What's the matter with closed adoption? EVERYTHING

Lorraine

Sometimes it is necessary to remind new readers that adoption--particularly closed adoption--is far from the altruistic institution that society and, typically, as a reflection of society, how the media portrays it. Today's post explores that thought and was triggered by a comment FMF received recently at a 2009 blog, Why Is Adoption Like Slavery?

Making the comparison, despite how it is framed, usually draws a number of comments from people unhappy with the comparison; yet at its core, the contracts of adoption still drawn up today in states where birth certificates are altered and thus, original ties are obliterated, result in social engineering as wrong as slavery was; the contracts involving adoption also treat the individual as a legal res to be handed over to another party, without input from said individual, at the time of delivery, and into the unending future.  As the late Cyril Means wrote: "Apart from slavery there is no other instance in our laws, or in any other jurisprudence in civilized system of jurisprudence, in which a contract made among adults, in respect of an infant, can bind that child once he reaches his majority."