I’m Having Their Baby: Bowling for Babies Redux

(Note: Since I changed formats, spacing has become an issue in some posts, and I can’t get it fixed)  Since I was forced back into the job market at a time when most people my age have already retired, it’s been difficult to find time to sit down and blog. After 4-10 hours+ of manual labor, the likes of which I haven’t done in 45 years, the mind numbs  thoughts of the blogosphere. But, sometimes enough is enough and the adrenalin kicks in..\To wit:  I’m Having Their Baby, Oxygen Network’s  new  voyeur docu where titillated couch consumers and Snooki fans get to watch adoption agents and their clueless customers, ie PAPs, vie for the attention and ultimate product of  pregos in trouble and  need of social engineering.. There’s not been such an uproar in AdoptionLand since Orphan hit the big screen when adoption agents, their industrial hangers-on, Christian orphan savers, politicians, paps and adopters hit the keyboards over Hollywood’s “destruction of adoption.” Bastards and birthers found the whole business amusing. I’ll be blogging more about I’m Having Their Baby (at least I plan to), but in the meantime I want to remind people that the concept of the show is Continue Reading →

Happy Father’s Day to My Three Dads!

On this Fathers Day, I’m posting some pictures of  my three dads (in chronological order) I still can’t find my pictures of Jack, but I do have a few. . I’ve got lots of pictures of my adoptive dad, Charlie  and one of Mama Dot’s husband Jack. Ahey were  fine men and I miss them all. In 2005 I wrote a Fathers Day piece My Two Dads for both of them.   My  memorial to Jack is here. ****** JACK REESE, August 16, 1927 –  December 28, 2010 Jack in preppy drag, c 1947 Jack about 2008 The man’s man until the end CHARLIE GREINER, September 2, 1912 – August 24, 1977 Baby Charles c early 1913 Baby Charles, Grandmother Del Campbell Greiner, brother Hiram Boone Baby Charles and Lemmie Salem Jr High School, c 1924 Seriously dorky picture, Culver Summer School, 1929 New York Military Academy, 1931 The night they raided Minsky’s? Life before me  Didn’t everybody have a family bar? Was this in the home study? Life with me.  Warren, Ohio BOB CAMPBELL, July 28, 1924 – November 19, 1997 Bob as I knew him.  A good man

Los Ninos Robados: Spain’s Catholic Church accused of selling thousands of newborns into adoption

I‘ve been busy working on the new Bastard Nation webpage.  We lost quite a bit of material in the crash and burn, and I’m trying to reconstruct, but the more I get ahead, the further I get behind. At the rate I’m going it will be a year before it’s finished. (Note:  some paragraph breaks below are double, but there is nothing in the html to indicate why).  ****** One of my tasks is beefing up the International page–the section that lists activist, search and support websites around the world.  I have added a category  for each country, when appropriate, on”child laundering,” covering news on sealed records, forced and illegal adoptions, and any other corrupt activity the state, private industry and church can devise individually or in partnership. Sor Maria Gomzez Valbuena going to court One of the latest scandals,  Los  Ninos Robados (The Stolen Children). involves  illegal child removal and black market ops  in Spain–a complicated decades-long collusion of government, law, Catholic Church, and private industry and individuals.   Although the current  scandal broke in the Spanish press in 2008, stories of  fraudulent adoption have circulated  in the press and public for years.  In 1982, for instance, nun and social worker Sor Maria Gómez Valbuena was Continue Reading →

Adoption Mystique Now in eBook!

Good news!  The Kindle version of the adoption class Adoption Mystique by Joanne Wolf Small, has just been released. You can find Nook here. By way of review, here is what I wrote about the 2007 re-issue with new material, of the original 2004 edition. …a book that every adoptee rights activist needs to keep on the nightstand. I first ran into Joanne in 1980 when somebody gave me an article about sealed records and identities she’d written for a social work publication. It was from Joanne that I first heard the peculiar legal concept that the adoptee and natural parent(s) are “as if dead to each other.” That article stuck with me, and I credit Joanne in large part for raising my consciousness and bringing me into this strange adoptee rights “career” a decade later. But Joanne has done more than write. In 1980, she was the only adopted member of the federal Model Adoption Legislation Procedures and Advisory Panel (Model Adoption Act 1980). The panel’s sweeping recommendations, including unrestricted records for all adoptees nationwide, was a broadside on the secret adoption system. The report sent the industry into such a tizzy that Gladney formed the strong arm lobby, Continue Reading →

Adam Pertman Joins the Ranks of the Angry Adoption Professional

In my last blog I brought up the growing phenomenon of The Angry Adoption Professional, those sad souls  whose authority is displaced  and downsized when Class Bastard takes control of its own personal and political  destiny free of pathology and professional victimization.   The Angry Adoption Professional however,  is never far away,  clucking its tongue  over Class Bastard’s  inability to accede to professional expertise.  Who knows more about adoption than adoption paper pushers and their auxiliaries in the legislature, church, and medicine? These experts  show up at hearings and “professional” conferences and  write books and articles in journals nobody reads, promoting their “professionalism” and lecturing how adoptees (or their bio and even adoptive parents) are just too klutzy, uneducated, and  inexperienced (and no doubt ungrateful)  to handle adoption issues without their.oversight. We only want to help. . In consumerist terms this means, we need  the  trained steady hand of the “expert” to “negotiate” the alleged twists and turns  inherent in  the adoption triad or constellation or whatever fancy label de jour they like. Moreover, genuine adoptee rights such as original birth certificate access–or as we shall see, adoptee deportation– that require political action and thought are seldom mentioned in their personal vocational narrative unless they want to look au courant or empathetic, or they Continue Reading →

Some Thoughts on the "Angry Adoptee:" Gazillion Adoptees v JCIC$

I’ve been away for more than a month.  I’ve lost all track of time.  No matter. April was the worse month of my entire life. Just when you think things get any more abysmal, the crevice opens deeper.  Maybe I’ll write about it; maybe not.  I can make it adoption related to make it palpable. I’m trying to get back to “normal” whatever that is. Last we heard from our friend Kevin Ost-Vollmers,in the Land of a Gazillion Adoptees, he was engaged in a dialogue with the Congressional Coalition.  That was ” bad” enough, but it gets worse.  It must be something about April. Land of a Gaiilion Adoptees: Kevin and Bert getting ready to kick it On April18, Kevin and  “Rockstar Vietnamese adoptee” Bert  Ballard, Assistant Professor of Communications at Pepperdine University, went to New York to give a presentation, Adoptees and Agencies:  Undiscovered Allies or Estranged Bedfellows,  before a JCIC$ symposium–to educate  (for want of a better word) this specific set of adoptacrats about adoptees.   JCIC$ is as interested in the international post-production product it markets as it is in the proposition that  9/11 was an inside job.How these bastard gods got the password to the sanctum Continue Reading →

Bastardette’s 7th Anniversary: The more things change the more they stay the same

Tuesday marked  the 7th anniversary of the Daily Bastardette.  To be honest, I’m surprised. I started Bastardette as a little experiment not expecting her  to go very far. In fact, the big reason I started her was that a techie bastard, whose name escapes me now, suggested I blog since webpages were”obsolete” and blogs were “the way to go.” I was also curious to see if anyone would read her. I was astounded when I had 100 hits.  As of this writing, I’ve had  almost 350,000 hits. I’m still astounded.  One of my first blogs, Abandoning your Baby: It’s such a simple thing to do, was about California’s godfather of baby dumping., LA County Supervisor, Don Knabe.  Supervisor Knabe had complained  to the press that not enough mothers were anonymously dropping off newborns at their neighborhood fire stations.. “It;’s such a simple thing to do,” he bemoaned. Nothing has changed.  The other day .Missouri politicians, complained that something had to be done to save more ‘newborns” (the state’s “safe haven law” has two tiers so babies up to a year old can be dumped with different parental “legal defenses.”)  The solution to this dire non-problem, according to them and their Continue Reading →

Oklahoma: HB 2634 passes House 93-0

Oklahoma clean bill HB 2634 passed the House yesterday with a 93-0 Vote. It now goes to the Senate. For more information go to the Oklahoma Open blog and Facebook. Thanks to all those Oklahomans who contacted House members!  And thanks to Reps Sherrer, Walker, McDaniel, and Hoskin for their terrific support.  We’re half-way home! 

Oklahoma: HB 2634–Geographically limited Action Alert

Important:  please read the guidelines before you write . This is a limited action alert for those born in Oklahoma or current residents. From Pat Marler: Great news! HB2634 was placed on the House of Representatives Floor Calendar today! It will be heard between the 12th and the last day to be heard, the 15th. This is a clean bill with no restrictions; only a contact Preference Form which does not affect the release of the OBC.    The following are e-mail addresses for the Representatives and we want all those who were born or live in Oklahoma to please write these Representatives and tell them why passing this legislation is important to all adult adoptees born before 1997. It is a sensitive way to let a birth parent to let the adoptee know how or if she/hewants to be contacted. Also, if there is no contact wanted, the birth parent will be asked to fill out a medical and social history to be given along with the Contact Preference form to the original birth certificate. IMPORTANT:   HB 2634 sponsor Rep. Ben Scherrer  requests that  emails not be sent until  Monday morning March 12.  He wants them to be Continue Reading →

International Women’s Day: The Women of the IWW

…and yes, Helen Keller was a Wob!   I was, too, and I need to rejoin the One Big Union.  I owe much to those wonderful women of the Industrial Workers of the World– those I knew in person and others only historically who inspired me to fight state oppression:  Sophie Cohen, Esther Dolgoff,  Gurley Flynn, Lucy Parsons, Nina Spies and so many more.  (I’ll save the men for another day)