National Adoption Awareness Day: “Calling out” cermonies shill adoptables

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I had never heard of “calling out” ceremonies until two days ago. I haven’t done any extensive research on this activity, just a quick Google look, but I’m betting this goes on in other places. Why? The harm caused to children by adoption fairs (which have their roots, as do many current adoption marketing schemes, in pet rescue), cross-country adoption visitations, and other public adaption stunts where potential adoptees expected to act like well-behaved trained monkey to find a forever home, is well documented. Is calling out–hawking children on the steps of the statehouse– any better?

I don’t think so.

Both demean and degrade. They create a special status; that of adoptable consumable with issues that nobody wants rivaling a the cute and cuddly HWI with future issues that everybody wants..You will never see see a healthy white newborn called out in the public square. Continue Reading →

Ohio HB 307: “Adoption reform” language used to promote reactionary adoption legislation

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The bill is promoted as an “adoption reform” package. with, no input from actual adoption reformers. This appropriation of “reform” language is akin to racist and sexist appropriation of language. In the topsy-turvey world of American politics African-Americans, for instance, who support black candidates for office are racists; women who support abortion rights hate women (and children.) During the baby dump campaign a few years ago, Bastard Nation, and myself in particular, were called “anti–adoptee,” with an implication of self-loathing.. “Do you want to see adoptees in little white coffins? the Morriseys liked to hector. (not that that question even makes any sense), but the meaning was clear. I’d rather see newborns die than be adopted out of the “safe haven” program, and that’s what they spread around legislatures. Continue Reading →

Yana and Toli Kolenda: Two Murdered Russian Adoptees You Never Hear About

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There are indeed 20 Russian adoptees that we know of who have been murdered by abuse or neglect. in the US, but the “official” count is 17 (though that can be disputed due to a couple of acquittals, even if the evidence showed otherwise) because the deaths of the other three do not follow the pattern of Russian adoptee murders. Their deaths had nothing to do with their adoptive status, nor were they abused, neglected, or isolated from the community.
On October 20, 2002, Yana and Toli Kolenda, more than five years after their adoption, and their adoptive mother Gienia, were murdered by their depressed out-of-work adoptive father Richard Kolenda who then committed. suicide. In 2010 Kirill Kazankov, (adopted name Jackson Atusso,) 8 was brutally murdered by a teenage stranger during a family outing. Neither the Russian government nor media has cited these cases in their condemnation of the American adoption system.

I am writing about the Kolendas tonight and Kirill Kazankov in a day or so. They are not footnotes and deserve their own separate entries.. I will also add them to In Memoriam. Continue Reading →

The Perils of NaBloPoMoing (only a little about adoption)

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t’s a good thing I got my blog out early yesterday. Last night my modem died, and with it access to the Internet and my dearest bastards.

I’ve counted many reasons why I might not pull off NaBloPoMo this year. The modem wasn’t one of them. What could keep me quiet:: my work schedule, an electrical storm, the electric shut off, falling asleep, and the most common –nothing to say. Some days it’s stretch, Continue Reading →

Adoption in Film: A Summer Place Revisited and Expanded

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A Summer Place, (1959) the penultimate dirty movie for a generation of high school girls, is full-blown melo, featuring family secrets, illicit sex, repressed sexuality, and alcoholism all exposed in public scandal. The plot centers on nice girl Molly Jorgenson (Sandra Dee) and her summer romance in Maine with clean-cut Johnny Hunter (Troy Donohue). Molly is sexually precocious but clearly a virgin with a disturbing habit of chatting up her dad while wearing nothing but babydoll pajamas. Johnny vacillates between wanting to sleep with Molly and putting her off. Continue Reading →

Facts of Life: Natalie’s Adoption

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Natalie’s Adoption was broadcast in April 1980, the year the Carter administration was discussing unsealing records and the National Council for Adoption was founded specifically to coldcock the discussion. CUB was five years old and the American Adoption Congress was only two years old,. BJ Lifton had recently taken off, and Joanne Wolf Small was starting to publish her work on sealed records in professional journals. Only Jean Paton’s Orphan Voyage and Florence Fisher’s ALMA Society predated,but not by much. Although small political oriented search and support groups were springing up across the country,t here wasn’t anything that could be called a viable national movement operating. 1980 was also the year I got my OBC from the State of Ohio.. I’d never known anyone personally who had done that. much less searched and found.

For decades the portrayal of adoption on TV was limited to happy tales of legitimates adopted after the deaths of parents (Ernie on My Three Sons and Cissy, Buffy, and Jody on Family Affair for instance, or later Different Strokes and Webster.). A couple times Sterling Siliphant addressed bastard adoption (or child abandonment/orphan loss) realistically in his visionary scripts for Route 66 and Naked City. Usually serious dialogue on bastard adoption was exiled to soaps where it could do little harm..I’m not being factious. The only time I ever ever saw adoptees, even if they were just actors, was on soaps. Continue Reading →

In the Eye of the Storm: My Interview with the Weekly Standard. The enemy got it right.

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fterwards I fretted. In my weather-distracted state, what in the world did I tell the Weekly Standard? How stupid did I sound? I knew the writer was also interviewing Bill Pierce and he’d be probably call BN a bunch of ungrateful hippie commies. He once assucsed Bastard Nationals of wearing Birkenstocks. Bill was like that. How I miss those days! Maybe the writer thought I was tripping, with my talk green sky and flying tree limbs.

Much to my perverse pleasure the article came out (online and print) as hit piece, but the best article ever written about Bastard Nation and the adoptee rights movement up to that ptime. Every one of our points made it in. The hit piece was a hit. We forwarded it around. Hey, the Weekly Standard gets it, even if they don’t like us! Reading it again 13 years later, I still think that, despite a couple of small errors. BN has never promoted the movement as a medical history issue nor are we left-leaning. We are no-leaning. Continue Reading →

Gotcha Day: Turning the private into the public

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Wiki says that Gotcha Day comes from animal rescue/ pet adoption (just as “forever family.”) I don’t know when it began to refer to humans.

I first heard about Gocha around 15 years ago. I was immediately squicked. Gotcha sounds like trapping a rat under the stove or grabbing up the last flat screen TV on Black Friday at Wal-Mart. It’s a predatory term. A scary tern. A cheap term. A violent term. Gotcha relates adoption to aggressive consumerism; and consumerism to a public act of virtue. Daniel ibn Zayd writes that , Gotcha moves the private into public space: Continue Reading →

Adoptees: The new sleeping giant

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AdoptionLand is a strange place. By statute, Koreans become Americans and Swiss, Americans Guatemalans become Irish, Cambodians become Brits, Brits become Swedes, Ethiopians become Norwegians, Congolese become Belgian, Oklahoma Indians become South Carolina Italilans, Jews become Catholics, Catholics become Nazarenes, Buddhists become Presbyterians at the flick of the Bic in the judge’s hand Let’ snot even start on race. We’re the original post moderns. Fluid, rootless, and without a context of our own, though we fit into other people’s contexts as neat as a Victorian parlor.. The product of 100 years of Progressive social engineering. And we still don’t get no respect.

And the really bizarre part of this is that nobody but us finds this identity shift on demand strange but us.

What I find exciting though, is that we are a worldwide movement of the :displaced, deidentified, disenfranchised, dismembered, undocumented, and colonized. We are everywhere. We must be dangerous. Continue Reading →

Our Bastard Moments: Real everyday adoption awareness, not just for November

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We’re having a discussion today on the Bastard Nation Facebook page on The Bastard Moment. Those times when as an adoptee you are insulted, embarrassed, patronized, degraded, demeaned, dishonored, silenced due strictly to your adoptive status. It’s part of the legislative process, but it’s also part of the personal process in the construction of Class Bastard.

Bastard Moments often occur out of no where when bumblers make rude, gratuitous. yet genuinely clueless and innocent remarks about your adoption, usually built around the theme of gratitude. My favorite is, “aren’t you glad you weren’t brought up in a trailer park?” Actually, I know adoptees in rural southern Ohio who were! I call them Bastards on Blocks) Continue Reading →