BASTARDS LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND: ADOPTION ETHICS AND ACCOUNTABIITY CONFERENCE
After 4 soothing days of highbrow adoption talk at ASAIK in Pittsburgh, Bastardette will fly south on her broomstick for the 2-day Ethics and Accountability conference in Arlington, VA, thrown by Ethica and The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. Monday afternoon (October 15) Bastardette will sit on the Adoptee Access to Records and History: Adopted People and “the ‘Right to Know” panel with records-access legal scholar Elizabeth Samuels, AAC General Counsel Fred Greenman, and moderator Pam Hasegawa. Bastardette is also a member of the informal Meet the Bloggers panel/cocktail reception Monday evening. (I’ll write about that in a separate entry). Adoption conferences preach to the choir who then return home to practice their hymns some more. While this will indeed preach to the choir, the conference is billed as a working conference with diverse ideologies and solutions (everybody is supposed to feel “uncomfortable” at least once) providing presenters and attendees the opportunity to help “shape improvements “in adoption practice. As such, traditional presentations will be replaced with (no more than) a 10 minute presentation by each panelist. Discussion will then open up to the “public.” At the end of the conference a Town Meeting will discuss ways in which to Continue Reading →