Adoption is not all 'rosy' for O'Donnell

Rosie and Chelsea O'Donnell

The sad saga of Rosie O'Donnell and her adopted daughter Chelsea reminds us once again that adoption is not a bed of roses, not for the children, not for natural mothers, and not for the adoptive parents.

On  August 24, the day she turned 18, Chelsea's birth mother, Deanna Micoley picked up Chelsea up at Rosie's home in South Nyack, New York and took her to live with her in Wisconsin.

This came after Chelsea ran away--or was kicked out according to Chelsea--and was found living with a 25-year old man, Steven Sheerer, who had sent her a nude picture of himself.

Jennifer Aniston to adopt! At last! It's a Girl!

Jennifer Aniston--Adoptive Mom to Be? 

Update on 10/9:  Jennifer Aniston is not pregnant and she is not considering adoption, at least not right now. That is the message that was delivered this week by her publicist Stephen Huvane. Recent rumored started by Life & Style have suggested that Aniston and fiancé Justin Theroux are thinking about adopting. In a statement to Page Six, Huvane said in no uncertain terms that Aniston is not planning to adopt or have a child in the near future.
                                      * * * 

"Jen's Adoption Surpise" and "A BABY AT LAST" read the headlines at the supermarket checkout, and I thought, Who is surprised? Not I. Ever since Jen did not get hitched and/or get pregnant during her fecund years, I have been waiting for this piece of news--that she is going to adopt! Well, folks it apparently has happened, if Life & Style magazine is to be believed. "Jen & Justin's Baby Secret: They're Adopting" read the headline inside.

Oh! $@#!

Why I'm not bullish on celebrity adoptions

Sandra Bullock and adopted son, Louis

Now that actress Sandra Bullock's new flick Gravity has hit the big screen, she's looking to adopt again, according to the Hollywood gossip machine. Three years ago, Bullock, then 46, joined many other entertainers who took another woman's baby as their own when she adopted Louis named after the jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong because, like Armstrong, he was born in New Orleans. And frankly reading about the likelihood of another Hollywood adoption makes me a little ill.

The list of Hollywood adoptive parents goes back to the beginning of the silver screen and includes Bob Hope, Joan Crawford, Joan Fontaine, Constance Bennett, Al Jolson and Ruby Keller, Dick Powell and June Allison, Bette Davis, Cecil B. DeMille, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman,

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.

Rosie O'Donnell Learns What a True Heritage Means

First mothers and adoptees everywhere who know that Rosie O'Donnell is an adoptive mother three times over. We have never seen any support of any kind for adoptee rights coming from Rosie. Her kids are still young but are adolescents now. Was she ever going to wake up? Signs did not point to Yes.

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
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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.

National Institutes of Health Supports Open Records for Adoptees

National Institutes of Health Supports Open Records for Adoptees!  
Well, not exactly. According to Dr. Francis Collins, the NIH Director and former Director of the Human Genome Project, by obtaining complete family medical history, physicians can determine risks for various cancers including breast, ovarian, and colon cancer and order tests and procedures accordingly. This is more effective than a "one size fits all" approach to disease prevention. - "Dramatic Breakthroughs in Cancer Treatment" (Parade 9-20-09)

(A woman has a higher risk of getting breast and ovarian cancers if she has two or more close family members who have had breast or ovarian cancer or breast cancer has been found in family members before the age of 50.)

Dr. Collins advises that "we all should be aware of our family medical histories. A medical history is essentially a genetic test. It won't cost you any money to collect the information and ... it could save your life.”

Well, that's fine and dandy, but what about those adopted people who can't get their medical histories because the government is hell-bent on preserving the privacy of women who most likely do not want "privacy" from their children? Those women hold the keys to the real medical histories of children they lost to adoption because they are the REAL mothers of the children. Obviously, a medical history of one's adopted family does not help one whit, and if the adopted person were to use it, the doctor would just be befuddled and make incorrect medical decisions. And then there are the offspring of anonymous sperm and egg "donations" (really sales). These folks have even less ability to obtain their genetic history. As Lorraine said, anonymous donations ought to be illegal.

There’s something like six million adopted people out there without their real medical histories. You’d think anything that saves lives and money would be a no-brainer for even the densest politician. Still, we deal with legislators who don't get the message, or, like Danny O'Donnell (NY Legislator and brother to Mama Rosie), just don't give a damn.