November is National Adoption Month, which is intended to promote
(provide "awareness" of) adoption. Often the adoption
"awareness" exists to ensure there is a good supply of
healthy, intelligent babies to meet the market demand - babies for
infertile and gay persons with the money to adopt. Read on to
learn how mothers, fathers and grandparents who have never been
proven to be unfit in any way have been deceived - by individuals,
by adoption agencies or by the over-zealous Child Protection System.
True family members are being permanently separated in many countries
to make babies and desirable young children available for adoption.
Separating family members is serious "business". The following
writeup on National Adoption Awareness Month is reprinted with permission
from a Natural Mother's "Adoption
Awareness" Blog. Don't miss the additional articles
and websites listed below it.
National Adoption Awareness Month
November is National Adoption Awareness Month. Early this month
much was made of the mass adoption done in San Antonio. There
have been articles in the paper and on the talk shows regularly
about adoption. All one has to do is turn on the television, radio
or go to a movie to have the theme about adoption as a loving
option presented as if the only choice is adoption or a dumpster.
Little or nothing is spoken about the darker side of adoption.
You seldom hear about the anguish of the natural mother and father,
the unalterable damage that is done to the infant when it is removed
from the only mother it knows, the loss of heritage, and the genetic
continuity of the families. To listen to the media, the only
thing bad about adoption is the fact that there is not enough
of it!
I am the mother of a son lost to adoption in 1967. We have been
reunited for 14 years, and I have seen, first hand, the damage
done to the adoptee. More and more research is being done on infants
and research is finding that infants are not the blank slates
that they were popularly supposed to be years ago. Instead they
are finding that, almost from the moment of birth, an infant recognizes
its mother and responds to her smell, sound, and taste. An infant
will pick his mother’s face from a crowd within minutes of
being born. How can we assume that an infant, a much more complex
individual than we realized, will NOT grieve for the loss of the
mother, the only familiar thing in their surrounding? The infant
still believes that he and the mother are the same, so such a
loss would seem to the infant to be an amputation of that familiar
part of himself.
Further, in counseling a young woman to lose her child to adoption,
is the young woman informed that up to 40% of young women who
lose a child to adoption never have another child? Is she
informed of the life-long consequences to herself and to her infant
child of that loss? Is she made aware of the support that is available
to her, and the other options, including kincare, fostering,
guardianship and public assistance, not to mention the support
of the family and the father’s family?
Adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The
young, unmarried, high school or college age woman, will not always
remain so. If school is the problem, high schools have programs
in place (by federal mandate) to accommodate young mothers. It
is possible for college to be postponed for a couple of years,
as evidenced by the huge numbers of non-traditional students at
most college campuses today. A few years of inconvenience is much
better than a lifetime of mourning in silence the loss of your
child and the necessity of explaining to a returning adult adoptee
your reasons for surrendering them to adoption …explaining
to them why they were not “good enough to keep”.
The new wave in adoption is the so-called Open Adoption,
where the mother “picks” the adoptive family, there
is an agreement to exchange pictures, updates and etc. The Industry
professionals do not inform the Natural Mothers that it is
legally unenforceable and that fully 80% of open adoptions
close within a year of the final papers being signed.
When I lost my son to adoption in 1967, I had been incarcerated
in an Unwed Mother’s Home. We were not allowed to use
our names, our phone calls and visitors were screened, our mail
was censored, and we were not allowed to leave except in groups
and during certain proscribed hours, when there was little traffic.
We were assigned jobs and we had to pay to be there. We were
drugged and exploited and treated as damaged goods, used merchandise,
and lesser human beings. Most had no wish to lose their child
to adoption, but were forced to go to the coercive Homes or into
a form of indentured servitude in private homes called Wage Homes,
while a place for them was secured in a home or in a hospital.
This same practice was used in most English Speaking countries,
such as Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. Most
of these countries are either cutting back or eliminating the
practice entirely. In fact, in Australia, there was a recent Government
Inquiry into illegalities in past adoption practices. There is
a case currently in their Supreme Court, determining damages for
illegal practices that occurred during the Baby Scoop Era, that
will have an impact on adoption practices all over the world.
For the first time, the courts are listening to the voice of the
exiled mother, the women who lost their first born children to
adoption, through lies, coercion and illegal drugging of the mothers.
I watched the recent presidential debates in horror as President
Bush casually mentioned reopening the Maternity Homes, not
once but twice, to give young women a place to make an informed
decision. Informed by whom, the adoption professionals who are
currently the representatives for a $1.6 billion adoption industry?
How much better for the mother, for the infant and for the society
as a whole if we support our young mothers, nurture them while
they are vulnerable and assist them to nurture their own infants
rather than to give them to someone who is deemed more worthy
to have that child, simply because the make more money? Since
when is wealth an indicator of someone’s parenting ability?
The information that a young woman will receive in a Maternity
Home is all about adoption and little about raising her child
on her own. One has to question if she would be so strongly
encouraged to surrender her infant if the adoption cost less than
$20-60,000.00 per infant. The mothers are not getting that
money; that would be illegal baby-selling. Who is? It is, again,
the $1.6 billion Adoption Industry.
And, since there were an estimated 6 million young women who
lost children to adoption during the period known as the Baby
Scoop Era, the period from the end of World War II to the
passage of Roe V. Wade in 1973, good taste and compassion would
suggest that it is unkind to, year after year, rub salt into an
unhealed wound. Are the Jews expected to celebrate the opening
of Auschwitz; are the Blacks supposed to celebrate the start of
slavery? Equally, Mothers who have suffered in silent grief
for 20 to 50 years find the National Adoption Month an almost
intolerable reminder of their loss and their pain.
During November this year, I will be wearing a Green Ribbon for
the opening of Sealed Adoption Records for Adoptees. At the current
time, Adoptees are only allowed access to their records in 4 states,
with New Hampshire joining in January of this year. The story
being told by the National Council for Adoption and the other
members of the powerful adoption industry to continue this sham
practice is that they made some promise to the Natural Mothers
that their shame would remain secret forever. As a Natural
Mother, I can say that no promise of confidentiality was ever
made to any Natural Mother that I know, and I know thousands from
both in person and online, all over the world. We were told and
expected to go home, forget it happened and go on with our lives
“as if” it never occurred, but it DID happen, and we
DID go home and go on with our lives, but we NEVER FORGOT. As
a group, slowly, we are finding our voices, we are coming out
strong and we are reclaiming our right to be treated with dignity,
honor and the respect that we deserve. I will wear my Green
Ribbon for the Right of the Adoptee to their Open Records, but
I will also have a black band on my ribbon to represent the sorrow
of the mothers who never forgot.
Sandy Young
Natural Mother
For some additional reading for National Adoption
Awareness Month, we highly recommend:
