These days adoption agencies and social services routinely use what is referred to as positive adoption language also sometimes referred to respectful adoption language. Examples of this can be found here, and here (that whole second website disturbs the shit out of me) and its really clear just by looking at the lists that the language is only positive and respectful for adoptive parents, not for adoptees or first parents.


According to Perspectives press:

Respectful Adoption Language (RAL) is vocabulary about adoption which has been chosen to reflect maximum respect, dignity, responsibility and objectivity about the decisions made by birthparents and adoptive parents in discussing the family planning decisions they have made for children who have been adopted

So firstly it doesn't take in to account at all how the adoptees are going to feel about the language used and secondly referring to someone as a birthparent is not respectful or positive, almost all the adoptees and firsts parents I've come across hate it. This article written from the perspective of a natural mother argues that using the prefix "birth" biases the way society thinks about adoption in favour of the adoptive parents:

When the word "parent" is used for a prospective adopter who is unrelated to a child and the "birth" term is used for the child’s own mother, it is just expected a mother must surrender her child. "Birth mother" is like a job title or worse - she is merely a "thing" whose function is to make a baby for others.

Everyone recognizes that a parent has a right to raise his or her own child. Yet in court when the foster caregiver or prospective adopter is called a “parent” and the true parents are called “bios” the outcome is predetermined. After lengthy delays initiated by those in the “system”, once they are finally in court the true parents of a child may be proven to be fit in every way yet still have their parental rights terminated.

Every citizen has a right and even an obligation to call a natural mother a “mother” or “natural mother” and thus prevent the temptation for others to separate children from their family any time they feel like it or can profit from it. Using the term "adoptive" for someone who has adopted is not disrespectful but honest and will avoid confusion about relationships. Any person who has adopted and who truly cares about children should be in favor of adjusting their language accordingly. Those who have not yet adopted of course must be called “prospective adopters”, not “parents”

But also as an adoptee its a term I hate, I much prefer to use Mother, it is almost always obvious which mother I'm talking about. My post adoption social worker insists on referring to my father and my siblings as my "birthfather" and my "birthsiblings" which apart from being really fucking disrespectful makes absolutely no sense.

perspective press weighs in on the matter saying

Those who raise and nurture a child are his parents: his mother, father, mommy, daddy, etc Those who conceive and give birth to a child are his birthparents: his birthmother and birthfather.

Why is it the natural parents that need the qualifier and not the adoptive parents?

Back to the lists, whats with the phrase "Adoption triad"? This probably isn't a phrase people who aren't involved in adoption have heard, but it is always used to mean the three parties involved in the adoption are equal and have the same amount of power. Well adoptees have no power (even adult adoptees because no one listens to us), first parents have very little power and adoptive parents have all the power, so there is no triad.

I have real issues with the "was adopted/is adopted" thing as well. Perspective press says:

When it is appropriate to refer to the fact of adoption, it is correct to say “Kathy was adopted,” (referring to they way in which she arrived in her family.) Phrasing it in the present tense– “Kathy is adopted”–implies that adoption is a disability with which to cope.

But I am adopted, it wasn't a one time deal that didn't effect anything else in my life, and while maybe not being a disability, being adopted is always something that needs to be negotiated, it effects all my relationships and will do for ever because it is such a profound life altering thing to happen to someone



Perspective press then decides to continue injecting its own bias on the subject of homestudies

The process by which families prepare themselves to become parents is often referred to as a homestudy. This term carries with it an old view of the process as a weeding out or judgment. Today, more and more agencies are coming to view their role as less God-like and more facilitative. The preferred positive term, then, is parent preparation, a process whereby agency and prospective adopters come to know one another and work toward expanding a family.

In light of the adoptees I know and how so many adoptions end up as car crashes because of abusive or just clueless adoptive parents trying to make a home study less judgemental or less of a weeding out process is just fucking immoral and criminal, home studies should be more strict not less. I don't want adoptive parents to think that "parent preparation" is some cushy thing that they wont get judged on.


Back again to perspective press on how to talk about reunions

Frequently news stories refer to reunions between people who are related genetically but have not been raised in the same family. In most such instances these encounters do not carry with them the full spectrum of understanding that the usual use of the term reunion implies. While children adopted at an older age may indeed experience a reunion, most adoptees join their families as infants, and as such they have no common store of memories or experience such as are traditionally shared in a reunion. The more objective descriptor for a meeting between a child and the birthparents who planned his adoption (a term which neither boosts unrealistic expectations for the event nor implies a competition for loyalties between birthparents and adoptive parents) is meeting.

How is meeting the woman who gave birth to you, who carried you for nine months. who was the first person to hold you not a reunion exactly, quite apart from the fact that lots of adoptees were with their first families long enough to remember them. the last sentence in the above quoted paragraph is really telling though. there is no such thing as "objective" language, the language we use both shows and shapes the way we see the world and here it appears again that the important thing about the language is how the adoptive parents feel, nothing about how the adoptee feels, quite frankly how any of my parents feel about any of my adoption issues doesn't matter to me. I use the language I need to use and I actively resist language that adoptive parents use to try and shape the world to the way they want it to be rather than seeing and respecting the lived reality of the adoptee

This seems like an excellent alternative to adoption. I've never heard of them before so if anyone has any info on them it would be all good.

The biological family is ideally the best place, and the organisation works to strengthen families and support parents to uphold their children's rights. In those cases where it is in the best interest of the child to receive long-term alternative care, SOS Children's Villages provides the care, love and respect that every child is entitled to.


They seem to have found a way of supporting families and supporting and educating parentless children while keeping them in their cultural context, also all the workers are local to the area and culture, it doesn't seem to be rich white westerners swooping in and deciding they know whats best for the children and the community.

Each SOS Children's Village consists of an average of ten to 15 family houses. Many villages also include a kindergarten that is also open to children from the surrounding communities. SOS Children's Villages are open spaces. We place a strong emphasis on the integration of the children into their surrounding environment, as well as on their exchange and contact with neighbouring communities. Family strengthening programmes and other social services for families and children in need are an integral part of the activities of SOS Children's Villages in many locations.

They really seem to have the best interests of the children in mind and really care about their rights as children and people

I hope this is allowed; if no, please let me know.

There's a guy on Facebook who's started a group called Anti Adoption Alliance. He is looking for new members to join. The group is based in the U.K. His story is quite horrific.
If anyone who has a Facebook account is interested...

I don't know about anyone else, but I see people (especially self-righteous leftist and libertarian types) suggesting this all the time. IE, "it's irresponsible to bring another person into the world, if you must have kids, ADOPT!"

I wonder...do any of these people have the faintest, foggiest idea of what the logical outcome would be if everyone or most people followed their advice? There would be a "breeder" class who was not allowed to raise children, and an elite class with the resources to choose, vet, purchase, and claim the offspring of the "breeder" class. SOMEONE would still be reproducing, though, or we'd all die out. (I know, I know, some people are in favor of that.)

Just another example of blatant, disturbing class bias in the promotion of adoption as some kind of utopian "solution."

I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself.
My name is Christina and I was adopted at ten days of age. My mother was sent to a convent when it was found out that she was pregnant, and made to give me up when I was born (I'm talking Northern Ireland in the 60s here).

My adoptive parents - were (and are) not great. That's all I wish to say about them because I feel bad enough saying that much.
I found out I was adopted when I was 20 - in the middle of a fight with my mum. I think I always knew, though. I never felt like I "belonged."
What was really, really awful, though, was finding out that EVERYONE else knew I was adopted long before I did. Even people who were only casual acquaintances of my adoptive parents, and most of the people I worked with at the time, were aware of the facts long before me.

I found my birth mother through Jigsaw and we keep in touch sporadically. She has four other children. I still don't know if they know the truth about their "cousin" from Australia. My birth mother won't answer questions about my adoption and my natural father. She sends me Christmas cards and, sometimes, birthday cards; no other info at all.

I have been anti-adoption for years for several reasons, one of which is the loss of identity I've experienced. I've found that expressing these anti-adoption feelings gets you funny looks from most people and attitudes of "you should be grateful," etc.
That's why I'm glad I've found this community.

Being a Christian has helped me enormously in coping with that sense of not belonging but there is still a hole that only those that are adopted can relate to. Thanks for reading this :)

So something else people often say to me is something along the lines of "so you think those children who would otherwise be adopted should be left to rot in the foster care system?" and then a tirade about how I better be single handedly overhauling the foster care system if I want adoptable children to grow up in it rather than being adopted. This just really brings home to me how much adoption is about commodity, is about adoptable children,is about the adoptive parents needs rather than about the support and nurture of disadvantaged children.

The foster care system sucks beyond belief, I know that, I spent four years in it, my sister grew up in it, I worked within it for three years. But what people are actually saying to me when they rant about how bad the system would be for adoptable children to grow up in is that non adoptable children don't matter, that children who are too old, or too emotionally disturbed, or of the "wrong" ethnicity or have whatever else "special needs" are disposable, that we don't need to overhaul the foster care system for them, it's only the adoptable children we need to worry about.

In the UK the number of children adopted from the foster system is static at about 4% every year . Which means that 96 % of children in foster care don't get adopted, are we not supposed to be working to make the system better for them or do we just let them rot?

The foster care system is one of the places where the poisoned underbelly of patriarchal racist capitalism exposes itself. Dorothy Roberts on the Pro choice public education web site explains

We should extend our struggle for reproductive justice to challenge the foster care system because it violates thousands of women's right to parent their children. Most of the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. child welfare system go to removing children from their homes and maintaining them in foster care. Foster care is a political institution reflecting social inequities, including race, class, and gender hierarchies, and serving powerful ideologies and interests. The U.S. child welfare system is and always has been designed to regulate poor families. Most cases of child maltreatment involve parental neglect, which is usually difficult to disentangle from the conditions of poverty. Nationwide, there are twice as many neglected children in foster care as children who are physically abused. The child welfare system hides the systemic reasons for poor families' hardships by attributing them to parental deficits and pathologies that require therapeutic remedies rather than social change.

Foster care is also marked by shocking racial disparities... The racial disparity in the child welfare system also reflects a political choice to address the startling rates of child poverty in communities of color by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots.

While this is about the American foster care system it describes the UK system as well. The racial disparities in the UK system are not so large but they are still there. According to community care.co.uk

Children from ethnic minority backgrounds are over-represented in foster care: 17% of looked after children are from ethnic minority backgrounds compared with only 13% of the general population. The largest groups of looked-after ethnic minority children have one or both parents with an African Caribbean or African heritage. There are much smaller numbers of children with Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani backgrounds...

A 2004 study found that 70-80 per cent of children who are looked after will have left care within two years, but that children from some ethnic minority groups: African Caribbean, Pakistani, those with one white and one African Caribbean parent, and those in the "any other black" group, were more likely than other groups to stay in care for over four years.(1) The same study followed up the cases of 297 ethnic minority children placed in the 1980s. Fifteen years later, it found that one third had been placed as permanent foster children. An important finding was that children with both parents from a ethnic minority background were more likely to be permanently fostered than adopted.

so it seems to me that all those people who claim that adoption is about the child's needs should damn well be working to overhaul the foster care system too, firstly by working out why so many kids end up in foster care and putting preventions and supports in place to stop that happening and then for those kids who do end up in care, who really need to be there we need to make sure that it is a safe nurturing supportive place for them whether they are deemed "adoptable" or not. Just because white middle class people do not view a child as consumable, doesn't mean they are not important.

My name is Jen. 
I am an adoptee. I was one of the lucky ones in that I have a great adoptive family. Both my adoptive parents have passed away. (my mom las August.) All I have now is my sister. 

In 2001 I finally got up the nerve to search for my birth family. I had the help of a group called PAC which stands for Pittsburgh Adoption Connection. It's a search and support group founded by a birth mom. She became a good friend of mine. She gave up her daughter when she was only 17. She still to this day feels she was totally forced into it. 

Anyway, my search went really quick. I discovered that my maternal grand parents were still living in the same house. 
My birth mother passed away at the age of 27. She was dating a guy who everyone is pretty sure killed her. 
My birth father never knew about me. He died when he was 35. Complications from a car accident, diabetes, alcoholism...

My whole life I was always pro-adoption. 

But now I definitely lean away from it. I understand why in some instances it can be a good thing, like if the child is in danger living with the birth parents, (Abusive, drug addicts what have you.) But only if no one else in the birth family can take the child. 

I think it is so important to know where you came from. I love my family, but wish more than anything my birth mother had raised me. 
I never really felt like my name was my name... if that makes any sense. And while no one ever made me feel like i didn't belong, deep down inside I knew something wasn't right. 

So that's me in a nut shell, and those are my thoughts...

Poll #1439874 Which part of the triad are you?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11

What are you?

 Anyone else read the book primal wound by Nancy Verrier? 

Thoughts?

Daniel Drennan, a transracial adoptee , wrote a really interesting article in response to the Arche de Zoe child trafficking scandal. In it he talks about things that are pertinent to Transnational adoption and adoption in general.

I have copied extracts of it here but its well worth reading in its entirety. It can be found here

individual adoption is deceptively marketed and packaged around this humanistic aspect. It mistakenly pre-supposes a globally valid nuclear family, as well as a concept of third-world deliverance coming in individual doses from the developed regions of the world; it extols the child as now “better off”, or “lucky”, or “chosen”. It depicts adoption as better than nothing, and proclaims that little can be done on an individual level to change the global situation. Adoption can thus be seen to fulfill certain needs of dominant global culture, not just those of parents wishing to start a family, and focuses on children who are (perhaps ideally) least capable to speak for themselves.

Adoption on the international level creates a “demand” for orphans that is answered by third world countries and the agencies that serve them with a “supply” of children; it is problematic to bring a foreign-born child into a non-multi-cultural environment; individualistic, nuclear family-based cultures undo other more community- based cultures. Do we simply deny that baby theft and brokering exist? Is it not paradoxical that underclass children in first world societies go unadopted, often for racist and ageist reasons? What aberrant first-worldist rationale allows for the adoption of third-world children, while forbidding adults from these same countries to emigrate, or while deporting those already present back to their home countries?

None of the above monological attitudes take into consideration the thoughts, feelings, or needs of the very subjects of their so-called advocacy. They are meant to deflect questioning and derail criticism, while disparaging non-first world views concerning adoption. They place adopted children in an existential limbo which is unjust, incharitable, and ignoble.

Many of us recall being informed that we are fortunate since adoption is not allowed “among the Muslims”. Raised believing in the supremacy of the couple and child(ren)-based social unit, the very idea of growing up in an orphanage, with no “family”, or otherwise under “guardianship”, is unfathomable, if not horrifying. Since moving back to Lebanon three years ago, I have realized that the Qur’anic invocation concerning adoption has everything to do with children maintaining their lineage, their name, and their place in the community. Most remarkable then is the fact that these very concepts–of lineage, name, appearance, and original community–are the issues that most plague adult adoptees.

I am daily witness to endless first-world interference here on the political, cultural, and economic level and so can’t help but make the logical leap to add adoption to a long list of injustices perpetrated from without. And I add my voice to those from the other side of the adoption myth, from fellow adoptees and the communities they come from, who now demand a reply be requited us; that critique and response be afforded those most justified to speak, yet most silenced. To quote an African Union missive in response to the recent events in Chad, there exists a lack of “dignity and respect” toward the issue that is but a protraction of how the first world has historically viewed and treated the rest of humanity. The focus concerning adoption needs to shift, from parent to child, from first world to third. It is time to discuss international adoption openly and honestly, in order to be fair to all those affected by it. It is time to speak about the trafficking of the most fragile and defenseless of humans. It is time to speak about the hypocrisy that ignores the ever-growing gap between the first and third worlds, and the terrible abuse of the current power imbalance between them; a continuation of a sordid history in which the poor, the nether, the “uncivilized” portions of the planet serve as source material to be plundered, exported, and sold.

the first world thus play God, with disastrous results. This missionary idea condemns people to their given status without considering it a direct function of the vagaries of international economic, political, and cultural systems put in place by the first world at the expense of the third. We must acknowledge what international adoption represents, and what its consequences are, not just locally or individually, but globally and in terms of our shared humanity. To simply accept one perspective of adoption, one that doesn’t give voice to adoptees and those of their places of origin simply because it validates our sense of self, is morally and ethically untenable.

I always find myself surprised and infuriated by peoples assumption about my position on adoption. So many people, when they find out I am anti adoption automatically jump to the conclusion that I 1) think children should stay in abusive situations 2)think that DNA is more important than love

I do think family is important, I do think genetics is important, really important actually, but I don't think its more important than security and nurture. The assumption is always made that I don't know that children get abused and this drives me crazy. The reason my siblings and I ended up in care in the first place was because of physical abuse and neglect. My sister, who remembers, describes the place we lived as being filthy, piles of maggoty dirty nappies all over everywhere, dirty washing piled in the bath for weeks, un house trained cats and dogs in the house. inch thick grime on the surfaces. My brother was so malnourished when he was a year old that he weighed eight pounds, we frequently were given very little or no food. My sister and maybe the rest of us were frequently beaten up by my mothers boyfriends.

So I know abuse happens and I know it has adverse effects on children. I still live with the damage that abuse did to me and I probably always will. I don't think we should have been left with my mother in the state she was, at the point we were taken away. but the thing is I think if the right sort of intervention happens before that point a lot more families could be kept together.

My mother had very little education and was very probably had undiagnosed untreated schizophrenia and postnatal depression. If she had support with her mental health. if she had access to education, if my father hadn't been sent to prison for forging checks so he could feed his family, things may have been really different.

At the point we were taken in to care my mother was 25 ands had six kids under 11 to look after on her own, that would put a strain on any woman. How much more stressful is that going to be for a woman with no support, with serious mental health issues who is living is extreme poverty?

I think financial support, mental health support, education and community support would cut down on the abuse of children massively and mean that lots of children didn't have to be separated from their families.

However, I also know that with the best will in the world sometimes it just wont work, sometimes children do need to be separated from their families and I don't think that they shouldn't be. Children need to be safe and secure and nurtured and away from abuse. But there are many many ways of dealing with that situation without bringing adoption in to it.

I understand that my actual position on adoption is going to piss people off because people want to believe that adoption is a win/win/win situation for everyone, because people think that middle class white women deserve children no matter what, because people think that our western society is so wonderful that all children should be bought up here. But seriously? Why make dumb assumptions about things I don't believe. There is no space to have a discussion about this if people insist on setting up straw men.

x posted to anti_adoption