Tag Archives: National Adoption Awareness Month

Goodbye National Adoption Month: I won’t miss you!

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Well, I’m not sure if we conquered, but bastards and adoptees certainly held our own this National Adoption/National Adoption Awareness Month–the longest month of the year. Especially  long if you’re force-writing every day while tin horn blowers and tin hat wearers, shysters in 3-piece suits, flim-flamers,  do-gooders, Biblicalticians ,Grundys, neurotics, pschchotics, happy dappies, and woundies are all out to get you from one side or the other. Me thinks the whole world is crazy except me and thee; and sometimes I wonder about thee. Continue Reading →

National Adoption Month and National Adoption Awareness Month. Is there a difference?

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After reading the article three times, the only difference I can see is that NAM is government sponsored (paid by you know who) to educate the public and celebrate adoption. NAAM, is the privately sponsored brainchild of adopta evangelical gadfly Mardie Cardwell (funded by you know who) to educate the public and celebrate adoption. Ms Cardwell, enjoys the additional distinction of being the only adoptee I know of who has ever been nominated for the Demons of Adoption Award (2013). Continue Reading →

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 →

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 →

NAAM: Adoption is God’s will

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Propaganda like NAAM’s looks awfully close to cultural appropriation. Or inviting your maid and her kids to sit at your Thanksgiving table. Remember when Adam Pertman opined that international adoption could world peace?

Is praying that a family will be broken up so you can have one really God’s agenda? According to NAAM propaganda, it is, Or is it?. As Rosie O’Donnell so notoriously said, “God put you in the wrong tummy and I have to fix it.” Continue Reading →

International Adoption: The White Woman’s Burden. Agency staff picture is worth a thousand words

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Just a morning thought on International  Adoption and American foreign policy, such as it is. I had never heard of  MLJ Adoptions before this morning, until I ran across it on a re-Tweet 30 Things to  do During Adoption Month. Since I’m lazy and didn’t make a list of things to do for NAAM I’m ready to take on an assignment. Not content with telling people to set up book displays or make a “life book” for their kid, MLJ   busy-ness is more specific and time-consuming.  If I’m not promoting Orphan Sunday, subjecting my friends and neighbors to Stuck, raising $$$ for other people’s adoptions or setting up an adoption booth at a local high school’s Friday night football game to  drum up producers and consumers, I’m not doing my fair share  to spread the Good News of Adoption. Why NMJ has even created a handy-dandy selection of  MLJ adoption banners and pictures for my FB page. Aimed at the crunchy social justice crowd  the selections include the consumerist: Adopt Globallly — Love Locally By globally  MLJ  means adopt from our program.  MLJ’s grabby fingers reach into Bulgaria, Congo (oh! oh! just closed!), Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Samoa, and Ukraine. It Continue Reading →

Why is Adoptee Rights Still an Issue? the 20/20 question

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National Adoption Month 2013 opened with a bang today.  Clicked on a link to “Bethany Christian Services” and “NAM” and got a live sex site. (No, I won’t put up the link) Then there’s the real porn.  ABC/s 20/20 Facebook question: Do you think all adoptive children should have access to their biological parents? Excuse me?   Some production intern, without much thought or grammatical skills, must have posted the question. I’m not even sure what the question even means: Does it refer to actual children, open adoption, the right of adult adoptees to their own original birth certificates? Or what? For the last 80 years, for their own specific  and sometimes unrelated reasons,  the state and its  politicians, along with social engineers, private industry, therapists, churches, and social do-gooders across the political spectrum have moderated the public and private lives of adoptees and their families.  Nowhere is the entwining of the personal and the political so grotesquely practiced as in adoption in the United States today.  Nowhere is the conflation of adults with children in public policy and public imagination so blatant.. Hence, even those deeply involved in bastard rights, don’t know for sure what the clumsy 20/20– post even Continue Reading →

Michele Bachman Wants to Adopt You

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…well, maybe not you specifically , but she wants you to adopt somebody. . Here’s her PSA for National Adoption Month (She leaves out the “awareness” part.)  As you’ll see in the video and in her House Resolution, she’s pushing foster adoption.. Oops, link went bad the first try)  It’s OK now. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with foster to adopt for genuinely familyless kids, but Ma Belle Michelle. a 20x + foster care provider of girls (she originally wanted to take in unmarried pregnant teens)  has a hidden agenda. See, according to our fav presidential has-been,  it’s not abuse, poverty, crime, neglect, family breaks-ups, foster home-hopping, and prominent dysfunctional foster mothers who cause problems for kids in fostercare.  It’s exposure to the public school system. ****** After I viewed Bachmann’s video, I tweeted her back: @MicheleBachmann . Do adult adoptees deserve the restoration of the right to our original birth certificates or are we 2nd class citizens?  Ya think she’ll reply? RELATED POSTS Beltway “Orphan” Wingnut Update Michele Bachman Named to “Most Loathesome List;” Carries on National Council for Adoption Tradition And you Think Sarah Palin’s Bad:  Meet NCFA’s Fried, Michele Bachmann

National Adoption Day: Stats and Shame

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Last Friday. November 18 was National Adoption Day. Baby Love Child, in her blog for that day, National Adoption Day: A celebration of sealed records & inequality, wrote in part: “National Adoption Day” must be recognized for what it is from the adoptees’ perspective rather than the adoption industry’s perspective; it represents the single largest number of sealed records of any day of the calendar year. A collective loss of thousands of kids original identities one stroke of a pen at a time. I had never thought of NAD specifically working in those terms: the single largest number of sealed records of any day of the calendar year. BLC pointed out that by the end of the week culminating with NAD, approximatley 4500 children would be adopted. Except for those adopted in the six free states, all of them will have their identities and histories obliterated by the state forever with the impounding and sealing of their birth cetificates. Unless, that is, we can fix it. It kinda made me sick. Making me sicker is the number of obcs that have been sealed alone on that “special” day since NAD’s inception in 2000. According to the Tri-State Defender: more than Continue Reading →