Tag Archives: National Council for Adoption

MADONNA CAN COME DOWN FROM HER CROSS NOW

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As predicted, the fix was in, and Madonna has acquired another human accoutrement. Citing Ms. Ciccone’s “investment” in the welfare of Malawian children, the Malawi Supreme Court overrode their country’s strict adoption laws and sent Chifuno “Mercy” James on her merry way to Madonna’s lovin’ lap of luxury. Chief Justice Lovemore Munio, reading the three-judge panel decision said that Madonna’s commitment to helping Malawi’s disadvantaged children should have been taken into account in her initial petition to adopt Mercy. This is from the AP story: The appeals court said that was a narrow interpretation based on old laws “In this global village a man can have more than one place at which he resides,” Munlo said in the ruling, which took more than an hour to read in court Friday. “The matter of residence should be determined at the time of application of the adoption. In this case, Madonna was in Malawi not by chance but by intention. She is looking after several orphans whose welfare depends on her. She can therefore not be described as a sojourner. Talk about legal contortions! Madonna may not be a “sojourner” but neither is she a resident of Malawi. The court simply ignored Continue Reading →

TABOO: THE OFFICIAL NCFA STAY-AT-HOME GALA COLLECTION

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Joan Wheeler has an excellent blog today on the NCFA Stay-at-Home Gala. The eagle-eyed Joan caught something I missed yesterday with the on-site NCFA pictures. A minor point, I suppose–but is anything really minor in adoption? I’m curious now. Joan wrote: Those little gixmos are what exactly? Is someone typing into a plastic cel phone to “get” a pregnant girl? Is someone holding a calendar? Countdown to adoption day? One box says “Taboo” on it. Yeah, sure, lots of issues in adoption are taboo. Taboo Toys?! Sex toys from “Talk Sex With Sue”?! (That’s a sex-ed television show out of Canada, folks! Hey, I’m a Social Worker, I’m supposed to know about these things!) As for “taboo” that should be Taboo: the Game of Unspeakable Fun. For those not familiar with Taboo, the object of the game is to get the other players to say a word without saying any of the obvious words connected to it. Here’s an example played between NCFA and its cronies and gullible leggies: ax murderer, porch pisser, ungrateful, homewrecker, sweating sheets, back seats, danger to society, klepto, serial killer. Answer: uppity adoptees. (Bastards is just too crude for the NCFA crowd). I collect adoption Continue Reading →

TIME IS RUNNING OUT: PLACE YOUR NCFA BID NOW!

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You have only a few more hours to put in your bids for the National Council for Adoption’s Stay at Home Gala silent online auction. All proceeds will go to, in NCFA’s words, “help children find loving, permanent families!” I know for a fact that they are serious about this. Dr. Pierce once assured Bastardette that if she were left on his doorstep he would find her a permanent and loving home quickly. Unfortunately, his wife might object if it were theirs, but he’d contact the proper authorities at once and make sure she’d be settled with her forever family within hours of drop-off. Since this was back in the Bush years, I think I might have ended up in the White House challenging the Bush Twins to the real meaning of life: rearing a helpless rejected, potentially dumpserized, bastard of secret origins or falling down dead drunk at Toad’s. But enough of that! Place your bids now! While Bastardette is too busy to take the trip to Villa Bella Vita, she’s is never too busy to wear a diamond sapphire necklace. Feel free to bid in my name. Oh, and don’t worry about paying for it. As bastards you Continue Reading →

THE ADOPTION INDUSTRY CONTINUTES TO EAT ITSELF: LOS NINOS SHUTS DOWN

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I wasn’t expecting this one, but maybe I’m out of the loop! National Council for Adoption member Los Ninos International Adoption Center is no more as of March 31,2009. Unlike many agencies that have closed their doors recently, with little or no notice, this appears to be an orderly shutdown, but the only information I can find is off the Los Ninos webpage itself. Executive Director Rosana N. Erichsen, writes: The Board determined that Los Niños can no longer continue its charitable adoption activities because it is extremely difficult to meet our client’s adoption goals now that the rules governing new applicants have become so stringent and numerous countries have closed their international adoption programs. The Board believes it is in the best interest of Los Niños and its clients to dissolve Los Niños. The Texas-based Los Ninos has been around since 1981. It is a 2007 inductee into NCFA’s Hall of Fame. Besides the Los Ninos webpage you can read more about them here. I don’t know much about Los Ninos so I won’t comment. only to say that it appears the Hague, adoption scandal blowback, and the economy has done them in. ChompChomp! I wonder if the age Continue Reading →

SWAPMEETIN’: NCFA, REFORMISTS, AND BASTARDS

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Last week, the National Council for Adoption published its latest issue of Adoption Advocate: “Mutual Consent: Balancing the Birthparents Right to Privacy with the Adopted Person’s Desire to Know. The article (it is not a “report”) appears to be a better-late-than-never response to the November 2007 Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute report, For the Records: Restoring a Legal Right for Adult Adoptees, a document as activist, as say, the phone book. The fuss Mutual Consent has caused in AdoptionLaLaLand is as perplexing as why in the name of St. Jerome Emiliani NCFA waited so long to repsond…or why. It’s not exactly new news that NCFA promotes sealed records. NCFA was founded in 1980 specifically to fight the Carter initiative to open records on a federal level. Although NCFA in the last couple years has put on a happy face and begun to move to the center, (no more 5 signature registry! no more dour proclamations about open adoption or “spoiled adoptees”),it continues to oppose the unsealing of records without rigmarole worthy of a Soviet propiska. That doesn’t mean that Mutual Consent isn’t worthy of comment. But there is no need to legitimate Mutual Consent by making a big deal about Continue Reading →

MICHELLE BACHMANN NAMED TO MOST LOATHSOME LIST; CARRIES ON NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR ADOPTION TRADITION

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Michelle Bachmann is back! Recently, The Beast named its annual 50 Most Loathsome People in America. Ma Belle Michelle clocked in at #47 below Barack Obama and M. Night Shymalon but higher (that is, less loathsome than) OJ Simpson, John Updike, Ben Stein, Tila Tequila, John Fund, Blago, Bernie Madoff, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin (#1), and a host of other finger wagging political, sports and media whores, parasites, and hangers-on who preach, pick our pockets, and insult our intelligence daily for our own good. Regular readers may remember that Minnesota Congresswoman Bachmann was a featured speaker at the 2008 National Council for Adoption conference in Washington where she gave us memorable accounts of “launching her biologicals” and fostering 23 kids, mostly girls, including one who ran away from her. (left: launchables and hubby.) You may want to go back there and refresh your memory before continuing. While I was looking for links to place here, I ran across this little nugget from a Dump Bachmann blog dated September 3, 2006: Fight Pork which leads us to Bachmann and Associates, a full service “Christian counseling” business operated by Bachmann’s therapist husband Marcus. Therapist Bachmann took his MA from Pat Robertson’s Regent Continue Reading →

POPE V POPCICLES: RATZO SAYS NO-NO TO FROZEN EMBRYO ADOPTION

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Friday, the long-waited Dignitas personae (The dignity of a person), was released by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI. You can read the whole paper here. There’s no surprises: birth control = badabortion = badstem cell research = badsurrogacy = bad Added to the B List: snowflake adoption = bad Here is what Dignitas personae says about our frozen brethern: With regard to the large number of frozen embryos already in existence the question becomes: what to do with them? All the answers that have been proposed (use the embryos for research or for the treatment of disease; thaw them without reactivating them and use them for research, as if they were normal cadavers; put them at the disposal of infertile couples as a “treatment for infertility”; allow a form of “prenatal adoption”) present real problems of various kinds. It needs to be recognized “that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved. Therefore, John Paul II made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking Continue Reading →

OLD KING–NEW KING: TOM ATWOOD RESIGNS FROM NCFA; CHUCK JOHNSON NAMED INTERIM PREZ

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Big news out of Washington this morning! Tom Atwood has resigned as president and CEO of the National Council of Adoption “to pursue other professional opportunities.” No details given. The reigns of command, at least temporarily, have been turned over to Chuck “Gomer” Johnson who will act as interim Adoption Honcho. Dr. Pierce must be stomping through heaven’s floor. Johnson is a proponent of open adoption. The good news: as the director of an Alabama adoption agency, he was part of what he calls “the Alabama compromise” that restored the right of that state’s adoptees to unrestricted access to their original birth certificates upon request. The bad news: he supports “mutual consent” and is “open” to the idea of confidential intermediaries. Johnson also believes in working together and getting along with diverse groups. He doesn’t do name-calling. That’s a shame because NCFA is always so much fun to kick around when they call us commies, anarchists, and election thieves. It’s gonna be real interesting to see what this non-traditional appointment means. Maybe we can bring Gomer over to the Dark Side. Here’s the text of the press release: Thomas C. Atwood Resigns from the National Council For Adoption Alexandria, VA Continue Reading →

AND YOU THOUGHT SARAH PALIN WAS BAD! MEET NCFA’S FRIEND MICHELLE BACHMANN

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Max Blumenthal wrote a great piece in Tuesday’s Daily Beast (now repost all over the net) about Minnesota Cong. Michelle Bachman How a Minnesota congresswoman became a poster child for the GOP crack-up. Who? That’s just what I said when the National Council for Adoption announced that Bachman would be a keynote lunch speaker at its annual conference in Washington last month. (Go here and click on link to “conference” in the right sidebar. This is a pdf link with no dedicated URL). I quickly looked her up. Outside of having impeccable credentials as a fundamentalist GOP nut job, I learned that she’d sponsored the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act, to repeal the nationwide phase-out of conventional lightbulbs by 2012. I was impressed. I honestly don’t remember much of what Bachmann said at the NCFA lunch. Her subject was mostly foster care, which she is apparently qualified to speak on since she was a foster parent of 23 (mostly teenage) girls, as well as popping out a few kids of her own. According to her Wiki profile she believes that the troubles that her foster charges had were the fault of the public schools: I began to realize as Continue Reading →

NEBRASKA FIASCO: BASTARDETTE GETS A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH NCFA’S TOM ATWOOD ON NEBRASKA TEEN DUMPS AND ‘SAFE HAVEN" LAW

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Recently I attended the annual National Council for Adoption conference in Washington–my third in four years. On Saturday (Sept 27) I caught NCFA president Tom Atwood, between the last panel and lunch. I was able to do a short interview with him about the Nebraska Fiasco–Nebraska’s teen dump epidemic. Atwood was unaware of Gary Staton’s “legal abandonment” of his 9 kids at Creighton Medical Center ER, which took place during the conference, until I told him. We only had a couple minutes to talk and were cut short by lunch call. Obviously there is much more to discuss. There is time yet to bring NCFA to the Dark Side! The most interesting part to me is that Atwood’s criticism of the Nebraska law and its consequences are very similar to my and Bastard Nation’s arguments against baby dumping all together–only he excludes newborns from the equation where we oppose it for all, no mater what the age. With Atwood’s consent, I tapped my interview with him. The transcription is below. I have edited nothing except an interruption. INTERVIEW:BASTARDETTE: I’m here at NCFA [conference] talking to Tom Atwood about the Nebraska Fiasco. For a little background: Wednesday, a father safe havened Continue Reading →