What does "ancestry" mean to an adoptee?

Jane and Family on White House Lawn

On April 9, my grandchildren, ages six and nine, my daughter (their aunt) who lives in Washington and I participated in the White House Easter Egg Roll. About 35,000 people attended the event which has been held annually since 1878.  Easter Egg Roll participants come in groups of several thousand and stay for two hours. Because our tickets were for the late afternoon, we did not see the President or the First Lady, who were there in the morning.

The event was much like a neighborhood festival held in a local park.

How are gay marriage and adoptee rights connected?

Daniel O'Donnell

Today in the New York Times one can read about the marriage of Daniel O'Donnell and John Banta, who, under New York's newly passed legislation allowing gays to marry, tied the knot on January 19.

O'Donnell, Rosie O'Donnell's brother, is described as a Democrat "whose impassioned pleas in the Assembly chambers and Albany's private corridors were considered instrumental in humanizing the push to legalize same-sex marriage, as New York Lawmakers did last June."Later one reads: "Mr. O'Donnell's speeches on same-sex marriage were both comic and profound. 'I don't want a seat in your synagogue. I don't want a church pew,' one of them went. 'I want a license that all of your have....'"

Russian Adoptees Get a Respite on the Range and assorted ramblings about anti-open-records legislators, Rosie O'Donnell and her brother, and the awful 'open-records' bill in Michigan

Is there life after adoption for troubled kids, alcohol-fetal syndrome kids, too-long-in-a-terrible-orphanage kids? Maybe. While stories of adoption disruptions have been leaking into the press in dribs and drabs, and Jane's previous post discussed the overall problems/corruption in international adoption, today's New York Times today highlights a place where problem adoptees can chill while their adoptive families figure out what to do: Joyce Sterkel's Ranch for Kids in Montana. See Russian Adoptees Get a Respite on the Range.

The story had some figures on how many adoptions from Eastern Europe have been "disrupted," that is, terminated. No more forever family, kids sayeth the Times:

"Dr. Federici has tracked international adoptions since 1992 and estimates that about 4,000 from Eastern Europe alone have foundered — with children being sent into state care or to places like the Ranch for Kids or back to their home countries. He said that while he respected the impulse behind the ranch, permanent improvement could not happen without a spine of rigorous medical and therapeutic treatment.

"'It’s like a vacation at the beach — we’re always better when at the beach,' he said.

"Ms. Sterkel and her staff do not fully disagree....

“'We can’t fix the fundamental damage,' she said.'Generally, our parents have reached a place where they need to restore sanity.'

"About 70 percent of the roughly 300 children who have come here, Ms. Sterkel said, do go back to their adoptive families — though she admits she often loses track after that. Of the remaining 30 percent, the younger ones are often readopted, while adolescents typically go into the federal Job Corps program. And now there is even a second-generation to work with — a 10-month-old girl named Lilia. Lilia’s mother was adopted from Russia and came through the program herself a few years ago — fiercely unmanageable and claiming, in full embrace of the Goth lifestyle, to be a vampire. The young woman’s life did not much get better: She ended up on methamphetamine, tattooed, pierced and pregnant at age 19.

"But she came back to the ranch last year, Ms. Sterkel said, for the final months of her pregnancy, and then agreed to let the infant stay on in the Sterkel family’s care. Ms. Sterkel, now the baby’s legal guardian, said she assumed Lilia had prenatal exposure to alcohol, so she is trying everything she has learned over the years — especially physical contact, usually with the baby on her hip or lap — as an effort at early intervention therapy."

But wait, there's more: In another adoption story in today's Times, we learn that adoptionack Rosie O'Donnell, our least favorite celebrity adoptive mother (who is adamantly against open records, along with her rude and obnoxious brother, Daniel O'Donnell of the New York Senate and who will never never never vote for an open-records bill to give adoptees the right to know their birth parents, as he told us, but I digress); anyway, one of Rosie's kids is having a problem--that is, listening to her apparently, and so we get a sympathetic story about Ms. O'Donnell. All right, I'm being flip about this, I'm sure "auditory processing disorder" is a serious problem, but Daniel or Danny, you choose, O'Donnell told one of our lobbyists that he and Rosie feared that her children's birth mothers, if they ever found them, would ask O'Donnell for money, and that was a reason he would never support giving those kids, even as adults, the chance to make a decision for themselves. Rosie bought them, and they were gonna stay her property, in other words. Unfortunately that is the feeling of a lot of adoptive families who shell out $25,000 up for a kid today.

Unfortunate, yes, but true. Parents sympathetic to our cause have told me that this is the feeling of a lot of wealthy adoptive parents.

Back to O'Donnell. Just hearing his or her name makes me angry. If he is the kind of legislator we have in New York, from the uber-liberal West Side of Manhattan, in supposedly liberal New York State, it is no surprise that getting legislation passed anywhere is like walking against a thick tide of sludge. As in Michigan, where I just returned from after visiting family and friends. The supposedly "open-records" bill there now has an amendment that would criminalize contact with your birth mother/father/parents once you got your original birth certificate--if you did not go through their confidential intermediary system. And pay money that, you know, no other person, non-adopted person, that is, has to pay. Fair? Unequal under the law? Cruel and unusual?

All of the above.--lorraine
_______________________
For more about the Michigan mess, see on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#!/topic.php?uid=47705527209&topic=14700. I'll try to come up with a site/link later today that doesn't require you to be on FB. I'm not shilling for FB, but it does have a lot of adoption-related stuff that is worthwhile. Here's the official Michigan site detailing the bad bill: http://legislature.mi.gov/doc.aspx?2009-HB-4015 but it does not explain a lot. The FB site details what happened.


In the meantime, I'm trying to come up with a more recent photo--took some pix while I was home visiting--that I can live with. The one above, in truth, gives me a nifty facelift that my brother and photoshop achieved...but vanity sits deep in my heart, 'tis true. Now off to the doctor, and my husband says his computer is dying, at last, and he needs a new one.

When you have a family history of breast cancer, take this test. Or, Do not pass Go, Go directly to jail.

Did you know that genes can be patented? That's right, ever since 1982 when the U.S. Patent Office let a group of inventors "own" a specific gene. Today more than 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities.

What does this have to do with adoption?

Plenty, if you are adopted most likely you do not have access to your family medical history. A company called Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City (in our least favorite state) holds the patent on breast- and ovarian-cancer genes, and they have developed the only test so far which doctors recommend for women with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer to see if you are carrying the discordant gene. You see the problem, right?

If you don't know if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, what do you do? Pop for the test, of course. It's around $3,400 and good luck getting your insurance company to cover it because you say you're adopted. Earlier this month, Myriad reported its profits increased 67 percent, to $35.4 million, for the quarter that ended Dec. 31, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

There have been complaints aplenty that the patents impede research because scientists are even forbidden to looked at BRCA results with permission. Amazingly enough, in the first lawsuit of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Association, while no friend of adoptee rights, no sirree--and the Public Patent Foundation of Cardozo School of Law argued earlier this month in federal court in New York that patents on these genes are unconstitutional because they restrict research and thus violate free speech.

The lawsuit, Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, et al., was filed on behalf of researchers, genetic counselors, women patients, cancer survivors, breast cancer and women's health groups, and scientific associations (ED: too bad it does not include the American Adoption Congress and "women adopted as infants without access to family medical records") representing 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals. The lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as well as Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, which hold the patents on the genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. The lawsuit charges that patents on human genes violate the First Amendment and patent law because genes are "products of nature" and therefore can't be patented. 

All of this reminded me of being in Albany a couple of years ago to lobby for an open-records bil for adoptees. One of my fellow lobbyists was a woman who flew up from another state. She had been born and adopted in New York, and so records were tied up in some dark dank corner of Albany. She talked about having medical tests that might be unnecessary, and the expense, trying to explain to the doltish legislator she was speaking to, Daniel O'Donnell, why this made her feel less than equal to well, say the guy she was talking to. (We've talked about Mr. Daniel O'Donnell of the Albany Assembly before.)
 
O'Donnell (of the Upper West Side of Manhattan) stopped her and said that he would never never as long as he lived, no matter what she or I or anyone in the whole wide world might say, vote for open records for adopted people. She continued on, tears welling up in her eyes. O'Donnell treated her as if she did not matter.

If I'm getting off the track here, excuse me, because every time I read about O'Donnell (and I do read about him now and then), who is a major player in getting gay marriage passed in New York, I see red. While O'Donnell is fighting for the rights of his own group--a right I support, and wrote in favor of years ago in USA Today--he can not see beyond the blinders imposed by his sister, adoptive mother Rosie O'Donnell. He once told another lobbyist that Rosie and he were afraid that if the records were open--and Rosies' adopted children knew the truth of their origins--that their birth mothers would come back and attempt to extort money from her; he told Joyce Bahr of New York's Unsealed Initiative that giving adoptees their original birth records was unconstitutional, the court cases that she showed him to the contrary notwithstanding.

And adopted individuals' need for a health history? Phfft! Not our concern! Apparently we haven't made the case yet, and it does seem to fall on deaf ears, such as O'Donnell's and all the others who oppose our bill or hold it up on committee--it's in the Health Committee in the Senate and Thomas Duane, who chairs that committee is not at all interested in moving it along. He recently referred to birth mothers who might be found as "fair game," as if we were all fearful of the phone call that might open the door to the child we lost. (See sidebar for more on Duane and how to reach him.)

Let's hope U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in New York decides in favor of not letting a corporation--any corporation--own a human gene. The ruling was stupid in 1982, and stupid it remains.--lorraine
-----------------------------------------
I don't know what is up with the white space here but I can't get rid of it.