birth parent to redact their name from the non-certified original birth certificate before it is released to the adult adoptee.

Section 2 (3) (c) (2) mandates that the option to file a redaction demand expires six months after the effective date of the legislation, however any redaction demands filed during that period remain in full force or effect unless later withdrawn.

Section 2 (3) (c)(4) A birth parent may withdraw their redaction demand at any time, however there is no provision to notify an adult adoptee that they have done so.

Section 2 (c) (7) allows an adoptee who has been the subject of a redaction of their OBC to every five years request that the Department of Health search for and contact the birth parent who filed the redaction demand and request that they remove it, as well as provide an updated medical history form. If it is determined that the birth parent is deceased, the adoptee will be entitled to an unredacted copy of their original birth certificate. Continue Reading →

Breaking News: JCICS shutting down!

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The Joint Council on International Childrens Services is closing up shop. No details yet.

I had heard from an inside source this morning that a BIG announcement regarding AdoptionLand would be made today. I expected the news to be that the long-rumored merger of JCICS and the National Council for Adoption was imminent, especially since the joint JCICS-NCFA Children First conference was meeting today. Continue Reading →

Massachusetts: S1114/H2045 – Submitted Testimony in Support

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Yet after months of bickering, debate and delay—little of which was made public or explained to adoptee rights activists– a compromise bill was passed that split Massachusetts adoptees into two classes The Haves: born on or before July 17, 1974 and on or after January 1, 2008 would share equal rights with the state’s not-adopted through unrestricted access to their birth certificates. The Have Nots born between those dates could not. Illogically, simply through an accident of date-of- birth, The Have Nots found themselves and their publicly held birth certificates tossed into a black hole along with their right to equal treatment and due process.

The State of Massachusetts has the opportunity now to right that grave wrong done to its adopted population nearly ten years ago. It has a chance to “level the playing field” and make the rights of all the state’s adopted citizens—not just some– equal to the not-adopted and equal within their own adoptive status. Continue Reading →

New York: S5964: Bastard Nation Letter to Acting Rules Chair Sen. John J Flanagan. Do not take up and consider.

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S5964/H2901A is not a matter of clean- up language or simple additions or subtractions. Instead it strips the original bill and adoptees of their right of OBC access, replacing it with a highly bureaucratized system of court orders, permission slips, and fiscal irresponsibility that infantilizes and restricts the rights of New York’s adopted adults. Incredibility, it mandates that judges take into consideration the “feelings” of an adopted adult’s adoptive parents when deciding to release the OBC!

Another section mandates that the state track down the birthparents of adoptees who apply for their OBC, in order to get consent for their for release. According to the bill, even birthparents whose rights were terminated by the courts for abuse and neglect would have the authority to stop the release of the OBC.

Since no fiscal note is attached to pay for these searches, which we estimate at today’s going search rate would cost over $7 million the first year alone, either NYS taxpayers are expected to pony up or adopted adults will be forced to pay the state hundreds of dollars each to get permission to receive their own birth certificates—a right every not-adopted New York-born possesses free and clear without anyone’s permission. Continue Reading →

Massachusetts: Tuesday June 23, 2015–Hearing on Clean Access Bill

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Proposed S1144 and its companion, H.2045, possibly the shortest and easiest to understand adoptee access bill ever, reads as follows:

Section 2B of chapter 46 of the General Laws, as appearing in the 2008 Official Edition, is hereby amended by striking out, in line 3, the words “on or before July 17, 1974 or on or after January 1, 2008” and by striking out in lines 4 and 5, the words “on or after January 1, 2008.”

In other words, it would remove the” black hole” and give all adult MA adoptees their OBCs, without condition, redactions or vetoes.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015 from 1pm-5pm, these (and other) bills will be heard before the MA legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Health, Room A-2 at the MA State House. Continue Reading →