Bastardette’s Top 13 Adoption Songs for NAAM2019

A couple of times a year people post their Top 10 Favorite Songs. I always check them out, but find most of them pretty weepy and womb-crawling.–like a  safe space playlist for your office..So, for the last few days I’ve been checking out my own playlists to come up with adoption-related: pieces. Continue Reading →

Reading Recommendation: “Are you accidentally upsetting your adopted student?”

You would think that teachers, in the trenches of our current culture wars would recognize this. Apparently, they don’t since Herriot covers everything from schoolyard bullying to family tree and baby photo assignments, to teacher-inculcated adoption gratitude, all of which are familiar to American adoptee eyes and ears. Continue Reading →

Veterans Day: Birth family thoughts

As an adoptee, I desperately wanted to know about my family of origin but was not keen on re-joining them.  I became quite adequate in snooping through desks, dressers. and closets all to no avail. Many years later it appears that all I had to do was ask and I would have been given what little information my adoptive parents possessed, but what is the fun in that? Continue Reading →

Donald Trump’s Adoption Fuck You: NAAM2019 Proclamation v LBGTQ Rights

Despite Trump’s unicorn ride, the following day, November 1, just in time to kick off NAAM2019 , the Trump Department of Health and Human Services announced its intention to implement a new rule that would strip Obama-era protections for LBGTQ individuals. and couples regarding access to social services. The new rule would allow recipients of HHS grants ,including faith-based adoption agencies and foster care Continue Reading →

Adoption Advice from Pat Robertson: Promotes family destruction; international adoptees are “weird;” and more

oday RIghtwing.Watch posted Robertson’s latest advice on adoption during his regular 700 Club Q&A session. You never know what the dottering old fool will say: AIDS comes from towels; let’s nuke the State Department;  let’s assassinate Hugo Chavez; feminists are socialists who practice witchcraft and kill their husbands and children; Hait’s shitty economy is the fault of the devil. So today he advised a young unmarried Christian couple, who seem to be perfectly, or at least passably happy, break up and ship the baby off to an adoption agency. For everybody’s own good.  Poor people shouldn’t have babies. Continue Reading →

Warning! Adoptaraptor on the loose in Jax!

Jacksonville , Florida-area Family Law attorney Michelle Sweatland says in the October 14, 2019, Jacksonville Daily Record, that she’s worried that not enough newborns are being tossed into the adoption spammer. Of course, she isn’t that crude; rather, she promotes bribery “incentives” — including education funds –to encourage women to “choose”  quick and dirty adoption as their life path. Continue Reading →

National Adoption Awareness Month: #NAAM is the time to collectively dirty our hands, not throw them up.

Adoptee mouths traditionally have been gagged, during #NAAM, unless they had a nice story to tell. But in the last few years, it’s become more difficult to keep us sitting still long enough to insert the ball gag. I’ve never met an adoptee–even a happy adoptee–who likes #NAAM and its specially designated  National Adoption Day party (this year Saturday, November 23) where broods of children get their names and families switched out and birth and court records sealed.like they were tiny Henry Hills. Continue Reading →

More conflation: Recruiting Adoptees to Promote Adoption in a “post-abortion” USA.

Adoptees, then, from the evangelical  (Protestant or Catholic) POV, need to be visible as a “saved” class, grateful for the life they claim we would otherwise not experience, yet be invisible regarding our genuine selves, including our genuine and often unpleasant opinions about adoption,  What’s more, abolitionists and co-religionist adopters need to be seen as saviors to fulfill their own social and spiritual ambitions. Former Kansas Senator, Governor, and US Attorney General Sam Brownback says that the more children you adopt the easier it is to get into heaven Continue Reading →

Blossoms Awards 2019: Gladney awards itelf for its good work

Now, we know that the adoption industry is shrinking, making the circle jerk tighter.  Nonetheless, we were surprised to read that all the awards went either to Gladney itself or close fellow travelers. (OK. One is actually set aside for a Gladney volunteer) . Continue Reading →

New York Ball of Confusion: Setting things straight

As you can see, it’s only the beginning of February, and already there are plenty of screwy bills up and running to screw over adoptees. New York A2691/S2492  (aka the  Benedetto bill after House sponsor Michael Benedetto) is by far the screwiest. It mandates unrestricted certified OBC access all right, –but there’s a catch.  The OBC would contain the “circumstances of the adoption,” which translated means (according to the bill’s pimps) that the name(s) of your adoptive parent(s) and the date of your adoption would appear on your ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE. This fake OBC would include the disclaimer that it could not be used for identification purposes. So, you’ll get a special second fake “Amended Birth Certificate”  to add to your original fake Amended Birth Certificate instead of your genuine OBC, adding one more link to the chain of abuse.  This scheme, which we are all supposed to be grateful for (again!)  not only defaces the OBC, but de-centers adoptees by giving adoptive parents a documentary role in our birth, and upends one of th core principle of the adoptee rights movement–access to a clean, unaltered OBC. Continue Reading →